Epox 4PEA+ (845PE): A well rounded 845PE

Epox 4PEA+: Tech Support and RMA

For your reference, we will repost our tech support evaluation procedure here:

The way it works is first we anonymously email the manufacturer's tech support address(es), obviously not using our AnandTech mail server to avoid any sort of preferential treatment. Our emails (we can and will send more than one just to make sure we're not getting the staff on an "off" day) all contain fixable problems that we've had with our motherboard. We then give the manufacturer up to 72 hours to respond over business days and will report not only whether they even responded within the time allotted but also if they were successful in fixing our problems. If we do eventually receive a response after the review is published, we will go back and amend the review with the total time it took for the manufacturer to respond to our requests.

The idea here is to encourage manufacturers to improve their technical support as well as provide new criteria to base your motherboard purchasing decisions upon; with motherboards looking more and more alike every day, we have to help separate the boys from the men in as many ways as possible. As usual, we're interested in your feedback on this and other parts of our reviews so please do email us with your comments.

Epox's technical support form is quite long, but well rounded nonetheless. Epox asks you to fill out, among other things, your personal info, email address, motherboard model, serial number, vendor from whom you purchased the Epox product from and your system specifications (BIOS version, video card, CPU, etc.). You then have to briefly write out exactly what your issue(s) are and you're done. All in all we like this type of technical support procedure, it's well organized.

As far as Epox's technical support was concerned, we were able to get a response from their tech support staff in just under 35 hours. In addition, Epox answered our "problem" correctly, which is always a good thing obviously. We would hope that Epox is consistent with these types of quick and useful tech support responses.

Epox very clearly lists their RMA policy and procedure on their web site. For some odd reason, some of the larger motherboard makers do not feel that it is necessary to clearly and explicitly list exactly what their RMA procedures entail on their web site. Thankfully Epox doesn't follow suit.

For your reference, here is Epox's RMA policy in its entirety:

This is a fairly straight forward RMA procedure. Compared to online hardware vendors like Newegg, this RMA process really isn't too different.

All in all, Epox's technical support and RMA policy seem to be top-notch, and certainly better than even some top-tier motherboard makers.