Digitimes reports this week that GIGABYTE and Asustek are engaging in fierce competition over motherboard warranties in China. Despite the negativity that usually accompanies the words ‘fierce competition’, we feel that this move is a step in the right direction in that it encourages positive competition where industry leaders use the quality and reliability of their products to compete, rather than focusing on reducing the quality and reliability in order to simply undercut the competition. An example of this kind of negative competition can be found in the current notebook PC market as it spirals in a lethal race to the bottom – clearly, nobody wins in a race to the bottom because negative profits translate to unsustainable business. The result is that quality focused vendors pull out of the market or spin off their PC businesses in order to focus on more profitable projects.

Getting back to the 4 year warranty, every motherboard vendor knows that the main causes of RMA (after sales service issues) are BIOS problems (e.g. from power failure during booting up), capacitor and other power phase component failure, and blown fuses from external connectors such as USB and LAN ports. GIGABYTE has this covered with:

Dual BIOS (scroll down to the Dual BIOS section), Japanese solid capacitors together with the rest of the Ultra Durable features and 1 fuse per USB port

These features primarily give us the confidence to initiate a 4 year warranty in China, and we hope to expand this to other regions as our distribution partners come onboard with the idea.