MSI 845PE Max2-FIR (845PE)

MSI 845PE Max2-FIR: 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.

MSI's RMA process is actually non-existent for end users. Their policy is pretty straight forward, and is as follows:

As you can clearly see, end users must contact the vendor from which they purchased their MSI motherboard from (like Newegg or Mwave for example) if they want an RMA. MSI does not directly take RMA's according to their web site. The remaining info above only applies to resellers.

However, MSI's tech support was significantly better. We received a response from their tech support staff in just under 64 hours. MSI was able to correctly diagnose our "problem", which is good, and in general we were pleased that a large manufacturer like MSI was able to provide this type of support, as other large motherboard manufacturer's tech support have been much less responsive.

MSI offers a very clear and informative amount of technical support in addition to their good tech support response time. If you go to MSI's U.S. page on technical support you'll find contact information for the Sales, Marketing, and Technical Support departments as well as three different Regional offices you can contact during the week if you have any questions about MSI products in general. There are even "Direction and Map" links that offer a way for the user to visit MSI's Regional offices.

MSI is also able to provide tech support and information to many different countries, continents and languages. Some of these countries and continents include Australia, Brazil, China, Czech, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Netherlands, Russia, Taiwan, and the USA among others.

MSI's RMA policy is clearly disappointing, especially compared to the smaller motherboard makers. However, this is the norm for a large motherboard maker like MSI (for example, ASUS and Gigabyte's tech support and RMA weren't that great). However, MSI's technical support response time was fairly quick, and the general contact, sales, and marketing information that's provided are positive aspects of MSI's customer service.