JD71 said: What is your experience with open box products from Micro Center? I am going to purchase a motherboard as an open box and was wondering if open box was a good option.
Only time I buy open box is when there's no other option for the particular SKU I'm looking for. If it's something complicated like a mobo I'll pay the $50 or whatever it is and have them install the CPU and ram as well (I never buy those seperate, as I upgrade the whole thing at once every 5-10 years) and post test it, as well as test all sata, usb, M2, and other ports. Any of that doesn't work = no deal. More often than not the mobo will have a deal-breaking defect (ie 2 bad ram slots out of 8) as the reason it was returned to begin with and you waste the post-testing fee and your time/travel costs. Open-box monitors the return reason tends to be a dead pixel or 3.
I love searching for Open Box deals at MicroCenter. This year alone I have purchased two Open Box items and it turned out great. One was a HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop that I purchased for $430 and after a few months I sold it for $600. Then I was able to pick up a HP Pavilion Gaming PC Desktop with way better specs for $700. There are great deals to be found in the Open Box section, if you know how to look for them.
Just want to add a drop of bitterness into this old thread. I believe that most of the people making the purchases at Microcenter do enjoy the adequate prices. And if there’s an opportunity to get an extra savings on “open box” graphics card we say “I’ll take two”, right? My today’s experience says that it’s wrong. I’m not the most patent person in the world about desktop hardware. I do my best to behave in a reasonable way and that’s why I’m still sitting with my almost 2 year old 3080Ti FTW3 liquid cooled and waiting for a true full scale GA102 to be released one day. But today smth went wrong spontaneously. I’ve noticed the new item in “open box” stock. It’s MSI 4090 Suprim - the flagship, air cooled, not a hybrid one. And since it’s one of the best options on the market to be moved to a full cover block + ~12% discount I pulled myself together and stopped by the local Microcenter store. The guys told me “it doesn’t come with an original box”. I asked if that affect the warranty and they said “No”. Pls check the pictures of what I was a witness to at the checkout.
2K graphics card was shipped back to the store via UPS being wrapped into a single ply wrapping bubbled film. It was bouncing freely inside of this huge cardboard box. Nothing but the card was inside. No 16pin power cable adapter, no manuals, no protective plastic at pcix connector-nothing. I didn’t take a picture of the card’s physical condition, bc I didn’t want it to fall accidentally (it’s 5lbs of weight) but there were scratches at the backplate side, the pcb had an obvious bent at the I/O side. But the worst was that thick aluminum backplate had a bent corner. And it was so bad that the corner of the metal backplate was touching the pcb. That supposed to be a very hard drop. I canceled the purchase even though it might suit my requirements since the stock cooler would rest in a box after the waterblock installation. I don’t want to be a tester guy to figure out how long it’ll survive after it was treated in such an abusive way.
My opinion is if you sell a used item in such a poor condition it should be discounted at least 1/3 of the original price for a brand new item. 10% of savings for such a complex device can easily turn to an awful headache.
I do apologize for the issue with this item being available at our store. I'm going to forward this information to store management so they may look into this further to ensure this card is further looked into before any sort of further re-sale may take place.
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