Manufactures Warrenty on components, the next kick in the teeth for us?

[humbug]

I just came across this article and it sent a slight chill down my spine. https://www.hardwaretimes.com/msi-cuts-the-warranty-of-its-graphics-cards-to-just-6-months/

When you spend £400 or more on a CPU or a GPU, or any component IMO you would be rightfully expecting the component to last for at least 3 years if not 5, these are expensive devices, they should be high quality and operate reliably for several years.

3 years for the minimum warranty is acceptable to me.

I know this article is for mining cards, and the fact that they are only offering a 6 month warranty for them should tell you how long MSI expect these cards to last mining.

In recent years the push from all sides has been to increase prices while offering less, the 11900K is $540 MSRP, the 10900K which has 2 more cores than the 11900K and is faster was $490, that's a $50 increase in price for less CPU.

AMD have put the prices up on Ryzen 5000 vs Ryzen 3000 while at the same time no longer offering Box Coolers with any of them.

Both AMD and Nvidia's prices for GPU's even for MSRP have ballooned out of control.

My MSI Gaming-X GTX 1070 Quick Silver had a higher quality Shroud and VRM Heat Syncs than my $150 more expensive MSI Gaming-X RTX 2070 Super. the build quality on the MSI GTX 1070 was phenomenal, the build quality on the 2070 Super is average.

When AMD launched their RDNA 2 GPU's they reduced the warranty from 3 years with RDNA 1 to 2 years with RDNA2.

Looking at everything else.

AMD CPU's: still 3 years
Intel CPU's: 3 years
Nvidia GPU's 3 years

So not too concerned right now but its something to keep an eye on because if they conclude we don't care much about how long the warranty is it will fall to 12 months without you even noticing.

And that for expensive components is taking the pee.

The manufactures warranty is how long you should expect the component to last reliably. Minimum.

 

[ScottiB]

misleading click bait headline made worse by having a consumer card in the heading image. Miners generally don't expect warranty and it's not worth their time to go through all the trouble either...so it's a non-story really.

During my time with MSI we pushed to get the warranty increased from two to three years across EU. There's no indication at all that they'd consider working backwards...

I'd be more annoyed by their blatant openness to producing mining cards rather than fulfilling end user demand.

 

[Marak]

Warranty periods are just the time you can return a product as faulty with no hassle. You can still get a repair, replacement or refund on out of warranty items if they fail as long as it's not an unreasonable amount of time since it was bought.

It used to be the Sales of Goods Act but I think it's something else now which determines this.

But as ScottiB says, miners will already have their money back after 6 months anyway.

 

[humbug]

misleading click bait headline made worse by having a consumer card in the heading image. Miners generally don't expect warranty and it's not worth their time to go through all the trouble either...so it's a non-story really.

During my time with MSI we pushed to get the warranty increased from two to three years across EU. There's no indication at all that they'd consider working backwards...

I'd be more annoyed by their blatant openness to producing mining cards rather than fulfilling end user demand.

Appreciated. And that MSI 1070 was a very high quality product, i liked that GPU, a lot.

 

[heatonpkmassive]

Warranty periods are just the time you can return a product as faulty with no hassle. You can still get a repair, replacement or refund on out of warranty items if they fail as long as it's not an unreasonable amount of time since it was bought.

It used to be the Sales of Goods Act but I think it's something else now which determines this.

But as ScottiB says, miners will already have their money back after 6 months anyway.

This is correct. It's the Consumer Act you're referring to.

 

[humbug]

I still have the pictures i took of it when i sold it on hosted on my image host.

 

[ScottiB]

Warranty periods are just the time you can return a product as faulty with no hassle. You can still get a repair, replacement or refund on out of warranty items if they fail as long as it's not an unreasonable amount of time since it was bought.

It used to be the Sales of Goods Act but I think it's something else now which determines this.

Consumer Rights Act 2015

The thing is, CRA didn't do anything to clarify the issue with regards what a "reasonable time" is. There's a common misconception that it's six years (five in Scotland) but that's just how long you have to raise the claim, not how long the goods are expected to last.

Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, a guarantee is an agreement given by a trader to a consumer, without any extra charge, to repair, replace or refund goods that do not meet the specifications set out in the guarantee. If the manufacturer says that's two years then that's how long it is. After which it gets really sticky because it involves the end user being willing to go to court and able to prove that their product failing outside of the guarantee period is indication that the product was not of suitable quality.

So, yes, the OP would have a reason to be worried if there was any indication that brands were looking to reduce their warranty period, but I'm yet to see any and, frankly, it's just bad for their business as it would definitely display a lack of faith in their product's quality.

 

[humbug]

So if after 4 years of life my 2070S fails i can write to MSI and request a replacement or repair? Free of charge?

 

[PaulM]

MSI support seems to have taken a nosedive anyway so I wouldn't be surprised if they did cut the warranty length. They've had my X570 Tomahawk for nearly 3 months (it was only 6 weeks old when I had to RMA it to them), quite a few people mirror my experiences on the MSI subreddit. Warranty will be expired by the time they get it back to me

 

[humbug]

MSI support seems to have taken a nosedive anyway so I wouldn't be surprised if they did cut the warranty length. They've had my X570 Tomahawk for nearly 3 months (it was only 6 weeks old when I had to RMA it to them), quite a few people mirror my experiences on the MSI subreddit. Warranty will be expired by the time they get it back to me

Not only are they depriving you of the product, but having it for this length of time also eats into your warranty window, they don't extend the warranty by the duration they had the product do they?

 

[Gray2233]

Warranty and customer service quality are the main things I consider when buying hardware now, followed by the individual product under whichever company I'm considering (is it known to have faults, for example).

I tend to buy Gigabyte whenever possible due to that. Conversely I avoid Asus like the plague.

 

[humbug]

Warranty and customer service quality are the main things I consider when buying hardware now, followed by the individual product under whichever company I'm considering (is it known to have faults, for example).

I tend to buy Gigabyte whenever possible due to that. Conversely I avoid Asus like the plague.

I've seem some stories on reddit about Asus RMA refusal, like scratches on the grounding solder around screw holes on Motherboards, Brilliant...

 

[Gray2233]

I've seem some stories on reddit about Asus RMA refusal, like scratches on the grounding solder around screw holes on Motherboards, Brilliant...

All the worse when you consider they're effectively the most "premium" brand when it comes to hardware, the Asus tax is real.

 

[darket]

Miners generally don't expect warranty and it's not worth their time to go through all the trouble either...so it's a non-story really.

Eh??? that doesn't even make sense.

If I was mining crypto (and I don't and never have) and one of my very expensive gaming cards became faulty I'd 100% claim the warranty.

Claiming the warranty on a retail purchase isn't exactly time consuming. You start an RMA, you send the card back and wait for either a repair or a new one to arrive.......

 

[Gray2233]

Eh??? that doesn't even make sense.

If I was mining crypto (and I don't and never have) and one of my very expensive gaming cards became faulty I'd 100% claim the warranty.

Claiming the warranty on a retail purchase isn't exactly time consuming. You start an RMA, you send the card back and wait for either a repair or a new one to arrive.......

There's a difference between a gamer who mines and an actual miner, which is what the article in the OP is about -- the cards in question don't even have display outputs.

The type of person to buy a mining specific card will have a lot of cards mining at once, chances are when one inevitably dies they'd just slap a new one onto the rack and bin the old, the time and effort of RMA just wouldn't be worth the hassle.

 

[HangTime]

Intel CPU's: 3 years.

IIRC Intel OEM warranty is only 12 months, or at least it used to be years ago, maybe they've increased it then?

For me personally, I never worry too much about warranty. It's rare I've had hardware fail after I've had it a year or more where it hasn't been getting pretty ancient and in need of replacing anyway. RMA can be a right PITA sometimes. Trying to think of all my failures in past 20 years:

-40GB HDD packed up after a couple of years, didn't bother with warranty, probably didn't want anyone snooping around on it given what I was like at the time...
-P4-1.6A packed up after 9 months, to be fair this was a good use of RMA, replaced with P4-1.8A
-850W PSU literally went *BANG*, I asked for a refund but could only have a replacement, i think in the end I procastinated / CBA with the hassle of returning the PSU, I just bought a new one, as didn't really want another dodgy PSU given how violently the first one gave up
-GTX280 started artifacting after not sure maybe 1.5yrs, can't remember if it was in warranty or not, I did the oven trick and bought something better soon after
-GTX470 fan blades broke after 15 months, got RMA replacement
-160GB HD failed fairly recently, I think it was about 15 years old so well beyond RMA
-1.5TB HD failed 6 months ago, this was actually annoying as it had a bunch of old savegames on it, but again from an RMA perspective it was 10+ years old so no go

So out of all that stuff, I'd say the only RMAs I actually utilised in the past 20 years were the P4 (which cost about £100 iirc) and the GTX470 (which cost about £150).

Maybe I'm a bit relaxed about warranty because I rarely buy things that are THAT expensive, the most expensive GPU I've bought brand new was the GTX280 for £240. Pretty much the only thing right now that I'd rely on the warranty for would be my monitor which cost £500 a couple of months ago, most of my other components aren't worth much if you ignore the GPU market nonsense.

 

[Gerard]

AMD have put the prices up on Ryzen 5000 vs Ryzen 3000 while at the same time no longer offering Box Coolers with any of them.

Some of the 5k cpus have coolers with them, the 5600x does. The 5800x upwards it would be pointless including a reference cooler as it wouldn't be up to the job and would as a result be noisy. Little point in them including a cooler if they know that it's not going to be able to do it's job, you could argue that they should include an aio with some of the more expensive cpus but that's also an area where the buyer might well want a custom loop or a high end air cooler so it goes to waste. Makes more sense to not include a cooler for the higher end enthusiast cpus as the likelihood is the end user will be doing some sort of custom cooling anyway.

They could probably knock a bit off the price considering there's no cooler but as they buy them in bulk it would probably be a negligible saving anyway.

 

[darket]

There's a difference between a gamer who mines and an actual miner, which is what the article in the OP is about -- the cards in question don't even have display outputs.

The type of person to buy a mining specific card will have a lot of cards mining at once, chances are when one inevitably dies they'd just slap a new one onto the rack and bin the old, the time and effort of RMA just wouldn't be worth the hassle.

I don't believe that for an instant if I'm being honest. If you can show me some sort of proof of this then I'll change my mind. But it sounds anecdotal at best.

And secondly why would miners favour mining cards ? The evidence is that they mostly buy retail cards if they can due to the resale value. Why would they care if they sell them or not if these things are disposable ? Why at the end of every mining craze do we see the market flooded with used gpu's ? some sellers on the bay list dozens at a time ?

I don't buy it.

 

[FoxEye]

All the worse when you consider they're effectively the most "premium" brand when it comes to hardware, the Asus tax is real.

I think many of us here see the Asus tax for what it is.. a joke. The joke's on anyone who buys them.

Asus are about as premium as Tesco value loo roll.

 

[jaybee]

In over 20 years of working in IT and building computer hardware, I have never, ever seen a CPU "fail" through normal use. Nor have I seen one DOA.

I've seen dead CPUs due to bent pins or damage during installation, damage during de-lidding attempts even with no visible external damage, overclocking/overvolting too high.

Just saying.

GPUs.... yeah they go bad a lot more.