My review of my new DS PC

I’m a new proud owner of a DS PC. I played around with the idea of building my own but chickened out at the last minute and bought a PC that professionals built. I check the reviews on line and felt DS was my best bet not because they are the cheapest but because they pre-test the systems before they ship them to the customer. I was also impressed that I picked out my system and chose the parts I wanted on their website without needing to speak with a sales rep. I completed the whole transaction online and received updates on the progress of my build. Again, I was very pleased with the fact I didn’t need to talk with sales staff. I received my new DS PC and let me tell you the thing looks great and the wire management was perfect. After fallowing all DS recommendations, I started my new PC up and everything went great. I hit restart to allow all my drivers to work properly and I got an overheating warning that my CPU was overheated 88 degrees C. I didn’t know exactly what that meant so I shut the PC off and looked in my DS manual to trouble shout it. I restarted the PC the next day and only ran it for about 2 hours and restarted it. I got the same warning as the day before CPU was at 88 C. I was disappointed about the decision to have professionals build me a PC that didn’t work properly. The whole reason I chose DS was all the stress testing they do for reliability. I got on the DS web site and sent them this.     

“My name is Jason Riffle and I recently ordered and received a new PC from DS. I followed instructions on the initial start up and I was able to set Windows up and download all drivers with no problem. After I was done I restarted the system. There was an era code CPU overheated and would not let me proceed to the windows menu. I hit F1 and the BIOS came up and the CPU temps read 88 degrees C. That is 195 degrees F. I read the trouble shooting guide in my booklet and it told me to make sure all connections to the power supply was secure. I did and noticed the wire to the CPU water block was a little loose. I wiggled the wire pulled it out and reinstalled it. I restarted the PC and it was fine. Day two same thing happened after 2 hours of using the PC and the water cooler was making a bad noise. I would like someone to call me to help fix the problem”.

Kyle from Teck support called me later that night and took over my PC and adjusted the fans and looked at the temps. He told me that ether the Corsair water cooler was bad or there is too much thermal compound between the CPU and the water block. He told me I could send the PC back to DS for repairs or they can send me a replacement water cooler to switch out myself. I chose to have them send me a new replacement so that I could do it myself. Kyle told me that I had to put down half the cost of the water cooler before they send me the new replacement part. I agreed and gave him a card number. He then gave me one more thing to try. He told me to remove the water block and wipe off the thermal compound and reapply a bee-bee size portion back to see if that fixed it. I chose to wait till the new cooling system came in to try this. When the new corsair water cooler arrived, I decided to remove the water block first. When I did it was very obvious that the DS tech that installed this used way too much thermal compound and caused the CPU not to get the cooling benefits from the water cooler. I chose to replace the radiator anyways to be safe. It only took me and my wife about 90 minutes to complete the work. I started the PC up and ran ARMA 3 for 2 hours with the CPU temps only getting up to 40 C. Kyle at DS was very professional with me and I really appreciate the way he treated me. I have no doubt DS has great employees but who ever built my PC and tested the system under load didn’t do a good job if they even tested it at all. I paid for the promise of out of the box reliability and I was very disappointed. I do want to give credit to the quick response from tech support and I know once this gets fixed I shouldn’t have any more problems but that’s to the quality parts used not the person that assembled my PC.

Jason Riffle    

System Configuration:

Chassis Model: Special Deal Hot Seller - Digital Storm Velox
Exterior Finish: - Standard Factory Finish
Trim Accents: - Standard Factory Finish
Processor: Intel Core i7-7740X (4-Core) (Up to 4.50 GHz)
Motherboard: ASUS TUF X299 MARK 2 (Intel X299 Chipset) (Up to 3x PCI-E Devices)
System Memory: 32GB DDR4 3000MHz Digital Storm Performance Series
Power Supply: 750W EVGA SuperNOVA (750 G3) (Fully Modular)
Storage Set 1: 1x SSD (960GB Digital Storm Performance Series)
Storage Set 2: 1x Storage (2TB Seagate / Toshiba)
Internet Access: High Speed Network Port (Supports High-Speed Cable / DSL / Network Connections)
Graphics Card(s): 1x GeForce GTX 1080 8GB (Performance Edition) (VR Ready)
Sound Card: Integrated Motherboard Audio
CPU Boost: Stage 2: Overclock CPU - Up to 4.8GHz (Depends on Cooling and Motherboard)
Graphics Boost: Yes, Overclock the video card(s) as much as possible with complete stability
Display: Asus 24 inch VG248QE Series (144Hz Refresh Rate) (1ms Response Time) (1920x1080)

Congratulations on your purchase and welcome to DS. Mistakes are made daily by all. It shows true strenght how we respond to them and, like bprat22 stated, that is where DS excels.  DS is the place to be if you are into something more than just a pc and very importantly, they back all their products with the philosophy that us, the customers must always be happy.

That is a nice system. Enjoy.

Pics would be nice. We like to ogle all systems.

I agree that everyone makes mistakes and I lock forward to working with DS in the future. I need to update my office server soon and I'm probably going to use DS for the job. I will just need to be more hands on in the building stage of the order. I will post some nice pictures soon.   

Yes, way too much paste.   A small pea size drop evenly spread across the CPU is all that's needed. Too much, like that, can also go over the edges and hit the CPU connections.

Everything is working great now and here are some pics.

Nice set up and thx for sharing photos.

Love that Velox case and how it shows off your card.

Congrats and welcome to the next level

Happy Gaming   
    

did i misread or were you charged to replace a part under warranty?  

The charged my credit card half the cost of the replacement part. They will refund the complete amount once the part get back to them. I assume they have been burnt befor and use this policy to motivate us to return the faulty parts back to them so that the can get reimbursed from the vendor.

Originally posted by bprat22 ........ I think it used to be the full price of the part, but not sure.

Yes. I was surprised when I read that the OP was charged half price. I was charged full price way back in 2015.



Edited by hoserator - 18 Aug 2017 at 6:37am

Normally they charge you upfront that way they can send you the part and you don't have to wait to send yours and then once they get yours they would send the new one.

some people use to get the new part and not send old part, so everyone adopted the pay first policy, its not just DS, Evga, corsair, most place will rma your part the same 2 ways:

1. pay first and part is shipped right away

2. don't pay first and wait till vender gets the part and then the new part is sent.

Of course Alex knows best and sounds like they now even do 50% instead of %100 of the cost.