Concerning AVA Direct:
Poor, lazy and lacking in customer service and technical expertise.
Spoke with a salesman named Misha who claimed to be CEO of the company and one of 4 owners. First red flag: Why is the CEO working in the capacity of a Salesman?? What kind of an operation is this? I enquired with Misha about a high-end gaming rig. Misha kept pushing me back to the site to configure my builds; upon doing so, I asked Misha via email for input regarding cost savings tweaks to the 2 system builds I had configured, at his request, and for obvious reasons. I then went back & forth via email with him responding to irrelevant questions designed to hide his lacking of technological prowess and he continued to push me back to the site with no answers to my questions. He finally recommended an SLI, DDR2, Q6850 over a single video card, DDR3, Q9650 solution. When I asked him to explain why, what the trade offs were etc., he got extremely hostile and started shouting out me and then closed with “as CEO, I’m going to refuse your business” and hung up on me. Before he hung up on me, I told him how shocked I was at how he was conducting himself and that I was going to post my experience with him all over the net. It was at this point that he said he could care-a-less and hung up. There’s one more happenstance I’d like to point out that is indicative of this individual's incompetence and lack of foresight. When I first spoke to him, I shared with him how I had come to be in contact with his company by way of a negative posting I read herein concerning one of his competitors. You should also know that based on pas experiences other computer manufacturers' tech support, I called AVA's tech support to see what they were like and found that their hours were only 8 am to 5pm EST M-F. What a joke.