End of Year PC Build

I like Gigabyte stuff....Always wondered what their laptops were like.

Looks like Gigabyte is my new destination for at least some hardware then since I don't usually deal with manufacture support since I find it easier and quicker to solve it myself.
Did they treat you like your problem was asinine?
Or were they polite and helped you to solve it?
 
If the answer is the second question....
Then this is a problem how?
They got to you. If it took them a while so what. 
Its best to use a backup system in a case like this or just better yet go camping for a week, fishing for another and deer hunting for another then you only have a week to wait. They may have a lot of people in line before you or not many tech savvy supporters available. 

Last time I had an ASUS product (the Maximus VI Anti-Hero which was garbage from the day I bought it, and the ASUS Transformer Tablet)  This situation happened twice.

Each time I signed for delivery insurance and sent the aforementioned products to my local office.  It shouldn't have taken more than 2 weeks to fix.....But they lost it (and didn't tell me about it), then lied to be about receiving it (when I knew they had because I got notified from Cnada Post which was the reason for the delivery insurance)....Then when they couldn't fix it (something else they didn't tell me) they sent it down to Mexico for further analysis and repairs.  Then the Motherboard got lost in transit from Mexico.  It took 4 months to get it back, and the problems (a warped GPU socket and defective RAM slot) still were not fixed when I finally received it.

As for the Tablet...I RMA'd it because after less than a year it wouldn't hold charge.  Same disasterous lack of service, cover-ups and BS......Then when I finally did receive it back, it came back to me with smashed screen.  ASUS told me it was my fault, that I did it....And they were gonna charge me several hundred to repair it.

You know...I miss ASUS from the 1990s when their products and their service matched their slogan:  Rock Solid. Heart Touching.

EVGA  on the other hand has truly the very best customer service and warranties in the Industry.   In my experience, Gigabyte has also been good.  Nowhere near EVGA's level of quality....but good.    I can't speak to Seasonic or PNY, but both are very good companies from what I know.  PNY makes most of Nvidia's Quadro lineup, at least for the Commercial side.

The last truly good quality ASUS Boards I owned were the P5E Deluxe Gaming, and its successor, the P6T Deluxe.  I miss boards of that quality.   The Maximus VI Anti-Hero was just complete trash.  And I paid good money for that board, between 400 and 500 dollars at the time.  And from day one, it was just trash.  After that I vowed never to buy another ASUS Board.  Though my Dad has Maximus Hero XI paired with an Intel 8700K which he bought in 2018....and he quite likes it.

So I guess with any of the big vendors, it's a crapshoot.

I'd buy an EVGA Board if I could afford it.....Though I don't really like their connectivity choices and features; seems almost out-dated in comparision to what Gigabyte and ASUS are offering at a lesser price point.

For example..... NO internal USB 3.0 or 3.1 ports, only 1 internal  USB 2.0

USB 2.0, really?  C'mon....



www.evga.com/products/product.aspx?pn=121-RL-E799-KR

And this is their 800 USD Kingpin model

I definitely overpaid for the Anti-Hero POS, but those were Canada Computers prices at the time considering it was marketed as a top-tier ROG Motherboard.  But I understand and agree with what you're saying.  As for EVGA's Kingpin board, I know it's meant for Overclockers....But even with that, it seems like it's stripped down.  And as I mentioned- why USB 2.0 ?   That just seems like a massive step backwards in tech even though I know a lot of peripherals still use 2.0 and not 3.0.

But really price for features, performance and overall quality.....I know I'm presently having some issues with my Z490 Aorus Master, but I would still take Gigabyte over ASUS or MSI.

Nothing is perfect, of course. Given enough time, everything will eventually begin to exhibit problems of some sort, or failures (they are electronics afterall)....But it just seems that for the high prices Consumers are paying these days, we are getting less and less reliabiliy and good build quality.   Sure, all the fancy features and tech are cool, powerful and useful (not to mention things we have come to expect), but over and above all the fancy tech....I would say "give me a rock-solid board of excellent build quality that is going to last me for 5 years or more with as few issues as possible".

I mean, the good ol' days when things were actually built to last more than two or three years.    For example, take my P5E Deluxe Gaming motherboard I had that for nearly 6 years (connected to an i7 9650 Quadcore 2 Extreme and 24 GB of DDR3 @ 1600Mhz) and of all the hardware on the Board (the GPU was the first to crap out).....But the CPU and Motherboard were still running strong 5 and some years later.  Plus, it seemed like ages before I found a game that that system didn't chew through like paper.  It wasn't until 2013 when I upgraded to the Intel 4770 (another amazing CPU for its time), that I made the mistake of pairing it with the Anti-Hero.   A fabulous CPU, totally brought to its knees by a truly POS Motherboard.  I've never had a worse motherboard than the Maximus VI Hero.  But before I made my purchase, I did a lot of research and watched all the professional reviews that I could find.  Not a single one had anything negative to say about the Maximus VI, they all said "being an ROG board, you're getting top-tier quality and performance....."  So that's what I bought, and I think I paid somewhere in the neighbourhood of 400 CAD for it, give or take.  I can't remember exactly off hand. I would have to look at the paperwork.  Butfreom the very day I installed it I had nothing but problems.

Yet as I said in my previous post...My dad has the Maximus XI Hero paired with an 8700K and he is very happy with it.  So I am totally willing to concede the point that I may have just gotten the bad apple in the bunch.  But the trouble I went through, especially with the complete non-existence of Customer Service was enough to completely turn me off of ASUS products.

How long ago was this?
If within the year of 2022 there would be reason for the delay.

That asked I thought PNY had gone OOB -guess they just went the Enterprise level route... I will have to start looking at their stuff again. 
Oh BTW my hard drives are still in transit -I got put on backorder... AGAIN! -so kept the 14 TB Exos but canceled the others and got 4TB WD GOLDs, and 4TB WD RED PRO's -the reds will not be doing heavy work so don't see the reason they need be Exos now. 

It was back in 2019 when I purchased the laptop. Gigabyte's tech support doesn't seem to have gotten any better according to all the recent horror stories from the owners. So I definitely won't recommend any Gigabyte products until they significantly improve their tech support and RMA department.

I just hope that I never need to file an RMA request for my Gigabyte RTX 4090 Windforce. So far it has been working great. *knock on wood*

Continuing the LTT hack saga, this video contains useful information for just about everyone. Unless you don't have email, of course.

lol

Now you're reminding me why I got a gaming laptop in the first place.

But I think my Steam Deck makes 'em obsolete (for me) for the most part.

Why? Just Why? 
For convenience sake? 
It will always lead to disaster. 
I will never understand.

1st thing I would have done is to toy with the hacker:
1. Make a document and save it to the desktop as PASSWORDS.txt 
2. Inside the document write in 72 point font:
"YOUR IP HAS BEEN SENT TO THE IRS AND WE ARE WATCHING YOU!"
3. Save file.

4. Now that the fun has been had time to get serious:
    1. Never use passwords managers
    2. Make sure all passwords are 10+characters and include letters, numbers and symbols but not in a row. 
    3. Or memorize them -all 10 plus characters -that leads to #4
    4. Just write them down in physical journal or something to keep on your person.

If I want to have more fun I could convert my Passwords.txt to visual basic and convert with 7-Zip and then convert the 7-Zip in VeraCrypt.
Though still name it Passwords.txt.
I wish I knew how to code because if I really did I would leave a Passwords.txt document on my desktop the moment the hacker clicked and tried to open it...
They would get Independence Day activity...