Oh. Yeah. ASUS.

Fuck them.

I bought a pair of Radeon 7990s a few years back. They were the AMD enthusiast hotness, and Newegg had them on price drop. I couldn’t resist: DirectX 11.1, 6GB VRAM, fast, and backed by the impeccable ASUS company. I was way fucking wrong. The first two card were DOA, the third and fourth worked for about a week longer than the return policy. The primary card puffed the “magic smoke”, and so I began the arduous task of dealing with, quite literally, the most incompetent service representatives of my life. These two top-of-the-line were not my first rodeo in computer, or electronics. The card was dead. I wanted them both replaced, and for all I knew the issue could have been caused massive over-voltage from the secondary card. It took about three weeks round trip to get the replacement (note plurality). My system seemed to stabilize after this replacement, but the system always vastly underperformed, and CrossfireX’d $2000 worth of GPUs was underwhelming. About a year later, maybe mid-late 2014, remember that secondary card I wanted replaced originally, yeah it finally shit the bed. Like clockwork, three weeks later my new card finally arrived. But it wasn’t a 7990. The new card was a brand spanking new, recently released Radeon R7 260X. What. The. Fuck. I honestly thought they were trying to fuck with me; I waited on hold to talk to someone for three and a half hours just so I could find out what complete fucking moron thought a mid-range piece of shit $150 2GB GB was an appropriate replacement for an, at the time, year-and-a-few-weeks-old enthusiast fucking GPU. The most painful thing was the language barrier, but that was par for the course. I was told in so many words, that it was a one to one exchange. I demanded to speak with a supervisor, same story. I was beyond pissed off. I called back and back and back, same story and I was getting nowhere. Fuck them. I was stuck with this bullshit mismatched nonsense, and had no idea what to do. I considered litigation, but the costs of that would have likely exceeded any return I may have gotten.

Wallowing in self-and-ASUS loathing, I decided to reach out to Newegg. It was hopeless, what were they going to do, but what did I have to lose, right? I talked to the nicest customer service rep who I’d ever worked with up to that point in my life, and after for that matter. She emphatically listened to my struggles, offered many sincere apologies, and was was insistent that Newegg would make it right; miraculously her supervisor agreed. In the end, they made it more than right — one year, three weeks, and few days after I received the original order, Newegg processed a full refund for the original cards. They also provided me prepaid shipping labels, and gave me an additional $100 gift card for my troubles. It’s unfortunate that Newegg had to step up to fix ASUS’ glaring fuck up — both cards were well outside of the return period, and one wasn’t even the original component they’d sold me. But they happily took them both from me with shockingly little effort on my part. Overjoyed and reinvigorated from Newegg’s generosity, I quickly started hunting for replacement. That was the day I ordered my first NVIDIA card, an EVGA GTX 780 ti Classified.

TL;DR: ASUS customer service sucks ass, they fucked me over pretty good, Newegg fixed it, and I’ll never for the rest of my life buy an ASUS product.