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Re:RaptorCS Power9 Blackbird PC: An expensive mistake by kev009 on Monday September 23, 2019 @01:22PM (#21051085)
I lost a Talos II board due to what we are fairly sure was a shitty PSU on the first few powerups. I replaced the PSU with a store bought Corsair one and the new unit and replaced (under warranty) board has been very reliable.

Raptor is a small company and one guy is fronting most of the support load so keep trying, he's not out to screw any customers or provide an inferior product.

Re:RaptorCS Power9 Blackbird PC: An expensive mistake by jigglesniggle on Monday September 23, 2019 @04:08PM (#21053030)
> he's not out to screw any customers or provide an inferior product.

Can he actually manage returns? His suppliers should be eating the cost of faulty boards, and the article makes me think they aren't. Continued problems customer side should result in a replacement.

In the US you have full rights to a return to the person who took your money for 30-90 days (depends on state). Requests that you use the warranty or contact the manufacturer are unenforceable. Considering this, it is unwise to wait for longer than that period before requesting your money back. The federal statute of limitations for being sold a defective product is 4 years, but that is a lot harder to enforce.

Remember the AMD Ryzen returns? Why wait 2-3 months for a replacement? Demand your money back from Newegg and buy another, they have to process the refund. Also -- most FFLs either state gun returns are outright illegal (a lie) or only accepted for 3 days (against state law) with a steep restocking fee (also against state law). This is the worst case I know of.

Re:RaptorCS Power9 Blackbird PC: An expensive mistake by ksec on Monday September 23, 2019 @02:10PM (#21051703)
>Raptor is a small company and one guy is fronting most of the support load so keep trying, he's not out to screw any customers or provide an inferior product.

But Radio Silence for a few months... surely that is a bit too much?

On the other hand I didn't know Raptor was this small.

Re:RaptorCS Power9 Blackbird PC: An expensive mistake by tpearson-raptor on Monday September 23, 2019 @07:01PM (#21054685)
It's not that small, the information above is not accurate.

However, I think people that do not see what we see in the support system are greatly underestimating the volume of Email an OEM/ODM receives on a daily basis, which then must be filtered and sorted through to determine the valid issues from the flood of spam and general inquiries. It's not something we have a solution for yet.

Re:RaptorCS Power9 Blackbird PC: An expensive mistake by tpearson-raptor on Monday September 23, 2019 @07:08PM (#21054742)
This is not accurate, one person is not fronting the support load. However, you are correct in that Raptor is not intending to provide inferior product -- in fact we take any reports of issues very seriously, preferring to determine a root cause and fix it instead of just swapping parts to make it go away.
Re:RaptorCS Power9 Blackbird PC: An expensive mistake by sangnoir on Monday September 23, 2019 @07:56PM (#21055065)
> ...preferring to determine a root cause and fix it instead of just swapping parts to make it go away.

May I recommend a more customer-friendly way of doing this? Allow the customer to exchange their iffy hardware first, then do the investigations on your time, with the hardware in your labs.

Re:RaptorCS Power9 Blackbird PC: An expensive mistake by tpearson-raptor on Monday September 23, 2019 @08:24PM (#21055252)
We did try that, only to find that in the majority of the cases the customer was doing something quite unexpected that allowed the fault to manifest. When that results in multiple shipments back and forth, no one is happy in the end -- the techs get frustrated with yet another seemingly functional board returned under RMA, and the end user wastes time with their product in shipping.
Re:RaptorCS Power9 Blackbird PC: An expensive mistake by jigglesniggle on Monday September 23, 2019 @10:48PM (#21056024)
I have to agree with sangnoir. I don't want to provide free engineering services. I want a working product. If you are explicit about component compatibility and provide a troubleshooting checklist (all ways it must be plugged in and turned on) then you should assume there is an issue. You should also treat the boards as interchangeable; if a board comes back, you test it and it's good, ship it out again.

A family friend will help me troubleshoot my electronics. So, I have seen the other side of this: I get something which is completely nonfunctional and send it back to the manufacturer who claims it is functional, and tries to bill me for the shipping both ways. That's why if I can not get a working replacement in 2wk or so I just send it back for refund.

For a real example: Are you using very well made power supplies? Maybe your board's power filtering could be better, and customers notice because they buy the cheapest supply that meets their power requirements.

Re:RaptorCS Power9 Blackbird PC: An expensive mistake by tpearson-raptor on Monday September 23, 2019 @11:34PM (#21056252)
All of the Raptor products use very high quality regulators and power filtering. The only cases of PSU-related damage or malfunction that I am aware of were as a result of a PSU operating way outside of specification (think 12V+ on a 5V rail) or a poorly made PSU exploding and catching on fire, with predictable consequences for the attached devices. Thankfully such incidents are rare, and have never happened with our prebuilt systems that use high quality PSUs.

In general we can diagnose and repair or replace the systems rapidly. This one case was an extreme outlier, and in the future we will just be authorizing RMA and replacement / repair.

Re:RaptorCS Power9 Blackbird PC: An expensive mistake by jigglesniggle on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:36PM (#21063258)
Ok, that sounds good. The example was more just to be illustrative. But there is the (slight) possibility of harmonics on the power lines, etc. There are EDA suites that can do such signal analysis on your board but they are quite expensive. If you picked just the wrong values there could be a filter system which amplifies noise from a power supply.

The trick is to get your board manufacturer to eat the return cost. If you can buy testing, do so; usually it comes with some assurance that the boards work, and they either make new stock or remanufacture what you send back. If you can point to a comprehensive testing instructions that the customer would have performed it should not matter if you receive the board and it works for you, for some reason it did not work for the customer.

Re:RaptorCS Power9 Blackbird PC: An expensive mistake by Luke-Jr on Monday September 23, 2019 @10:06PM (#21055783)
Why not just ONE back and forth shipping? And hold debugging until the user reports if the replacement fixed it...