My fault but whatever

DeuceGroan

So on Friday 8/4 I drove a hour and a half to the Houston store. I bought the last open box Powerspec G715. Take it home and boot her up. I then go to initial Windows setup and BSOD. Try thrice more and between BSOD’s, I manage to get through setup hoping that it’s a driver issue. Long story short spend about 3 hours trying to make it through Windows updates and Graphics Drivers as I was seeing the GC Driver timeout warning popup before BSOD. I then reseated everything just to be sure and gave up with no luck. I called tech support and they advised me to return it. I was pretty heartbroken as it was the last open box as I mentioned before and was pretty much all of my PC budget along with an extra set of G.Skill Ripjaws DDR4 3200 I bought with it for my not to be PC. Loaded all of it up the next day, drove two hours to Microcenter (Houston traffic), and went to return my dream. Sales guy stopped me and said hey we still have one new I’ll swap it out. Cool I thought. Take both to the register, explain everything, and they get swapped. I also had the ram with me as originally I suspected I would be returning everything for a refund. Anyways start to walk out and cashier guy says sir that’s $189. My fault, I took it on the chin and charged it to my 2 percent cash back card so it was like $185. I then walk out kind of mad, load up my new pc, get a little happier, guy parked next to me is trying to put a 65 inch tv in his truck. Help the guy and hop in my truck feeling morally superior and drive off leaving my ram that I didn’t return because I was going to put it in my new pc. My fault, but whatever. Typed on my phone/am not responsible for misspells/use deductive reasoning 

PowerSpec_MikeW

@DeuceGroan

We've got a few things to unpack here but we will look into it for you. First one, you're saying the RAM kit was left in the parking lot? We can reach out to the store management to look into that. Hopefully a customer turned it in.

With the G715, you added RAM before the first boot? Did Tech Support ever have you test without the new RAM installed, in addition to the factory RAM? If so, we can help you diagnose this. You have be careful about adding RAM that's running on an XMP profile, even of the model numbers match. Manufacturers will make significant changes to RAM without indicating it with a model number change. As an example we just had a RAM kit swap from a Nanya 8GB IC, dual rank to a SK Hynix 16GB, single rank. That's a massive change and very likely would result in instability when mixed, but it's something that you can figure out by running the kits individually and looking at the IC in a program like CPU-Z or HWiNFO64. Or you can examine the stick closely and look for product codes or revisions.

Let me dig up your information tomorrow and contact management at the store. Then we'll move onto the memory. If you have any questions in the meantime, feel free to ask.

DeuceGroan

I never added the RAM. I always make sure to operate from a known stable platform and back everything up before I add or change anything. It cost me at least $25 in gas round trip to Houston, so I’m just going to chalk it up as a loss. I was just extremely frustrated to buy an item that was listed as good condition when it had major issues that would have been caught with even minimally diligent testing. My NIB prebuilt G715 works perfect at least. 

PowerSpec_MikeW

@DeuceGroan

Understood. We'll look into this and see how this was missed during the open box diagnostics. Seeing the information you provided, and tech supports notes on the GPU failure, I'm not sure how this would have been missed.

Regarding the RAM, it can't hurt at least to reach out to management and see if someone picked up the item. I'll send you an email for some information and see what we can do.