No Help From ECS

[dollarbillII]

I recently was intouch with ECS about their K7SEM motherboard,that I have . The conversation was about replacing the defective K7SEM motherboard . I told them that the board got so hot that solder melted & one of the chips moved . They wrote back and said that kind of damage was not covered under their warranty. What kind of manufacture are they???? Is there any help out there ?

 

[DieHardware]

Nothing normally melts, unless you're on the surface of Venus.

Seriously, I'd check the case for proper cooling. Is something wired incorrectly? (The USB pinouts, etc) If not, take back.

 

[buckmasterson]

Generally motherboard makers don't respond real well to this sort of problem. They tend to blame it on the installer as in, you had an extra stand-off pin from the case touching the motherboard. This one sounds like it's more than case cooling. What happened?

 

[lane42]

I had the same with my K7SEM about a year ago. I think they were the voltage regulator chips, small square black chips, 2 of them burn't and cracked.

 

[Harvey]

If the board is fairly new, and you still have your sales receipt, return it to the dealer that sold it. If they say you have to contact the manufacturer, tell them you already did that, and they turned you away. Be persistant.

 

[Peter]

Blown up voltage regulators are a typical symptoms of DIY gone all wrong - overheating CPUs usually kill vregs, so does a short caused by bent CPU pins, badly aligned mainboard mounting, AGP card inserted all wrong, that kind of stuff.

I understand a vendor being rather uncooperative about a warranty exchange on something like that. That'd be different if you had a bubbled capacitor on the board that might also cause a vreg to go haywire - however you'd be about the first with an ECS board to have that happen.

 

[dollarbillII]

Thanks everyone, I checked everything out all yhe other components are fine. The chip that moved is one of eight in a row.About 1/2"square . The board worked fine for almost 6 months. The bad thing about this is the responce from ECS. They put a defective board out on the market & the end user (The person that puts out the most money for the board) gets stuck holding the bag.I've read about this happening to this board & other ECS boards . Even catching on fire.