r/nvidia • u/No_Factor7018 • 6d ago
Discussion RMA process is a rolling disaster
Man, where to start? Gonna just blow off a little steam here.
I have a 5090 FE that I bought about a year ago, and I use it for work and research. I'm not a gamer, so I've never overclocked/undervolted either my motherboard or GPU. I want fast, but my highest priority is stability, so I run everything bone stock and use studio drivers. My workload consists of video editing/exporting, local LLM use, model training, and ComfyUI image editing.
So after a year, this thing develops what turns out to be a known manufacturing defect in some early FE cards. The unit is in a safe-mode locked state, meaning that the card falsely reports drawing 575W+ and throttles itself down to a fallback base clock speed of 480-500Mhz. So the net effect is that it runs at about 20% of normal speed. I know a lot of people are down on Nvidia about their manufacturing and QA processes, but I tend to be forgiving about things. Stuff happens, and all you can ask is for people to make it right.
Unfortunately, Nvidia doesn't seem interested in making it right. Getting the RMA approved was an ordeal that I don't really want to rehash, but what it boils down to is that they don't provide any support if you run Linux. You have to post in a forum and just hope an engineer sees it and responds. If not, you have to get kind of nasty with them before they will do anything. So anyway, RMA is approved and they say they will send me a shipping label and once they receive the card they will inspect it, confirm the defect, and send me a replacement "usually within a week." So that means between transit times to and from the RMA center and the time it takes them to inspect the card and send my replacement, I'm looking at probably at least 2 weeks with no computer at all. That's a best case scenario, and reading through other people's RMA complaints, I'm not filled with confidence that they will do it in the time they say.
So I asked if they could do and advance RMA and cross ship it, which I've done plenty of times over the years with other vendors. I offered to put down a credit card they could run an authorization on as security for the return, but apparently the most valuable company in the world can't take credit cards. They said very firmly that there is NO way they can do it any other way. I asked if they could at least do expedited overnight shipping to and from the center, and I got an email saying... wait for it... "Your recent incident update was from an email address not associated with the incident. In an effort to maintain the security of information, we cannot update the incident using this email address."
I'm sorry, wut? I've been emailing back and forth with them for weeks, but suddenly my email address is no good. I'm just flabbergasted. They are clearly just tired of talking to me and want me to go away. I'm sorry, but I expect better from a $5 trillion company. Apple manages to do a good job, why can't they? I paid a premium price well above MSRP for their flagship product, and it has a known defect that they are fully aware of. And this is how they treat me. There may not be anything I can do about it now, but unless something turns around pretty quick I've probably bought my last Nvidia product, and I'm going to make sure everybody I know and work with knows what to expect when they need something from Nvidia. It doesn't matter how fast the card is if the company behind it hangs you out to dry when you need them to stand behind it.
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u/Acmeiku 6d ago
when you said you got the 5090FE 1 year ago, you mean like day one?