AOpen AX4PE Max (845PE)

AOpen AX4PE Max: Tech Support and RMA

For your reference, we will repost our tech support evaluation procedure here:

The way our Tech Support evaluation works is first we anonymously email the manufacturer's tech support address(es), obviously not using our AnandTech mail server to avoid any sort of preferential treatment. Our emails (we can and will send more than one just to make sure we're not getting the staff on an "off" day) all contain fixable problems that we've had with our motherboard. We then give the manufacturer up to 72 hours to respond over business days and will report not only whether they even responded within the time allotted but also if they were successful in fixing our problems. If we do eventually receive a response after the review is published, we will go back and amend the review with the total time it took for the manufacturer to respond to our requests.

The idea here is to encourage manufacturers to improve their technical support as well as provide new criteria to base your motherboard purchasing decisions upon; with motherboards looking more and more alike every day, we have to help separate the boys from the men in as many ways as possible. As usual, we're interested in your feedback on this and other parts of our reviews so please do email us with your comments.

AOpen's technical support process is very straight forward and clear. In fact, it's one of the best we've encountered.

Here's how it works. Once you've found the Problem Reports page on AOpen's web site, you click on the hyperlink that refers to the country and/or language that applies to you. AOpen includes the following countries and languages:

English (Canada, USA, and Latin America).
English (Europe)
English (Asia & other regions)
Chinese
China
Japanese
German

After clicking the first hyperlink, we were taken to the AOpen American Technical Support Center page. Here we were asked to fill out a detailed form (similar to Epox's and Gigabyte's technical support forms) where we were asked for our personal information (including name, address, phone number, etc.), the product in question, the model/serial/part number, system specifications (CPU, Operating System, BIOS version, etc.), and of course an area for describing the problem in detail. AOpen even listed examples under each category in case a user was unaware of what to type in (for example, under the "CPU type/speed" category, AOpen listed "Pentium II 266" as an example of a CPU).

AOpen's technical support response was equally impressive. We received a response from their tech support staff exactly 23 hours after we sent our email. AOpen was also able to correctly diagnose our "problem", which is a big plus.

The following is AOpen's RMA policy in its entirety:

AOpen's RMA procedure isn't too bad, but like a lot of the other motherboard manufacturers AOpen asks end users to first consult with the vendor you purchased your AOpen motherboard from before requesting an RMA directly from AOpen. AOpen makes this very clear on their RMA pages. This seems to be the average RMA policy with most motherboard makers, so we're not too disappointed.

While AOpen's RMA policy is only average, their outstanding technical support response time and organization are redeeming factors of the customer support AOpen provides.