Lifetime Warranties - Substance or Fluff?

[One4yu2c]

Adopting the policies long held by memory manufacturers, lifetime backings are becoming increasingly popular for videocards (AMD/ATI parts haven't followed suit), as companies try to outdo each other and gain a marketing advantage. Most recently, XFX amended their warranty terms to be more competitive with EVGA's flexible policy, but is there enough to get excited over? And who has the best warranty of the bunch? Let's take a peek at how they break down... - Paul Lilly

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Last week, I decided to blog about the three videocard vendors offering lifetime warranties (plus a blurb regarding PNY) after reading XFX's recent change to their policy (there's a thread discussion devoted to them specifically, found HERE). And then last night, Rich and I were talking about article pitches discussing warranties and customer service more in-depth.

As always, thoughts/comments/questions are welcome regarding the blog entry (as are DIGGS!), but I'm also interested in how you guys feel about warranties in general, and what kind of role they play in your real-world purchasing behavior. Aside from laying out different companies' policies and restrictions, what aspects of warranties and customer service would you be interested in reading about?

[stinger608]

Well I haven't had to do much warranty dealings, (thank the computer gods), but what I did have, was shortly after buying my BFG 7600gt oc, it took a big crap!!!

I contacted BFG, and I am not sure if it was due to the fact that it was so new or what, but they shipped me out a new one in place of the old one, and once I received the new one, then I shipped the bad one back to them.

Needless to say, it was a great experience having to deal with BFG!!!!

No complaints what so ever!!!

I also currently have one of XFX's 6600gt video cards that I purchased new about 2 years ago, and it has that double life time warranty with it!! Of course the card is already seriously out dated, so what is the use of the double life time on that

(ok Hitman, nothing over 4 lines here )

[gvblake22]

I think the warranties make a difference in purchasing behavior on things that are likely to need a warranty and support of some kind. Hard drives, for instance, are mechanical devices and are known to break down and die. This is probably the most important purchase where a warranty is closely inspected. I've chosen Seagate drives over and over because of their 5 year warranty and great reliability (I still have yet to have a Seagate drive fail on me). Power supplies and motherboards are also two things that would sway my purchasing behavior due to warranties. Power supplies undergo a lot of stress and can possibly be killed from a wide variety of things or easily wear out over time. Motherboards are always getting moved around, hardware installed, hardware removed, connectors connected and disconnected, heatsinks affixed, etc, so I can see a lot of places where a motherboard could fail thus making longer warranties on motherboards desirable. But with other things like enclosures, RAM, processors, fans, heatsinks, etc, slightly differing warranties will probably not sway my decision too much. Things like RAM and processors are purely electronic devices and will either work or not and if they work, they will probably continue to work for quite some time without incident. And even doing things that might place a CPU or RAM in harms way (like overclocking, physical modification, etc) would be against any warranty anyway.

As for video card warranties, I think they would probably fall somewhere in the middle as they are also an electronic device that should either work or not. But the fact that they are getting so large and complicated and require elaborate cooling solutions to keep heat under control makes warranties on video cards more and more desirable. But with companies like XFX offering such advanced warranties and support even for overclocking, that really starts standing out from the crowd and is likely to sway a purchasing decision when it comes down to several similar cards at like prices from different manufacturers offering different warranties.

[screwballl]

Originally Posted by stinger608

Well I haven't had to do much warranty dealings, (thank the computer gods), but what I did have, was shortly after buying my BFG 7600gt oc, it took a big crap!!!

I contacted BFG, and I am not sure if it was due to the fact that it was so new or what, but they shipped me out a new one in place of the old one, and once I received the new one, then I shipped the bad one back to them.

Needless to say, it was a great experience having to deal with BFG!!!!

No complaints what so ever!!!

I had a similar issues with a Ti4200 with BFG and actually several died on me over the course of about 6 months, the last replacement they sent me was a FX5200Ultra since it was past the end of the Ti4200 lifespan and that 5200 worked flawlessly until I sold it about a year ago.