MSI vs ?

I got my new rig from DS today and am still setting it up.  After I unpacked it found a few really minor wiggy wiring things kind of like left dangling that I did not want to look at through glass sides and top of my Mountain Mods H2Go custom ordered case. No prob at all.  But then I notice that the AMD ATI Radeon HD crossfire 7970's I ordered are labeled as MSI. I looked on line, and the ones I got would seem to be the lowest end of the MSI versions of this. Nobody at DS told me about this, or gave me a choice.  Should I be pleased or not?  What in fact did I get?  Better or worse than what was on the config. machine at DS online?

darbebo, what was your card brand experience?  These might have been upgrades, but I was nor asked about it.

Hey guys....Unless DS specifies in parenthesis next to the card the board manufacturer, then it can be MSI, Asus, Evga,Gigabyte, etc.   Probably has to do with the best pricing they can get in bulk.   MSI has lots of very good comments from users.  I've actually seen more complaints of Asus, but that could be just them selling more units and more people to either complain or praise them.

AMD is the chip manufacturer like Nvidia is for gtx680.  Lots others like EVGA, Msi, Asus take the chips and make the graphic cards.. 

Edited by bprat22 - 18 Apr 2012 at 7:33am

All of the graphic card companies simply use either the reference design by the manufacture or make their own cooler or PCB to market their own features. In the end, you still receive the graphic card you ordered, it's not as if the card you received isn't as fast as a different vendor or a lower quality.

That's fine, Alex.  I'm sure that you are correct.  However, after extensive testing of my new rig at DS, one of my two MSI ATI Radeon HD Crossfire 7970's was DOA when I tried to boot up the machine.  This resulted in continuous reboots but no successful normal operation, although we had no idea yet that all this mischief was caused by a defective GPU card..  Fortunately, I had lined up a local tech firm to assist me in salvaging and  transferring as much data as possible from my old 32bit machine to the new one.  He worked for over two hours with Mike (at $120/hr) to finally narrow down the problem to a dead 7970.  Once we got that out of the machine, I finally got to see a booted up screen.  By the way, I am not even mentioning the time spent waiting to get someone live to answer your phones (no secretarial answer until about 9:20 am your time, and then no clue from her about how long the wait was going to be before we got on the horn with a tech. I lost track of time, but I believe that was somewhere after 10:00 am your time.  In the meantime, my experience was a little like sitting in NYC in a taxi in a massive traffic jam, and watching the meter tick on and on and on. 

That was the bad part.  The good part was that Mike was very logical in working with my guy over the phone and the internet (in safe mode, of course -- I never again want to have to hear the F8 key getting speed pounded on an MX Cherry Red mechanical keyboard.)  As I said, after a couple of hours, the offending MSI graphics card was removed, and voila!  Now, my guy went through all of the usual things he could think of before we got Mike on the phone. Forget that.  But I would like compensation for the time my guy (who is a professional) charged me while he was working with Mike to fix the problem with a relatively expensive  computer that should have worked right out of the box.  I asked him to tell Mike what this amount of time had cost at $120/hr. and then I asked Mike for compensation for this from DS.  I also asked for expedited shipping (not at my expense)  for a new 7970.  He said he needed to run this past management (presumably you.)  This was after I asked if we should be trying to get money from Fedex for shipping damage (although the carton was in perfect shape and the packing was phenomenally good, inside and outside of the case.)  The answer, from Mike, was that no, these things just die. 

Which gets us back to the topic under discussion: a GPU card that is THAT expensive should not, well, just die. Is it MSI?  Is it ATI?  I hate to think that I should have bought an Nvidia card to help them pay for all the marketing advertising they do.

No, Alex, you do not understand how I feel.  I started working with DS because I believed all of the hype about how good you are to work with.  Now I am very disillusioned.  I am particularly upset about your response in number 4.  I also do not believe that the GPU failed because of a shipping shock. By the way, are you aware that I had previously inquired about a missing MS Office disk from the fully boxed edition I ordered?  I found it today.  Still in the optical drive, where it had been left by a DS employee who was doing the OMG perfect last DS inspection -- or something. As a retired business owner myself, I can tell you that I see some cracks in both your organization and your attitude toward your customers that you need to look at carefully. If you are a small business that "focuses on personalized support" you are obviously having problems fulfilling that admirable vision because you are taking on too much, too fast.  One of the most difficult points for any business is when it is in a period of rapid growth, which appears to be happening to your company.  It seems clear to me that you are in such a period, and you need to hire more employees.  On the other hand, the cash receipts from this growth pattern can lag the ability to spend to maintain quality of service and product. Unfortunately, I seem to be, as a customer, caught in the middle of this lag, and I don't like it much. 

I hope that I grow to enjoy my new DS rig, but right now, I have a pretty bad taste in my mouth.  I notice that you did not respond to my request for expedited shipping of the replacement GPU card. What are you going to do about that? By the way, the card was NOT dislodged, the packing was immaculate,  the carton was not even dirty, let alone showing signs of any shock in handling,  So you still dodged my basic question about the quality of the MSI cards you are using.

Comet,

If my responses came off in that manner, I apologize. Those were never my intentions; I was simply trying to respond to your post and the items you referenced.

Yes, we're always growing, however, we never doing it in a manner that would sacrifice our core focus as a business. My response about the personalized support was only in reference to you stating you had to wait, I was only trying to explain that situation and we're always working hard to improve response times as much as possible. One thing is that we never want customers to wait for us on hold; we rather have a receptionist create a ticket and have a senior rep contact you back right away.

In regards to the optical drive with the office CD, I truly don't know what happened with that, but, that's definitely not something I've seen as a common issue, an oversight might have happened, and I just sent a message up the ladder for us to look into, as we do strongly believe in constantly improving ourselves, no company is perfect, but, we do strive to perfect ourselves as much as possible with direct customer feedback.

In regards to expedited shipping for the replacement video card, it appears that the video card has shipped today, we try our best to get replacements shipped as soon as possible, I'm sorry that we were unable to expedite it for you. Unless the replacement is a critical item (stopping you from using the system [in your case you still have one of the two video cards that are working]), the warranty normally ships all replacements via FedEx Ground which take 3-5 business days, your replacement video card should arrive no later the middle of next week and include a return label for the original one. Also, you’ll receive an automated email as well with the tracking number details.

I was taking a step back and looking over the issue, and the root issue appears that you received the system and one of the video cards wasn't working. It's not due to it being an MSI card, MSI is a great brand, and your system passed all tests before it shipped. The only likely cause that we can determine from leaving our facility and going to you is shipping, I’ll explain further:

In regards to shocks and vibrations, I'm referring to when the boxes are going through conveyor belts, shipping hubs, shifting and moved around in the trucks, etc... not harsh mishandling such as dropping it from a couple of inches, etc... which is why you don’t see signs of abuse on the box. Plus, the boxes we use are very, very sturdy (more than two times the recommended thickness needed); it’s quite difficult to damage the box or show signs of abuse.

In regards to the quality of the product, we tested your system extensively at our facility and it did pass all of our tests, we do our best to try to weed out any defective components as much as possible.

In regards to the service, our senior rep Mike contacted you back shortly after you spoke with our receptionist, and he was helpful in trying to help you get up and running.

But, I understand that none of this really changes anything since you still received the system and wasn’t able to enjoy it out of the box. Computers are sensitive, and on rare occasions, things can happen, however, we’re here to help our customers as much as possible and get things resolved as quickly as possible. I really would love to be able to have it so that every system that ships never has an issue.

I hope that once you receive the replacement video card and are able to use it inside your system, that you're able to fully enjoy your awesome system and this bump along the road is gone.

Feel free to contact me directly at any time via email ([email protected])

NICE ONE Alex!

BTW, if a customer were to ship a whole system back to you, exactly how do they do it.. i mean, it's really tough to re-package it the way you guys did (including the foam inside the case and everything.) WIthfans like the D14, without the foam it may cause more dmg during transit.

What is the "best" way to ship a system back?