prospective DS customer

I'm looking to buy a new computer within a few months. Mid-July at the latest. How often is the product line and/or prices updated? If nothing is likely to change, then I might as well buy sooner. If things get updated all the time, I'll wait.

Secondly...as I took a look around the DS website and forums I became increasingly convinced that I would, in fact, buy a DS. Then I ran across a series of overwhelmingly negative reviews on yelp, where there were a few very happy customers (mostly all of these were 4-5 years old), and a lot of angry customers (1-2 years old) that received out of the box nonfunctional computers. These customers all quoted the same stress testing assurance that DS is supposed to do; but nonetheless; they all had massive problems. Any insight to what caused these QA issues?

Thanks

DS does most of the updates and prices when new hardware is released by the manufacturers.    Rumor is, the new Nvidia Pascal video cards will be released in June. Not sure of their performance but the "older" cards like gtx 970, 980 will probably be stopped in production. Doesn't mean no more Maxwell cards, but they will get less support over time.   Happens every year or so.

As far as negative reviews.... There's not a company out there without a percentage of bad reviews.   Some caused by production issues, many more by shipping and more still caused by new , tested parts failing in the first few days. It happens. I have personally tested a part , it passes with flying colors just to have it fail the next day, much to the customer's dissatisfaction. Nature of the beast.   It is a small percentage.

It's the service after the fact that tells it all.

it's not like DS manufactures the components, so if a part fails it's a manufacturer's QA you really have a beef with...right? 

i own an Aventum 3.  the build quality is awesome!  i love the case (one of the few that was designed in house) with the small exception of its reliance on a particular radiator (1 of the 3 installed) and the inability to swap it out. 

that being said, during the build/stress testing the Asus Deluxe mobo crapped out and it delayed my build slightly.  it happens.  after i picked the pc up and used it for a couple of months i began having issues with the mobo again (same model), which also damaged my cpu.  DS replaced everything extremely expeditiously.  i've never been w/o my pc for more than a week.  i have since moved away from Asus mobos and have a Gigabyte G1 in my rig now. 

my personal opinion of DS as a company is that they (refreshingly) stand behind their service and have a genuine care for customer satisfaction.  of course, the customer has to have "reasonable" expectations in the first place.  they have a wonderful asset in the community manager (Alex).  he's very active on these boards and is the go2guy if you need service.  my only real criticism is their internal/external communications can be a bit chaotic.  these is easily circumvented by emailing Alex directly and using him as the point of contact. 

that link that Alex posted that was removed is the Reseller site with the word Ratings in it

Edited by ArkansasWoman777 - 22 Apr 2016 at 4:37pm

Alex getting sniped by his own forum. 

But in seriousness, I've had very good experiences with DS, and as a general rule I put very little faith in Yelp. This is not to invalidate your concern, it's good to have high expectations from a high-end company such as DS, but Yelp is a bad tool to measure satisfaction based on the way their algorithm handles reviews and the general lack of control over fabricated reviews.

It's funny...I ran across that same rating website after I posted. For comparison I tried Dell, Alienware, and a few others. Most of those were 1.0 as compared to DS's 9.8. No comparison