nForce2 6-way Motherboard Roundup - December 2002

ASUS A7N8X: Tech Support and RMA

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.

ASUS's RMA policy is pretty straight forward as follows:

This is a fairly cut and dry RMA policy, with nothing too special that stands out. As is the norm with motherboard makers, you're asked for quite a bit of information in regards to exactly what has to be RMAed. Everything else is self-explanatory.

We are still pretty critical of ASUS for not providing any direct RMA information on their web site. Again, the only RMA information worth reading on ASUS's web site if that you can email a representative at ASUS and ask about their RMA policy by emailing them at rma@asus.com.

ASUS's tech support response time wasn't any better than the last time we sent an anonymous email. The last two times we sent an email to ASUS tech support, it took them just over 200 hours to respond to the first email, and the second time it took them 71 hours, just an hour shy of missing our standard 72 hour deadline. This time around, ASUS simply missed it altogether, not responding to our tech support email before the deadline. This is something ASUS needs to greatly improve upon if they want to keep their reputation as "the #1 motherboard maker".