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 :-)
Christmas Comes Early
As has been the tradition for the past 3 years, I arrived at 3:30 a.m. Black Friday morning outside my local Best Buy to patiently await the mayhem and bargains with my friend Jenny. While it may seem insane (in fact even now as I'm typing it, it does seem insane), it only happens once a year and ends up being pretty fun. This year, unlike other years, I couldn't decide what I wanted so I decided to piece together a new computer even though I really didn't need one. To do so, I got half my goods at Best Buy: 20x LG DVD writer, 2GB PC5300 DDR2, and a 300 GB SATA hard drive. Aside from the video card (GeForce 7950 XFX), which I bought from an acquaintance, I purchased the rest at Fry's: 500W Antec power supply, ECS 671T-M motherboard and now my prized possession, the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600.
I did a lot of research on the ECS motherboard and while I didn't find good things, the deal was too good to pass up at just under $200 for the pair. At that price, any amount of time that the motherboard holds up is gravy. And really, I haven't been disappointed with the motherboard so far. At least the documentation was much better than most Abit or Asus motherboards I've used in the past and the setup was pretty standard. There were a lot of people in forums and mailing lists that I saw asking if the 671T-M is really compatible with the Core 2 Quad because it's never explicitly stated in any of the documentation or online. And yes, I'm using the two together as we speak and I didn't have any problems. I did have a problem installing the video card so right now I'm using onboard video, but I think that had to do with the power supply rather than the motherboard.
Oh yes, the power supply. 
I learned a very valuable lesson today, which prompted me to come up with the graphic at right. I was about to look into my video card woes when I decided to re-seat my grounding wrist-wrap. I hooked it just a little too close to the metal plate inside the power supply and POOF! ...all the lights in the house are out. After flipping the breaker, I tried to start the computer but got absolutely nothing in response. Imagine my worry when I thought perhaps the entire system was toast. ...then imagine my relief when I realized the amount of voltage that would have shot through my mortal body had I not been properly grounded! Luckily only the power supply was lost and it was a steal anyway at $7 after rebate (granted I did spend 2 hours in line waiting to purchase it). The moral of the story: keep the grounding clip away from the power supply.
This has been a public service announcement from Captain Obvious.
Comments
I should comment that in fact the ECS motherboard has not held up well. Most USB products will no longer work with my computer :-/ It's true what they say, you get what you pay for.
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