i completely understand what your getting at, i have understood from the start. What i am saying is i have never seen this sort of reaction. enthusiast blow up their stuff all the time. And ppl suggest RMA all the time. if you burn up something from overclocking and your HW is not covered, doing and RMA is wrong. if you overvolt your HW and run it out of spec causing the HW to fail, RMA is wrong. check out this thread here:

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=24897

all kinds unjust RMAs. The PSU may have caused all sorts of issues and its the manufacture who makes the PSU that is liable for the damage, not the manufactures of the HW that resulted in issue. Yet you dont see anyone saying "knowing its a fault PSU and yet RMAing the components cost us all in the end." "this is bad and hurts everyone" . You wont hear it from me though, not in a million yrs.

Its mot uncommon to have issues like these as enthusiast pushing the envelope. Running systems that are consistently tinkered. By overclocking and tinkering we can cause all sorts of failures we never intended. PSUs get stressed from overworking and start to become erratic. They may have trouble stabilizing voltage and overcompensate burning out components such as motherboards, Hard drives, usb devices, gpus, cpus, just about anything. Sometimes the PSU could fault when no one has done anything to provoke it, not overclocking at all. But it doesnt matter, we always suggest RMA no matter what. Its an everyday thing.

I did this at best buy when I was 14 or so. I can't remember if it was a modem that I bought or a network card. Either way, I threw an old isa card in the box and returned it. Not proud about it now, but at the time I thought I was a being an ultra cool sneaky bastard.

Are you saying the PSU issues are my fault, and I should bare the burden of the faulty PSU and the drives it took out?

Corsair sent me a pre-paid label for the RMA today, however they said nothing about the drives. I feel I need to contact them, because I feel it is unjust for me to lay the drives on Crucial and Samsung when the PSU is what caused the problem. Having just received the replacements it had killed a few weeks ago which worked fine for a several weeks prior to being put back on the HX850 where they did not last long at all.

Unless you're saying it's unjust for me to fault a $200 850w "Professional Series" PSU because I ran overclocked parts on it. I'm not sure you can lay the same sort of logic on a PSU as you can other hardware such as VCs and CPUs. A PSU is rated at a certain wattage, a quality one such as this has OVP and OCP protections in place, if the rail was overloaded it should have shut off. If it is continuing to operate while defective, (which I believe is the case since anymore than 1 black modular cable will cause the PSU to not power on, I believe it's shorting out) than I should not bare that responsibly since it's a defective product. Nor though do I believe the drive manufactures should bare that burden as well, I feel it is Corsairs burden to bare as their product is faulty, thus resulting in the damage of non faulty products.

it may have been out of your control, thats does not make it the drive manufactures fault.

dont get me wrong, i am not against you. I am for the enthusiast not the corporations. But you have to understand, whether its water or a PSU, or lightning for geeks sake, if its anything but the component you are RMAings fault then its wrong. Most components are only covered when the HW itself fails under complete legit and normal operations. The PSU is not in the HD manufactures control nor is it their responsibility.

so i can carry this further. The fact that you may have severely stressed your PSU and probably drawn over the limits on your rails can bring the PSU out of the picture too. Blaming the PSU when it may not be its fault at all. it couldve been a secondary effect from a cause previous. It may have been the user all along or....... We have other things like power surges and lighting that couldve cause the PSU to become faulty. Then this may or may not be covered by the PSU manufacture. You may or may not have be in the right to RMA it even. Anyway the list can go on.

i am actually on your side though. I dont care about it that way. All i am saying is if you want to get down to it, a heck of a lot of RMAs are not the manufactures responsibility and yet we encourage it all the time on the forums. Never have i seen ppl start saying, dont do it its wrong. Most of the time its the reverse, try to RMA it even if its clearly your fault.

i would RMA the crap out of this situation. I am just saying that a lot of RMAs are out of the manufactures control and out of their responsibility. The manufactures know this yet they honor them for good business and relationships. They have designed their business around this.

I am saying that this is what we do. RMAs. stuff quits working after we paid money for it and we want it to work. The manufactures want us to be happy too so they most all the time honor them. My entire point is that i never seen such actions on a thread when it came to RMAing. And then people wanted to be the judge and jury on why it was wrong when if you really look at things, we always suggest RMAs when its not the manufacturer fault.

I am not trying to make you a better person or make you feel bad. I think there is nothing wrong with RMAing and getting your stuff sorted out especially when you paid money for it. The companies think the same way. They would rather have happy customers

so dont get what i am saying all wrong. Yours was just an example and just saying. RMA the crap out of that stuff till you get your system back. The only other option is trying to sue the PSU.

You're saying we're already overcharged based on years of RMAs for products that weren't their fault?

I can agree with that


I'm not a white knight, as I already said I think Intels policy is bs. AMD does the same thing, Unlocked out of the box, but they don't cover it under warranty if you overclock it, they even go so far as to say they don't cover the product if you use any other cooler than theirs.


It's a personal thing imo, if I'm to blame for doing something stupid I can accept it.

I also think there is an unspoken double standard on tech forums.

Take for instance the 7850, not a great choice at stock, it's slower than the 448. However those same people who take issue with people RMA'ing suggest the living sh!t out of overclocking the piss out of that card. Countless times cards and processors are recommended based on overclocking, yet never once will you see the "you void your warranty" disclaimer.

What about the HD 6990? It has a dual-BIOS switch. But if you flip it - as you are encouraged to - you lose your warranty on AMD's top card.

The big companies like to have it both ways. So do their customers. It is a balance. As long as there is reasonableness.

countless RMAs and more than half of them are perfectly fine components. So i have heard anyway. over half are perfectly fine yet get RMAed. Why? possibly something else was their issue and they didnt know it. there are even cases where they just want more overclocking and do an RMA to try to get a better draw. These things happen and cost the company money. But they have a system in place for this already. They are expecting them. If they start getting unusual RMAs on something specific or new, they will respond by making the product less prone to that type of failure. like overvolt protection or whatever.

Anyway, i just thought it was a strange way to be acting and thats why i linked the original post. We RMA all the time, and its a common practice for enthusiast. Most always we are RMA first ppl. we usually suggest it without issue. The actual person RMAing may feel like its wrong to do so when its their own fault, and this is cool i get it. But i never seen that kind of attack on someone at a tech forum talking about RMAs

That kind of "attack" is common at ATF. There are people who are self-righteous and who judge others in public

However, this principle applies

"he who is without fault, cast the first stone"
-- unfortunately today, there is a lot of AI who thinks it is faultless. It is broken AI.

OOPs .. i forgot that both threads are VC&G

EDIT

Here is today's *counterbalance* to that thread where an overclocker burned up his HD 7970 (literally fire; evidently a cap blew) while overclocking under water. In stark contrast to the generally self-righteous and judgmental attitude of the other thread, notice the *entitlement* of the majority in this one. i

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2249125

i guess it depends who is posting. Dr. Couzin might have fun with forum psychology.



Now it actually does depend on the vendor as to whether this kind of damage is covered or not. Galaxy's rep told me that they expect the card returned in "original condition". And each RMA is treated on a "case by case basis".

We cannot judge by reading the threads. Perhaps the OP tends to minimize what they did. Or the vendor does look for reasons to deny the RMA.