EVGA has once again shown that it doesn’t matter how big or small you are but how important it is to support your customers. Mistakes can happen to any business but as anyone who has been the unfortunate victim of one can tell you, it’s how the business treats you when that happens that can make a big difference in moving forward after one. Now to be fair to the user, EVGA dropped the ball not once, or twice, but three times during the course of these events but did eventually come through but it was, unfortunately, the user’s perseverance that made it happen.
Reddit user r/DataHoarder first posted about their experience on March 19 explaining how when they first powered up their new EVGA GQ 1000w Gold power supply it emitted a horrific coil whine. They immediately turned off the PC and per EVGA’s warranty instructions sent the PSU back, at their own cost, sans its cables. EVGA’s other instructions were somewhat par for the course in basic user guidance but this problem was not a user error issue. To further add to the situation an International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) safety regulation change led to EVGA making a change in the pinout of their PSUs which led to yet another calamity.
Per r/DataHoarder:
“At this point, I called EVGA. To their credit, I was able to speak with someone in a matter of minutes, which can’t be said for most manufacturers. After explaining the situation, and the tech pulling up my RMA file, he knew what the problem was. He notified me that “At some point, the pin layout of these power supplies was changed”. I was never told this when I received my power supply back from warranty, and clearly my cables were incompatible with the power supply now – with no way of knowing other than by checking with a multimeter.”
Now as most users are not going to check the pinout of a returned PSU even if they happen to have a multimeter on hand, things went from bad to worse. Not only did the PC still not function properly with the RMAd PSU but because the original SATA cables had been reused, it fried the user’s SSDs, and 22TB of data were gone in a poof. Fortunately for them though, it was at least backed up in the cloud but that’s of small consolence when the hardware is gone but the couple still lost at least a day of work in trying to sort things out.
Strike Three but not quite out, yet
So r/DataHoarder reached out to EVGA again explaining what had happened and the response wasn’t ideal. EVGA instructed them to contact the hard drive manufacturer for a warranty claim. Needless to say, the user wasn’t satisfied and further detailed the loss of hardware, time, and expenses involved in recovering from this experience. At some point during all of this Gamers Nexus became involved when the user contacted them resulting in them advocating for the user, and in the end, EVGA is replacing the user’s hard drives as well.
Per EVGA (via Tom’s Hardware):
“We had set up an internal procedure for RMAs for these model numbers based on a serial range to make sure the customer would get the right version for their cables. Typically, the customer just sends the brick back to us and they leave the cables in there. The procedure was in place and also stated that, if for some reason EVGA did not have the correct models, customer service would send the customer a full G5 power supply with a note to let them know that they would need to upgrade their power supply so everything matches. But where we fell short is that, while this policy had been enforced for the year since [the change] happened, due to some internal operation error, the wrong power supply brick was sent to the customer,” EVGA told Gamers Nexus.”
Final Resolution:
The user has replied to Gamers Nexus updating that EVGA has replaced their hard drives and they are satisfied with the final resolution. Gamers Nexus ends their reporting on the matter by acknowledging the challenges that current EVGA staff are facing with reduced staffing following the company’s ongoing changes it exited the GPU market and its motherboard crew mostly left for ASRock. GN adds that its EVGA contacts still give confidence the company is focused on customer needs but as mentioned above, GN notes the company has been reduced to a skeleton crew.