I have been an avid and happy user of Gigabyte motherboards for a couple of years, and now I have a faulty motherboard I got to experience Gigabyte's RMA procedure.

It all went well and quickly right up to the point of the e-mail that contained the RMA No. Gigabyte added that I should enclose a cheque or postal order to cover their cost of sending me a replacement board. A word-for-word Quote below.

"Please find attached requested RMA form. Please write this number (UKA-0000000) on the carton before sending it in. Your cheque/postal order for £10 should be made payable to: GBT Tech Co Ltd and sent with your RMA. This fee is NOT a charge for repair as this is done free of charge under warranty. This fee is to cover our costs of sending the items back to you."

This is absolutely disgusting behaviour, no other manufacturer has ever tried to pull a stunt like this with me before.

My current options to replace my faulty GA-P35-DS3 seem to be:

a,) To send the board back to Gigabyte with a cheque for £10.
b,) To buy the boards replacement (GA-EP35-DS3), and RMA it to where I bought it from and send them the P35 back and hope they dont notice the difference of one letter. I can then get a refund as it is faulty and within the 28-day period for returns.

Please feel to comment on this subject, and also whether Gigabyte act like true arseholes in countries outside of the UK. I have no problem paying for the delivery of an item back to the manufacturer, but I find it repulsive that they want me to pay for them to send it back to me.

I have sent them an e-mail expressing my disgust, I will add their reply here if they even bother to send me anything back. If their is a Gigabyte representitive here - feel free to join in the fun.


Andy

That's taking the piss mate. Good luck - I await the outcome with interest.

Whats even worse is that eBuyer where I bought it from wont let me RMA it with them at all, as they now have a strict 28-day policy for returns. I also checked out Dabs, Scan and OCUK. OCUK seem to allow me to return stuff to them, but dont state so for definite. Scan seem to claim to have a better returns procedure than other companies - but again this is not definite.

I had quite a long chat with a girl from eBuyer, and told them that I wont be buing from them any more unless they sort this out (£1000 a month), they said OK, even though this is all over £10 - you would have thought that they cared. Also from this discussion I found out that eBuyer have a different policy if you are a business custonmer vs a home customer - if my account was a personal one they would have sorted this out.

UPDATE

I have had an e-mail back from GBT Tech, who say that they will not charge me because we are a college (we actually are), they also said that they had not had any complaints about the charge from other people.


Andy

I've had the same trouble from eBuyer over a PSU - they wouldn't RMA even though it was still brand new and wasn't working out of the box, because I'd sat on it for 2 months without bothering to test it while I sorted out other bits and pieces. I've got an individual account with them but they wouldn't budge and made me go to the manufacturer.

"No complaints from other people about the £10" - time to break out the BS repellent.

I just sent my second Gigabyte board back for RMA a week ago. I didn't have to send any money for return shipping for the first one and didn't see anything related to a return check on the second one. I just checked again to make sure and don't see anything stating that. But this is in the US. I guess it's different depending on where you are.

Ditto in Canada.

Over here in the UK, we have very strong consumer protection laws, and if I wanted to pursue the matter I expect I could have eBuyer's 28-day policy overturned even though I have agreed to it. It is very similar to Microsoft's EULA, which has been overturned before as being unlawful. Strictly speaking the place that sold you an item has to fix/replace/refund the item for 6-years (depending on the warranty length).

As far as Gigabyte charging their customers for P&P, this is totally unheard of. I have had large heavy CRT monitors collected and delivered back free of charge by Samsung in the past, and the only fauly memeory stick I have ever bought was sent back to Kingston, they even payed my £0.60p postage via cheque when the replaced the RAM.

I suspect that GBT Tech are just the people who operate on behalf of Gigabyte in the UK, there may be a different company in the US and Canada if you dont deal directly with Gigabyte.

This would be just like Rexo who repair Samsungs drives in the UK.
http://www.rexo.co.uk/warranty.php
Although Rexo are very very easy to deal with and have a quick turnaround and DONT charge for sending the item back to me.


Andy

You should try being in Oz.

I had a faulty 965-DQ6 and my options where return to the place of purchase which would only give me a swap for another "fixed" RMA board OR post the board to Gigabyte in Taiwan, wait a couple of months and pay the return postage costs.

Samsung had, by far, the best warranty service on its CRTs. I had a friend who had an old 955df and had to have it replaced after 2 years (this was a LONG time ago). Samsung picked it up and shipped him a new one at no cost to him. I know Sony's sucked (as does all of their warranty service) and am unaware of any other manufacturer that provided that level of customer support at any time...

Well at least they have a quick turnround.

I posted them the faulty mobo on Friday 15th, and got it back today, the 22nd. This includes my delivery time of 2-4 days, and their delivery time of 1 day? At most they had it for 24 hours. The replacement works and has already been overclocked by 25%, I have not given it a rigourous test yet, and wont be able to until Friday or Saturday.


Andy

Eizo did the same for my TFT after 4 years (5 year waranty). They even drove to my home address after just missing the appointment at work. The delivery man turned out to be a technician employed by Eizo who swapped the broken one (one vertical row of pixels was dead) in my room for a brand new one and offered to hook it up to my computer. You can't get better warranty service than that.

You said it was fixed, does that mean you didn't have to pay the 10 GBP? I'd have raised hell. Then again, I don't like paying shipping to them, so I generally complain enough till they send me prepaid lables. I just don't see why I should have to pay money to send them their faulty product back. If they make good products then they won't have a large number of lables to pay for, percentage wise. If they make crummy products, it serves them right.

Never had any problems RMA'ing faulty DVD writers back to ebuyer for full refund, even close to the end of the 1-yr warranty but if they are refusing to accept their legal obligations under UK trading law as retailer for faulty components such as motherboards, I'll be looking elsewhere for my new build. Thanks for the warning.