XFX Customer for Life
As some of you know, just before the holidays I took advantage of a few Day After Thanksgiving sales to piece together a new computer. The only part I bought second-hand was my video card, a Geforce 7950 GX2 from XFX. It was a behemoth of a card- literally two physical cards sandwiched into one PCI Express slot. Well, things took a turn for the worse on that fateful day when I sparked my power supply. I don't actually know if the spark is what caused it but the video card never worked for me. I took it into PC Club to verify and sure enough, the card was dead. So I sought the best course of action.
The good news was that the card was manufactured by XFX (http://www.xfxforce.com/) and listed on their website is a "Double lifetime protection" warranty, which covers absolutely anything that might happen to the card- even if the card has been resold. The bad news is that the warranty went into affect well after the 7950 was originally purchased and this particular card's warranty had long passed. Still, I contacted their support center to see what they could do. The other good news was that the person I bought the card from returned my money with no questions asked. Given that gesture, I wanted to do what I could to see if we could both win in this situation.
To my surprise, after two or three emails to work out the details, I shipped out the dead 7950 GX2 to XFX's support center. I'm ecstatic to report that today a box arrived in the mail. I was expecting a repaired 7950 but instead, there before me lay a brand new Geforce 8800 GT! For a mere $8 in shipping costs, XFX saved us both a lot of money and stress. This is an example of a company really going the extra mile for their customer and it will definitely pay off for them in the end because I only ever plan to buy XFX cards from now on. A big "Thank You" to XFX's support staff for standing behind their product and resolving this issue with very little effort on my part.
Unfortunately I'm sort of torn now. For a while, I wasn't sure what was going to happen with the card, but clearly I couldn't count on XFX taking care of business- I just had to get my game on. So I went to Fry's and bought an XFX 8600 GT. Now I've got some options because I could definitely buy back the 8800 from the seller for a lot less than I could purchase it otherwise, but then what am I to do with the 8600? I'm really happy with the performance of the 8600 so far; as you can tell from the screenshot above from Bioshock, it looks great as it is and it already supports DX10 in case I ever switch to Vista (which may never happen). So is it worth the extra cash? This is the question I'll be asking myself over the next few days. But man...picking that 8800 out of the Styrofoam and holding it in my arms...this card deserves a good home :-)
