Information About The RMA
In the end, there are a number of people suffering due to this massive demonstration of incompetence to implement decent quality assurance. There’s AMD, its partners that just buy these graphics cards from AMD after having them labeled and packaged in China, as well as the stores and the customers.
Looking at the first of AMD’s emails that we quoted at the beginning, it’s pretty clear by now that the “very small batch” was, at best, an understatement. We’ve contacted some of AMD’s partners directly to ask them if they are aware of the problem and willing to do spot checks. We also wanted to know how they are handling cards that customers found to be defective and if they have stopped delivering affected cards to stores.
We’d first like to note that all of AMD’s partners told us the exact same thing. We’re not reporting their names, since this information was mainly given by the R&D departments of the companies in question, and there haven’t been, and most probably won’t be, any official statements. This isn’t much of a problem, since the main message was that all of the spot checks yielded graphics cards with the same pump problem, even though its severity varied. None of AMD’s partners are planning to return the cards directly to AMD at this point for a variety of reasons and to avoid ending up on AMD’s bad side.
The good news is that AMD will apparently reimburse its partners for any losses suffered due to customers actually returning their graphics cards. Is this a ploy to sell at least part of the affected stock, because some customers aren’t that sensitive to noise and others don’t want to go to the trouble of an RMA? This would limit the financial damages, of course. However, it might still lead to undesirable results due to the damages to AMD’s and its partners' images. It’s questionable if the financial gain is worth it.
