I had to return a MB a few months ago, MSI took 28 days and still failed to respond. Overclockers had to give me a new one from their stock.
Was it over a year old?
No, only a couple of months. It was a B450 Tomahawk max. I'd had the system about 6 weeks or so before the BSOD-fest was too much. The whole thing turned into a bit of a saga, and its entirely possible the MB wasn't faulty at all as I ended up having to return the CPU as well as the same faults came up with the replacement board. Thread is here: https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/borked-motherboard-b450-tomahawk-3600-build.18869594/
Currently have a working system with spare CPU and spare 16 MB ram kit
Oh, that is rubbish could you not MM the spares?
Also did you contact OC first or MSI? sort of regretting going MSI now as this will be the third board. 1 my fault, 1 theirs 3rd times a charm.
Also there was a very recent Reddit post pretty much identical to your experience that I was reading yesterday.
That turned out to be the CPU, same board as yours.
I was lucky there are still a few brand new X470 boards left as I am running our of road with my 1600x should it go wrong again.
Really need to go to a 3600X.....
Are you sure it's not the CPU? Remember the memory controller is on the CPU, the only things on the motherboard is the memory traces and dimm slots. Probably not but you never know.
mobo rma is EU - grab MSI from good reseller - specially if you hit 28days normally forces reseller to issue a new one and take it up with the vendor. Gigabyte is only one with UK RMA. MSI and the Rest for GPU are UK RMA though
Sorry to have to say this, but I really don't know why Ocuk behave like this, it's simple really, return the board to them, they test it, find it faulty, send you a replacement and then claim a replacement or a refund off their supplier, I don't know why they make you as the consumer wait, as long as it's under warranty, I don't see a problem, this is pretty much know any other shop you buy products from acts.
I had the same problem with an Asus monitor that I went to Stoke and brought over the counter, I got it home (1 hour drive) plugged it in and it had a thin red line right down the middle of the screen, I rang overclockers and they told me if have to go direct to Asus, I was discussted as the monitor was only an hour old, thankfully back then Asus had a place in Milton Keynes, not far from the gigabyte place, I rang them, explained the situation and they sent a rep out the same day with a fully working replacement, if I can find it cheaper elsewhere, I avoid overclockers due to their RMA service.
Yeah as I said, It was bought from the "Rainforest", not OCUK and I had a new board the next day, less than 24 hours from reporting it to them. So from that perspective, it was flawless.
As for MSI, being told to go back to the supplier ultimately saved me loads of time.