Advice on an incredibly poor offer on my faulty Graphics card RMA,

[Gamewiz1]

Hello everyone, I'm wanting to put forth an offer that I just received from XFX on a warranty claim.  Basically, I got an R9 295x2 less than a year and a half ago in preparation for the Oculus.  I figured that with the Titan and AMD R9 295x2 both offering similar levels of performance with the AMD card being the cheaper option, I'd get the AMD card. 

Well, a short while back, our home was struck by an extremely powerful lightning strike and had several of the items in my room fried, including my 4k Television and my Pc's card.  Of course, I contacted XFX for a repair.  Only then did I find out that XFX had cancelled it's double lifetime warranty, something that I had been complacent in expecting, as I had never owned another brand of card aside from my original PC's in the year 2000, a Compaq with a VooDoo 3 inside. 

So, having only then discovered the issue with the warranty, I was at least grateful that the experience happened within my warranty.  Well, after having waited now for a week and a half or so, I decided to ask on my RMA if there had been any news on my card.  Well, I got a reply today. 

I was informed that they would be in possession of some more 295x2's in a few weeks, but that the person had acquired authorization for a single R9 Fury X as an alternative replacement.  Now, I refused the offer immediately, not accepting a six hundred dollar Graphics card as a replacement for my 1.5k model.  Also, knowing that the Tflops on the Fury X were well below my own card, there was no way I'd accept the Fury X. 

Now, I know that the Oculus doesn't benefit from multi core GPU's, but I also have to consider that I play games on my 4k television, as it's been my primary display for the past year and a half.  As the Fury X page clearly states that it's a card that's nipping at the heels of 4k, why would I accept a lower performance GPU when I have a card with over 11Tflops of performance that handles 4k easily? 

The entire point in DX12 was that with the new API, multi core cpu's as well as crossfire or SLI cards would be utilized in a far superior way, and that since I had a dual GPU card, I would be able to add whatever third card I'd want down the road knowing that it would work due to the new DX12 features. 

Taking this all into consideration, I wanted to ask this question to see what others thought about the offer.  Myself, I've read the terms of the warranty, where they reserve the right to replace the card with a different model if necessary, "As long as it had equal or greater performance!".  Personally, I felt like they were spitting in my face, as well as hoping I'd know nothing of the performance decrease, as well as the loss of those nice new DX12 api benefits. 

It's just important to me to know how others saw that decision.  Would you have accepted the offer?  Do you think that they were indeed trying to rip me off, in direct contradiction to their own warranty terms?  Do you think that the mention of the "offer" and additional wait time of a few weeks was nothing more than an attempt to strong arm me into accepting an inferior card? 

Add to that issue  that I'd like to make sure everyone is aware of this info, for no other reason than I feel that it's important to know about the warranty change as well as their treatment of their most loyal customers. I'd always purchased XFX, and for my recent computer build, I chose XFX for the case, the power supply, and the Graphics card, all registered within a month of each other so that they knew my brand of choice. I had quite a few older cards registered before, from my 6979 to my 9800, I think it was a HD 9800?

Honestly, had they offered something like an NVidia GTX 1080, I'd have swallowed the cost difference for the new card with zero hesitation.  But a Fury X?  BTW, I forgot, they also included a fresh 2 years on the warranty with the Fury X.  It would have been an extremely expensive 18 months of additional coverage though to my eyes.

[Gamewiz1]

Yeah, I always run on too long. It's actually a problem. I get so wrapped up in trying to explain things, and I always think that the more details I give, the better things are.  I do it on my posts on twitter, facebook, pretty much everywhere.  I guess it's my habit due to not having many people to talk to. I don't get out much, i'm on SSI, diabetic and bad nerve problems with the bad heart. I'm a wreck physically, so it's my desire to talk I'd guess.  I'm always hoping that I can talk.  It's been a long time since there was a yahoo chat room service, I used to be there all the time. well. hell.

[GoldenRetroGames]

IRC is still going strong if you want chat rooms.  Might want to check out what servers people use to talk about topics you're interested in.

[Anonymous]

Well, on the original question - if they did offer you either a direct replacement (with a wait) or the FuryX, I would likely have waited for the replacement.  It is the better offer, even with the warranty difference.  Honestly, if the card lasts six months, chances are good it will last two years anyway - and since you are technically getting this free anyway, if it failed sometime after six months you'd be in basically the same position you are in now.

And as long as you were honest with them about what happened, there's no need to feel bad.  While they didn't have to help you, they chose to do so anyway, and you didn't mislead them or attempt to defraud them.

[Sloeri007]

rankinsect said:

Well, on the original question - if they did offer you either a direct replacement (with a wait) or the FuryX, I would likely have waited for the replacement.  It is the better offer, even with the warranty difference.  Honestly, if the card lasts six months, chances are good it will last two years anyway - and since you are technically getting this free anyway, if it failed sometime after six months you'd be in basically the same position you are in now.

And as long as you were honest with them about what happened, there's no need to feel bad.  While they didn't have to help you, they chose to do so anyway, and you didn't mislead them or attempt to defraud them.

Exactly what i was going to say as well.

[lenne0815]

WHAT THE HELL YOU DECLINED A FURY X FOR AN 295x2 ???? dood man, man seriously ! do you realise that you cant even use that card for vr as of now and propably forever ? Cmon, that dual card was ( Sorry to say but ) utter crap right from the beginning. I never thought i would get that upset about a post on the oculus forums.

Edit: WTF WTF

Edit 2: WTF

[Gamewiz1]

Thanks all, I appreciate your kindness:)  I guess I just have to work on limiting conversations.hehe  It's not like I could hide the fact that I do carry on longer than most.  I've been asked about it elsewhere, I just don't remember what the exact situation was.  It was on Twitter though, and I'm sure it mentioned Flooding the channel with posts.lol  Now, I've taken to making the posts incredibly long, but I only post the link on Twitter using the system where a post on one also get's posted on the other. 

But, Lenne0815, I definitely wasn't trying to anger anyone.  Did you really hate that card that much?  I personally had been blown away buy how great the performance was in my games.  I know that older games don't benefit from having a dual GPU setup, but when I made the purchase, I did so because it was going to be the one time I'd be able to get something nice, as it was done using my back pay. 

Also, having found out that DX12 was going to change the way PC's utilize the GPU and CPU, I was actually happy I had purchased what I did.  With DX12, at the API level, DX12 is going to use any GPU you've got installed on your system towards a larger "Pool" of processing power.  There is even talk of it using different brands of GPU's, so you could have a powerful AMD card doing the heavy lifting, and an older or newer NVidia card doing it's own share of work as well.  Plus, where most games previously only used two of the CPU's and nearly nothing on any cores beyond those, DX12 is going to share the load on CPU's far more, so you will finally see benefit from cores three and up. 

I had considered that if it was just based on the single GPU, it was far better to get the Fury X, but since I use my pc connected to my 3D Television also, I had to consider the performance hit that I'd take from going from 11.2 Tflops of power to sub ???? I want to say 6.8 or something like that.  Is the 295x2 really that bad to you?  I see two others here think it was the right choice, I'm curious. 

[Percy1983]

Well I am running 2x290x's and if I was offered a fury x to replace them if mine where taken out by lightening and Asus offered me that (which is more than they have too) I would take it.

If you love dual GPUs then get a second fury x and make a monster (assuming you can get both coolers in you case).

[Gamewiz1]

Well, I don't think I'd be able to fit another card in there.  When I got the tower, I got the new one offered by XFX as well.  It's a great tower, but the top has a ran, I think it's 200mm, it's got one on the front also, again, 200mm.  The CPU I have takes up the rear spot with the liquid cooling block that comes with the FX 9590.  I had to squeeze the X2's cooler on the bottom slot which is directly in front of the power supply.  It was tight, but it worked.  So I've got air being drawn in from the front and the top, and pushed out the rear and bottom.  Now, I can't say if that's still hard work for the fans, because all the air going out has to go through the two liquid reservoirs, but I have each one using a dual fan setup, one on each side, forcing the air through.  I have the tower on a floor with zero carpet, so that there isn't any air from the CPU struggling to get out.  Also, I keep a cold room.  It's not hot at all, because while I always run central air, but to make sure things were fine, I purchased a window unit AC that I always have running when I turn on the PC.  I wanted to be sure that I never lost the pc due to heat. 

I'm curious about the software issue in the Oculus. I've seen that they say no benefit from Dual GPU's, but it seems that at some point, the software has to catch up, because how is it that DX12 gets so many things right, and the software on the Rift doesn't?  It seems to me that logically, if the OR doesn't take any double GPU into account, that the DX12 API should take the work and just streamline it anyway, making it so that all the data being pumped into the Rift still get's the info and traffic faster anyway.  Does that not make any sense?   

[Gamewiz1]

Ok, I found a great article about the Fury X.  It's here.  http://www.anandtech.com/show/9390/the-amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-review/4 ; It's 8.6 Tflops of power. 

That's a tuff one.  It's 8.6 Tflops of power that would go directly towards the onscreen smoothness on the Oculus, but it would lose 2.? something Tflops of overall power, and I just don't know how bad that is for 3D gaming at 4k, or 3800x1800 on 3D settings.  Grr

Man, that makes things much harder to figure out:(

[TwoHedWlf]

Gamewiz1 said:

Thanks all, I appreciate your kindness:)  I guess I just have to work on limiting conversations.

And in the next few hours 796 words, 4,106 characters and 62 lines.
I don't think you even know how to start on that limiting conversations thing... 🙂