EVGA removes the Guest RMA option from their website – Only registered cards can receive an RMA

Today’s market is challenging for GPU manufacturers, with the rising cost of GDDR memory and the sheer demand of graphics cards for cryptocurrency miners placing a lot of strain on companies like EVGA, MSI, ASUS and Gigabyte.

 

EVGA has removed their “Guest RMA” option from their website, requiring their users to create an EVGA membership and register their graphics card to receive a replacement for their broken graphics card. This change means that user information like the user’s name, address, telephone number and email need to be given to the company, which may be more data that some users would like. 

Below is a comment from EVGATECH_BrandonS from the EVGA Forums, who has confirmed that the Guest RMA option has been removed from the website. 

      I’m sorry for the confusion; we have now removed the Guest RMA option, and all products will need to be registered and a standard RMA submitted instead.

In the early days of the company, EVGA was famous for their customer support, especially in the USA, making this change unwelcome for longtime users. To many, this is seen as a move that makes RMAs more difficult, while potentially making the RMA process more difficult for users of second-hand GPUs, which have the potential to be registered twice.   

It is also possible that this move is designed to prevent miners from bulk RMA’ing their graphics cards. Cryptocurrency miners run their graphics cards at high loads under 24/7 workloads, creating a situation where these users often have cards fail before their warranty expires. Under cryptocurrency mining workloads, GPUs often fail at a faster rate, which in turn costs GPU manufacturers a lot of money when they are forced to send replacement units.