4 Year Review

It had to be assumed that even the most rock solid rig would eventually start to show its age after the heavy utilization I've put it through. Running for hard 16-20 hour days since I bought it, along with plenty of late night and LAN party gaming sessions, this rig has been to hell and back.

The GTX 590 finally displayed its last pixel back in June. The card finally toasted itself, and quite frankly, I'm amazed at how well its held up. Luckily, the card gave up less than 2 months before the warranty expired!

Very happy to put in a call and get the usual RMA process started, as you can see from my A+ review experience below for my RAM replacement.

I call up on Thursday evening 6/25, with maybe 60-90 minutes before DS reaches their end of day. I get Tammy on the line who oddly interrupts me halfway through describing my issue to say someone will just call me back the next day. Eventually get an email asking for a survey. It's a bit strange, since troubleshooting hasn't even started, but whatever.

Friday comes around and around 1:30 PM Eastern I decide to give the Live Chat a try as I didn't see anything to indicate that Live Chat shouldn't be used for support-related activity. Brian replies to my request with, quote from the saved chat output: "I work from home and can't really help with that from here. I help people with questions about our systems and computer builds. Normally tech support will contact you within 24 hours." I wouldn't really call that going out of your way to give that A+ support I'm accustomed to in the past, and now I'm approaching that 24 hour mark with a machine that's dead in the water!

Straight from the contact page, I make 2 attempts calling 1-510-360-9911 and each time I just sit on hold until it puts me through to a voicemail prompt. Using 1-866-81-STORM from the main page actually puts me through to what sounds like a normal support queue and after only a minute or so, I get through to Mark. Trying to explain my story up to this point, and Mark just gives me the combination excuse of a backed up support queue, combined with a "first in first out" service model. That's all fine and dandy, but it does nothing to troubleshoot or assure the customer that they're being taken seriously.

A couple hours later, I get a call back from yet another technician, Mike. I go through the troubleshooting I've performed so far, and without hesitation we get straight to the point and start talking RMA. Finally! I ask about the average turnaround time involved in shipping with DS and EVGA, and Mike says 30 days. That's a pretty long time to remain dead in the water, but Mike promises me he'll check it out and give me another call back.

10 minutes go by and Mike is back on the phone. He'll get my RMA straight to EVGA to cut the time in half. Well, ~15 days instead of 30 is certainly an improvement! While I didn't get the promised RMA info the following Monday, an even better situation presented itself Tuesday when Mike called again to say they actually have another GTX 590 in stock that they'll just ship out to me, then I'll throw my dead card back in the same packaging, and the whole thing will be done. A couple days later, the new card hums to life in my rig, we're back online, and the dead card is back on its way to the West Coast with my credit hold refunded shortly thereafter.

So all in all, I was without my computer for maybe a week at most, and Mike really did keep communication flowing and salvaged the experience. Now I do know a thing or two about providing outstanding customer support considering it is also my chosen field and I'm part of an award-winning technical support team myself. Would I call this DS Support experience top notch? Well, Mike's part of the story was for sure. And at the end of the day it's still better than what you'd get with most other custom computer builders out there.

Graphics card aside, the whole machine keeps chugging along! Going with some of the higher-end items circa 2011 has ended up very well for me, CPU/Mobo/RAM in particular! Despite having the fresh GPU, I might just upgrade when the next Nvidia generation releases next year, and strongly considering going SSD for the primary partition. Time will tell!

The rig as it stands, now complimented with 2 monitors hooked up to the docking station for my work laptop on the far right:


Old reference posts:
3 Year Review
2 Year Review
My A+ Support Experience
1 Year Review
6 Month Review

I'm up there with my four years owning a Syndicate and its still running strong.
Love all the monitors and nice update.

Look at all those displays. I wouldn't even know what to do with all those.