Gameguru Mania

[ggrobot]

ation of Louis Rossmann to talk in great depth about how consumers can protect themselves. That'll include right to repair discussion as well, which is an adjacent topic.

This whole thing started with an ASUS ROG Ally warranty for the defective joystick (uot;driftuot;) issue and the microSD card slot. With the A

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Source: GGMania headlines
GGMania.com - Daily Gaming and Tech news

[Sabot]

All companies have gone down this route.
Customer support is a joke. AI bots chatting to you, no human anymore. No emails answered. No respect.
It all proves the point that when E3 was killed off for good, big name games publishers and businesses started laying off staff. You better believe the whole industry is in crisis.
First thing to suffer? Quality.
Sure as hell you’ll pay more. Like I said when I built my machine. No manuals, barely any connectors. Download this and that.
Boxes empty.

I still have my manuals and boxes from my previous build and it’s night and day. The boxes themselves were works of art and full of screws, connectors, rear mobo plates/shields.
Fuck all in this for a £220 motherboard alone…

Get used to it, it’s the ‘new norm’

[Csimbi]

Not quite. I had good experience with Gigabyte.
The solution is simple though: stop buying from Asus (or whoever it is you have a quarrel with).
When masses leave them, they'll have to take a good look around and figure out why...

[Sabot]

All companies, in general, have cutback on customer service and quality.
My comment about lack of cables etc, well i bought a Gigabyte RTX Eagle 4060 8GB TI for my new build at Xmas. £385

Lovely box, (over a foot long) lovely foam inlay, antistatic bag…and…. Well, that was it.
No card, no cables, no drivers.
No going the ‘extra mile’ to beat the useless competition and be different. Nope. Let’s just be the same as the useless lot out there.

They are not, somehow your ‘friend’. I’m not going to go about recommending any company today when they are clearly ripping everyone off.
Your machine is old. So you’ve not been in the market for years

My EVGA GTX SC 1060 6GB came with everything I needed to fire it up out the box, inc badges, stickers. There’s no fucking excuse to rip the customer off either way. CD-ROMs are still out there and can be put into your machine. They just want to cream every penny out you today and YOU’LL accept it

You need an internet connection to install the driver while the fucking machine isn’t connected to it. Or you spend time prior downloading drivers for this and that onto a USB stick from another machine. So practical and at your expense.

As for binning said companies. In your dreams. The gaming audience today are so polarised that as long as they get a reply on social media from from a company , that’s them friends for life!
They buy trash because they know no different, it’s all the same. They may ‘talk the walk’ but not ‘walk the talk’.
AMD is cheap because is a buggy nightmare in games. Fuck performance graphs. It’s games that you play with them! Games upon, games,games,games on steam are ALL AMD CPU/GPU issues. Fact.
On the subject of Steam

Did you know it’s the richest company out there, taking 30% of the cut from devs etc as we know
Richer than Microsoft,Apple,Facebook, Amazon. Raking in $780,000 plus per employee at steam You won’t find a two-faced American calling them out over it either
They would rather give them (Gabe) £30 from a £90 game and think nothing of it. Challenge them and they side swerve the subject and turn it to Epic etc.

Humans are fucking idiots, full stop. Most of all spineless all talk and no,action.
My keys are purchased anywhere but steam.
Steam belches money

Bearing in mind, this article was information about steam in 2018 - heavily redacted. Nothing has changed in 2024. So Steam will no doubt be even richer than anything on the planet.
So think twice about calling Microsoft,Sony shite, when your feet are covered in the shite from Steam - right under you nose!

[Csimbi]

That's a very good post, a lot of (sad) truths in there.

I think things went to shit after EVGA left the GPU market as there's nothing to benchmark against. It's all just shit as you said.

Regarding Steam - I buy there games only at 75%+ discount.
I get the keys elsewhere (there are much cheaper sites) and I just activate them there. Fuck Steam, as you said.

[Sabot]

You know the hardest part for me was accepting, that after all these years of building PCs and getting absolute quality -as standard. That it has all gone…

Here was a typical issue (during my new build) after ages of researching hardware etc. I settled on an MSI MAG B660M Mortar motherboard.
It had good reviews and suited my path for Intel 13th Gen - as it supported it.

But get this, I got it from Amazon (and I buy from Amazon so that I can return no quibble if there’s an issue or I don’t like it with the 30 day long distance selling act - something you cannot do quite as readily with a vendor without going through hoops and diatribe) we are with Prime anyway.

So I get the board and I find out that I’ve been sent one that supports 12th gen, not 13th gen Though of **course it DOES support 13th Gen, the pdf and online tells you** ( I already have the boxed CPU at that time) so I think I’ll just download the BIOS and flash it, yeah?

Wrong… you need a 12th gen CPU on the board to flash it to a 13th gen or it’s MSI factory flashed to 13th gen when bought.
See about being spoilt. My Maximus Genie motherboard - 15 YEARS old has flashback and dual BIOS so you couldn’t even fuck it up!
I was raging!
So this board was near £200 and it’s DEAD already. So I had to spend another £50 more to get an MSI Z790 that said it was ‘12,13th gen ready. Also it supported flashback without CPU or RAM. So I can do it without issue.

Amazon refunded instantly paid for and supplied the packaging at the post office which the post master packaged and labelled in front of us and gave us the receipt of return.

This is what I mean about stingy companies. Selling - to the unwary- mobos that are fucking DEAD, just to get old stock out the door and make some money off of the unwary.
If it’s a PC shop that sold you the B660M they’ll just tell you to bring it in and -hopefully flash it for free as they have the ability to stick a 12th gen CPU on it. If it’s PCWorld etc,etc then good luck!

This is the corrupt world we live in now, where wording is used to get around deception. “Of course it supports 13th Gen” (just you need to already own a 12th gen to do it) is missing.

[Csimbi]

Well, you know, it's always been like that. You have to watch what you are buying and if you screw up, the retailer would do the flashing for you before pickup.
As far as I know, the 13th/14th gen boards can be flashed without a CPU - at least, I did that with Gigabyte board I had with me: Gigabyte Z790-AORUS-ELITE-AX.

Apple had this invention where they wake up the phone in the box every now and then and update the firmware, then they turn it off, so when the use buys it, it already has the latest software.
I think that's pretty cool - except I am not sure how that could be for motherboards; mobos don't have battery in them (save the one for the CMOS, but that's way too weak for something like this).

[Sabot]

No, you’ve missed my point.
Before when a manufacturer said ‘it supported ## CPU’ it *meant* it supported *that* CPU out the box!

It doesn’t matter what research you do blah,blah if the motherboard states it *does* support that CPU, but they nicely omit the only if you have a 12th Gen to boot it up in the first place
It’s a cunning deceitful play on words. Very much frowned upon

When you buy a motherboard, you don’t buy it for ONE CPU to get it to function. That’s consumer right protection there and there.

The mobo doesn’t support flashback so you are royaly screwed, or MSI is.

Today you buy a product that is supposed to be modern and forward thinking.
MSI built this with no redundancy. They never seen it going past 12th gen to 13/14th Gen as did other manufacturers. So it worked with 12th gen and that was (supposed) to be it.
So rather than removing the 13th Gen bumf from the manuals and box, they left it there. (New sticker) Amazon seen it as false advertising and quite rightly refunded us.

If I said to Amazon or a shop “can I ‘borrow’ a 12th Gen CPU to boot this and flash it and then return it for a refund” they would tell me to take a run and jump off a cliff! They’re left with an opened CPU that can’t be sold new along with a used heat sink/thermal paste.

Btw, even if you do buy from a shop and they say they will put a 12th Gen in to flash the BIOS to 13th Gen, they will no doubt get you to agree that if “anything goes wrong with the flashing process, they cannot be held accountable” and therefore you will lose your money. Again,

Even all the forums I read said to get a 12th gen secondhand and then return it blah,blah. Others went ‘fuck this’ and we’re going for a refund.

Just utter cost saving shit that is the norm today. Companies lying through their teeth, just like the mobo manufacturers that left CPU protection off to inflate their boards overclocking abilities by default.
Look how that backfired on them today?
Electric vehicles that travel ‘up to’ 250miles. So if it did 180miles, they did tell you it was ‘up to’

No, it’s not up to the consumer to filter this bullshit, it’s up to the consumer authorities to put and end to to it and make them change their own products to correctly worded advertising.

[Csimbi]

Yeah, sadly.