Remember, enclose candy when sending parts out for RMA

[Haruspex]

If you do a search for "Gigabyte RMA", you'll find a ton of horror stories and a general consensus by the Internet hive-mind that the Gigabyte RMA process is an absolute nightmare.

My son's Gigabyte RX 5500xt wasn't stable. He was getting random black-screen crashes during gameplay. Testing it in another system gave the same results, and his system was rock-solid running a spare 650ti I had laying around.

His RX 5500xt was still under warranty, so I put that 650ti in his machine as a temporary measure and started the RMA process with Gigabyte. I sent it off with USPS, packaged with a nice note thanking them for taking care of my kid's GPU and a large bag of Skittles.

I can't compare this to another RMA sent off without Skittles, but I can say this. After Gigabyte received the box, within one week the card was repaired, tested, and returned. I've since plugged it back into my son's machine and it's absolutely rock solid. A perfect RMA experience.

I think that's absolutely worth the cost of a bag of candy.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Most of the RMA problems comes from the person simply not packaging it "correctly" for them to accept it. Or not putting the RMA # on the Package Label.

Also most of the horror stories I've heard over the years seems to come from outside USA/CAN. I've done many Gigabyte RMA over the years from around the Socket-A days, with my most recent RMA with them being around 2018 I did for a friends machine. I don't have exact numbers on-hand but I do know it's well over 20-30 times within that period. Not alot since I've done well over 1500 systems just from my home, just since the Socket-A days. So that doesn't count the many number of systems I've done while I was working for a company and such. I only can think of maybe 1 or 2 really bad RMA issues with Gigabyte that I can easily recall from memory. Most of the bad ones were from Foxconn and MSI.

[Meatloaf Cocktail]

Speaking of candy and PC components - overclockers.co.uk always send a small bag of haribo with every order. Always found it to be interesting.