A warranty is usually perceived as insurance against troubles, but in a world where video cards become more expensive than they wear out, they can turn against the owner.
A refund of the full cost sounds fair until the moment it turns out that this money today cannot buy even a close analogue, and the card itself has already been disposed of.
The story happened with the Swiss owner of an ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 4090 OG OC Edition 24 GB, purchased from the retailer Galaxus in September 2023 for 1,569 francs with a three-year warranty until September 5, 2026.
The card began to fade into a black screen under heavy load with ray tracing: the sound lasted for about ten seconds, then the system rebooted, and Windows regularly wrote to the LiveKernelEvent 141 log. The application was submitted on August 27, on August 31 the seller confirmed receipt of the card, and on September 8 a credit note was received for the original amount and the case was closed, although in the form the owner clearly chose repair or replacement.
The most interesting thing about this breakdown is the diagnostics that the owner did himself. The sensors showed a hotspot of about 112°C with a core temperature of only 68°C, that is, a difference of almost 44 degrees.
In nine cases out of ten, such a delta means degradation of the thermal interface between the crystal and the cooler base, and this can be cured by replacing the PTM7950 paste or gasket within an hour of work and without a single soldering point.
The service center, however, declared the entire card beyond repair. When asked to return the unrepaired board, the answer was extremely bureaucratic:
The defect was so serious that the product could no longer be repaired. In such cases, our regulations require that it be disposed of as electronic scrap, which, unfortunately, has already been done.
Then comes the legal part, which in Switzerland does not play in favor of the buyer. The legal warranty there, as in the EU, is two years, and everything that the seller adds on top is much more leniently regulated and allows you to specify in the terms and conditions the right to choose between repair, replacement and refund at your discretion.
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By comparison, repairman and activist Louis Rossmann, in a similar situation with a Samsung drive, took the case to court and won compensation at the current market price, rather than a check from many years ago, but this path requires either an audience of millions of subscribers or a willingness to go to small claims court.
A separate question is raised by the economics of what is happening: the RTX 4090 chip and memory today are noticeably more expensive than a year and a half ago, and refurbished cards of this generation are selling at prices that no one dreamed of in 2023.
Writing off the board as scrap, returning the amount from the old check to the buyer and not explaining where the hardware went turns out to be a surprisingly profitable sequence of actions.
