ASUS P4C800 Deluxe (875P)

ASUS P4C800 Deluxe: Tech Support and RMA

For your reference, we will repost our 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.

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

Dear Sir/Madam
Please provide the following information so that we may process your request for warranty repair service. Once we have obtained that information from you, we will issue an RMA # and provide the proper shipping instructions. Please read and provide all of the information below. We cannot complete your request, if all of the information below is not provided.
Thank you,
ASUS Computer International

PLEASE PROVIDE US WITH:

1. THE MODEL & SERIAL NUMBER OFF OF YOUR PRODUCT model (name of product) serial# (10 digits/characters long, no dashes).
2. YOUR FULL NAME/NAME OF COMPANY (Only provide company name if the shipping address is to a company).
3. YOUR SHIPPING ADDRESS (no PO boxes please).
4. YOUR DAYTIME PHONE/FAX NUMBER.

ASUS Computer International (USA) is a warranty repair service center. Please contact place of purchase for credit, refund, upgrade, or advance replacement. Asus does not provide these services under any circumstances.

ASUS Does not cover physical damage. Please refer to page 2 of your users manual. There is a $15.00 fee to replace a broken socket. There is a $40.00 fee to repair all other physical damage. If a product is not repairable, the product will be sent back to the customer. If a product is sent in with physical damage and is not accompanied with a payment, the product will be rejected and customers will not be reimbursed for shipping charges. A payment can be made by check, money order (payable to ASUS), or a credit card#. The payment must be sent in with the damaged product. Customers from Canada must make payments with a credit card#.

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.

Even after a recent web site redesign in the past few months, ASUS still hasn't listed any real type of RMA policy on their web site. We've been critical of ASUS on this issue for months now, and still nothing has changed.

ASUS's tech support response time did not improve from the last time we looked at an ASUS motherboard. At that time ASUS had yet again missed our 72 hour deadline. In fact, after the previous ASUS review was published, we kept track of that email to see how long it would take ASUS to respond; in the end it took ASUS 267 hours and 13 minutes to respond to that email. The same pattern was repeated this time around, with ASUS yet again completely missing our 72 hour deadline. After many missed tech support emails, it's clear ASUS isn't in some sort of slump, this is tradition! We'll let you know how long it will take ASUS to respond to this email when we take a look at another ASUS motherboard in a future review. Hopefully, ASUS won't take more than 11 days to respond like they did the last email.

While ASUS' RMA policy isn't too different from the other top tier motherboard makers, their tech support is still severely lacking, if not the worst in the industry. Hopefully these issues can be remedied in the near future.