Gigabyte 8S655FX Ultra (SiS 655FX): Price/Performance Reaches a New Level
by Evan Lieb on September 22, 2003 12:13 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Gigabyte 8S655FX Ultra: Tech Support and RMA
For your reference, we will repost our support evaluation procedure here:The way our Tech Support evaluation works is first we anonymously email the manufacturer's tech support address(es), obviously not using our AnandTech mail server to avoid any sort of preferential treatment. Our emails (we can and will send more than one just to make sure we're not getting the staff on an "off" day) all contain fixable problems that we've had with our motherboard. We allow the manufacturer up to 72 (business) hours to respond, and then we will report whether or not they responded within the time allotted, and if they were successful in fixing our problems. In case when we don’t receive a response before the review is published, any future responses will added to the review, including the total time it took for the manufacturer to respond to our requests.
The idea here is to encourage manufacturers to improve their technical support as well as provide new criteria upon which to base your motherboard purchasing decisions; as motherboards become more similar everyday, we have to help separate the boys from the men in as many ways as possible. As usual, we're interested in your feedback on this and other parts of our reviews, so please do email us with your comments.
Gigabyte's RMA policy is easy to follow and fairly good for a tier one motherboard maker. They offer a one-to-three year (depending on the model) manufacturer's Limited warranty. If you are experiencing difficulties in warranty service through your dealer, Gigabyte may attempt to resolve this issue. You must provide the following details to process your RMA request: Name, Address, Phone/Fax number, Model/Revision number, Serial number (10 digits), the precise issues you are experiencing, vendor from which you purchased your Gigabyte product (include vendor contact info), CPU type and size, and memory module type and size.
Like ASUS, Gigabyte prefers that you deal directly with the vendor from where you purchased the motherboard rather than directly with them. This is understandable, as the cost of RMAs, facilities, employees, etc. can be prohibitive. Still, we would love it if the tier one manufacturers would adopt similar RMA policies akin to ABIT and Albatron, among a select few others.
We were pleased to see that Gigabyte's tech support responded within 72 hours, 23 hours to be exact. This is a vast improvement over Gigabyte's past tech support record and nicely compliments Gigabyte’s quick response time from our last review. Though Gigabyte's RMA policy is still only adequate, our last few experiences with Gigabyte’s tech support response times have been excellent. Let’s hope that this is the beginning of a permanent trend, and that other top tier motherboard makers, such as ASUS and MSI, start to develop this kind of consistency.
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aditm - Thursday, December 18, 2003 - link
PrinceGaz - Monday, September 22, 2003 - link
Error on page 7 (too high FSB speeds):In addition, we ran several other tasks: data compression, various DX8 and DX9 games, and apps, like Word and Excel. Moreover, Prime95 was running in the background. Finally, we ran our benchmark suite, which includes ZD Winstone suite, Unreal Tournament 2003, SPECViewperf 7.0, and Gun Metal Benchmark 2. While we were able to boot and run some tests at speeds as high as 287MHz FSB and at default voltage on the Gigabyte 8S655FX Ultra, 262MHz was the highest achievable overclock attainable without encountering any reliability issues.