I had a 3500 Winchester where the memory controller went bad, I know not why, and I rma'd it. The process was very efficient and they sent me e-mail updates as it went through the various phases and within less than a week (one day on each side for basic shipping as I am local) they had a new 4000 (hammer) back to me. Since I never got around to overclocking the Winnie, this is a step-up in performance, though I did bump-up my fan speed (hence noise) a bit to offset the higher running temperature. I RMA's the MB at the same time (I was sure the CPU was dead, but I was not sure the MB didn't cause the problem and I didn't want to plug the new CPU into a suspect MB) and it took about twice as long and there was no voluntary status updates.
BTW, not the same MB as in my current sig.
nBd