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ECS does not stand behind WARRANTY!

S

shankscomp

Junior Member
I bought a K7S5A as new from a retailer back in September of 2005. Called up ECS and they said they will NOT warranty the board because it's a discontinued board. Unfortunately for me, the company I bought it from has gone out of business.

So, what am I supposed to do? I called ECS, but they don't want to stand behind their products.

Anyone else have this kind of issue? I hope not!

Thanks
Tim Shanks
 
ECS is not upper tier. I built my sister a rig using a 755A-2, iirc. No problems at all...Yet.

You bought a dated board from a fly by night vendor, that probably bought a crap load of these boards uber-cheap in bulk. I doubt they even came with a warrenty, aside from a 90 day job the vendor might have offered.

Yes many builders have to have thier arms twisted in court. Jetway, MSI & Abit have all settled class action suits recently.

This is the real world we live in. Great first post with a misleading title 😉


...Galvanized
 
What the hell has "upper tier" got to do with it?!?

ECS has a legal obligation to honor their warranties (at least in Australia they do), and yes, your Cosumer Affairs Bureau or legal action is appropriate if there is still warranty remaining on the board.

If there is no warranty left, then you are out of luck.

In any case let it be a lesson not to purchase anything manufactured by PC-Chips or any of their subsiduaries in future - good to know the leapard never really changes his spots...
 
The board has been discontinued for about three years now, even longer if it isn't a K7S5A "pro".

If anyone, then your local retailer has been ripping you off.
 
By not being upper tier was ment to imply, that they were cheap and sat in warehouses for years before being sold off for next to nothing. There was no maufactuare warrenty left when sold as new. The vendor might have a one year warrenty but most likely 90 days at most and he is no longer in business.

You do realized capacitors have a shelf life?? Google reforming capacitors Gstanfor.



...Galvanized
 
Just a quick note on the "tiers" thing. ECS are the world's #2 mainboard maker (behind ASUS), and that's not even counting the contract manufacturing they do for other (actual 2nd tier) makers like Shuttle, Abit, and many more.
 
I've tested and owned many MBs.

ECS makes junk products, just like ASUS, ABIT, MSI, etc.... My ECS NF3 and NF4 socket 754 boards have been solid for over four months. These units have no problem running at 275MHz FSB. A decent ECS board should come with Panasonic and/or United-Chemicon capacitors at the main power section. Many ECS products lack the bells and whistles found on more expensive name brands.

Most manufacturers will NOT honor the warranty if the product was purchased from an unauthorized retailer. You gambled on a fly-by-night outfit and you lost. All ECS boards @ Fry's come with 1 year MFR warranty. BTW, reputable retailers DO NOT stock new 4 year old MBs.

Some boards around that vintage will have defective capacitors. This problem also affect expensive boards produced by "name brand" vendors. It is possible to repair these boards by replacing the bad caps.
 
I bought a K7S5A as new from a retailer back in September of 2005.
Click to expand...
Your 'retailer' screwed you. ECS ceased production of the K7S5A in late 2003 or early 2004. I purchased four K7S5A Pro (5.0) boards in Spring 2004 from one of the few resellers who still had any. By the summer of 2004, remaining supplies of the K7S5A Pro (5.0) were depleted. I contacted over a dozen ECS resellers and distributors but nobody had any left.

What are the chances you received a 'new' board a full year after everyone else could no longer get their hands on any quantity of them?
 
Originally posted by: GalvanizedYankee
By not being upper tier was ment to imply, that they were cheap and sat in warehouses for years before being sold off for next to nothing. There was no maufactuare warrenty left when sold as new. The vendor might have a one year warrenty but most likely 90 days at most and he is no longer in business.

You do realized capacitors have a shelf life?? Google reforming capacitors Gstanfor.



...Galvanized
Click to expand...

You don't need to educate me on crap-ass-itors mate. I've followed that particular saga almost since its inception (and still wound up with 2 motherboards, both MSI and reccommended by Anandtech that suffered from them).

I first ran afoul of PC-Chips in 1995 when I entered the PC scene (following the collapse of the Amiga scene) and purchased what I thought was a solid midrange pre built PC based around an AMD 5x86 CPU. It turned out to have fake cache on the motherboard (you could open the "cache" chips up - they were totally bogus as was the COAST slot.

You don't see much of PC-Chips themselves anymore, their name is too rotten, but they are still alive and well, hiding behind a myriad of subsiduaries and different brands.
 
Predictably, this thread now starts to attract the usual bull and mythology, like every thread with ECS or PC-Chips in its title.

The "fake cache" 486 mainboards were built TO ORDER for a large US whitebox retailer ... and then surplus ended up in retail. You can make that an ethics question as much as you want, but the cheaters weren't in the factory - it was fraudulent system builders and retailers.

Fast forward to today ... PC-Chips is the OEM outlet of Elitegroup, far from "hiding" from anyone. What they always did and still do is, provide brandless mainboards to system integrating OEMs. Some of these boards also have a retail twin that usually goes under the ECS brand. For example, the K7S5A also went as OEM model M830.

Production volumes are huge, and losing customers nowhere hurts as much as in high-volume OEM ... lose a customer, lose a million units. Retail? Lose a customer, lose ONE sale. Guess where the customers are being ripped off.
 
Here is some more "bull and mythology" for you peter. Note I could continue on with similar articles until I had a post who size would make a large novel seem tiny by comparison if I wanted too...

One thing to note about that article. The author likes to blame consumer greed for the situation arising, but, conveniently fails to mention that at the time, you could not buy a non fake cache board for love nor money - the cheap crap was all that the resellers stocked!
 
Originally posted by: Gstanfor
Originally posted by: GalvanizedYankee
By not being upper tier was ment to imply, that they were cheap and sat in warehouses for years before being sold off for next to nothing. There was no maufactuare warrenty left when sold as new. The vendor might have a one year warrenty but most likely 90 days at most and he is no longer in business.

You do realized capacitors have a shelf life?? Google reforming capacitors Gstanfor.



...Galvanized
Click to expand...

You don't need to educate me on crap-ass-itors mate. I've followed that particular saga almost since its inception (and still wound up with 2 motherboards, both MSI and reccommended by Anandtech that suffered from them).

I first ran afoul of PC-Chips in 1995 when I entered the PC scene (following the collapse of the Amiga scene) and purchased what I thought was a solid midrange pre built PC based around an AMD 5x86 CPU. It turned out to have fake cache on the motherboard (you could open the "cache" chips up - they were totally bogus as was the COAST slot.

You don't see much of PC-Chips themselves anymore, their name is too rotten, but they are still alive and well, hiding behind a myriad of subsiduaries and different brands.
Click to expand...


You might consider posting more often and sharing from your deep well of comp knowledge. I sure need enlightening 😀 I'm not kidding.


...Galvanized

 
Gstanfor, not THAT redhill link again (and besides, it doesn't work). It's always the same one. While it has good analysis of what's been done on the technical side, it's taking wildly inaccurate guesses on the business side of how these things came to be.

The 2nd half of the article, regarding the "XXpro" chipsets, is very well inaccurate too. Those chipsets all (!) were mere badge jobs on plain normal chipsets from ALi, SiS and VIA. Their first attempts at Pentium chipsets were inferior to Intel's, but that situation soon turned around with the VXpro+ and TXpro chipsets, which had decent SDRAM support and higher bus speeds long before Intel bothered.

http://www.wimsbios.com/HTML1/xpro.html (guess who helped maintain that) has them all.
 
I just had an ECS L7S7A2's IDE channels go bad a couple of weeks ago for some unknown reason, and all of its capacitors were in excellent shape even after a few years use. I just replaced it with a S754 Board/Sempron combo though.
 
ECS Motherboard RETURN (RMA) POLICY
"ECS Warranty is offered to direct customers with valid ECS invoice only."

Did you buy your motherboard directly from ECS?

Yes, they have been known to honor warranty for end users on occasion, but not on other occasions. What is in writing is their official policy. FYI one time (early 2005) I tried to RMA a brand new board that was DOA from Newegg. Newegg at the time said "manufacturer's warranty only." ECS said "vendor warranty only." Then an ECS rep emailed me saying they can RMA for a $25 fee. I phoned Newegg and complained, and got an RMA from them finally.

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
One thing to note about that article. The author likes to blame consumer greed for the situation arising, but, conveniently fails to mention that at the time, you could not buy a non fake cache board for love nor money - the cheap crap was all that the resellers stocked!
Click to expand...

You shop at the wrong resellers. Back then I was doing system building and we were offered fake cache boards for a really low price from our vendor. We declined and paid more for different boards with real cache. Both were widely available, at least from reputable places in SoCal. this included wholesalers as well as retailers. However, some retailers just sold the fake cache boards for whatever reasons, and of course few bothered to mention the fact (and few consumers knew the difference when shopping).
 
ECS is crap and PC-Chips is worse.

I have owned several of each, and been denied warranty Repairs by both company's, both times they were only 6 months old and were purchased from newegg, and were running stock.

There is a reason why there boards cost about half what other quality boards cost that have 3 year warranties.

If you buy ECS or PC-Chips, then you take your chances.
 
I'm in Australia, not America. Australia/Oceania/SE Asia and Europe always seem to bear the brunt of these types of scandals. North America gets off fairly lightly which probably helps explain why PC-Chips etc is still somewhat tolerated there.
 
Originally posted by: tbogstad
ECS is crap and PC-Chips is worse.

I have owned several of each, and been denied warranty Repairs by both company's, both times they were only 6 months old and were purchased from newegg, and were running stock.

There is a reason why there boards cost about half what other quality boards cost that have 3 year warranties.

If you buy ECS or PC-Chips, then you take your chances.
Click to expand...

QFT!
I made the mistake of building a bunch of their barebones BookPCs a few years ago. I have NEVER seen so many power supplies and motherboards die in my life. Their quality is so unbelievably low it's ridiculous.
 
Originally posted by: shankscomp
I bought a K7S5A as new from a retailer back in September of 2005. Called up ECS and they said they will NOT warranty the board because it's a discontinued board. Unfortunately for me, the company I bought it from has gone out of business.

So, what am I supposed to do? I called ECS, but they don't want to stand behind their products.

Anyone else have this kind of issue? I hope not!

Thanks
Tim Shanks
Click to expand...

I did read this also happens with many( I said many not all) of video card manufacturers also.
If the card you are using happens to become antiquated and it goes bad,
and said card is discontinued and not being made then your warranty is SOL.

I also think Galvanized hit the nail on its head.

I would also like to thank you for the misleading title....but thats par for the course around here.
 
Originally posted by: Peter
Just a quick note on the "tiers" thing. ECS are the world's #2 mainboard maker (behind ASUS), and that's not even counting the contract manufacturing they do for other (actual 2nd tier) makers like Shuttle, Abit, and many more.
Click to expand...

Peter you can be the worlds #1 mobo maker and still make crappy mobo`s....
So YES...I might even say ECS baords are on the bottom of the totem pole..lol
 
That is exactly not the case. This is large volume OEM business - losing a single customer to quality problems is a loss of millions of mainboards sold. ECS have sustained the #2 slot for many years straight, and at one time have even been #1 for a couple of quarters. If you had the least insight into how this industry works, you'd figure that the one thing you can't afford in volume manufacturing - even at rock bottom prices - is making stuff with inherent design weaknesses (aka crap).
 
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