Originally Posted by
SoulsCollective
The point isn't and shouldn't be whether you can repair it or not. The point is that you offer a warranty on your products, you warrant that they will be free of manufacturing defects for the period specified. You don't get to pick and choose what gets covered - if it breaks, and it's not the end-users fault, you're morally and ethically bound to honour your warranty policy. If it's a simple, repairable fault, great, quick and easy for everyone. But if the fault is such that due to faulty components from the factory, the entire board requires replacing, tough luck. It's going to cost you more to replace, but that's the gamble you take by offering a warranty - you can't simply say that any PCB damage must be caused by end-user actions, and therefore that you will never, under any circumstances, replace a board with PCB damage, nope, never, can't possibly be a faulty component, guaranteed, 100% user error, not going to happen. That's lazy, arrogant, immoral and quite possibly illegal.
I've returned boards to eVGA, Asus, MSI and Foxconn for PCB damage without issue. The usual questions were asked about settings run and cooling used, but when I got all that information from the client and fired off an e-mail, proving that the board wasn't run with sub-zero cooling, run massively out of spec, etc etc, they were happy to replace it because the problem lay with a manufacturing defect. I've never before had a DFI board with PCB damage, so I hadn't come across this "limitation", but I can assure you that neither I nor my business will be dealing with a company that takes such a ridiculous stance on warranty issues in the future.