I'm thinking maybe the Gamer's Nexus approach might work well here, where they buy failed hardware to do an autopsy on it -- and then publish the results of it on youtube as they recently have done for the ASUS high end motherboards that cook the AMD chips.
It allows the the media companies access to the failed hardware to do their own autopsy on it, and it saves the users from needing to go through a painful RMA process, complicated by companies not willing to admit fault.
Yep, Asus main issue was the miscommunication text of "update the bios to not hurt your chip, but btw if you do this you lose your warranty" was the icing on the cake for bad PR. But apparently it's more of a 7000 3D series chips issue.
According to Gamers Nexus their main issue was shitty BIOS which was a different problem than the X3D issues. Their horrible response was just another fail on their part.
I feel like this was a bit too aggressive backlash for this. I think they should be allowed to release a beta BIOS without warranty support. I get that it is very enticing if the old BIOS may fry your system but technically it seems better in every way.
- Gets it out early for third-party verification such as these YouTube channels that are doing testing.
- Keeps it transparent that they are still working on the issue.
- Allows them to experiment with more exotic BIOS (in the general case).
Maybe what is missing is some sort of message like "This is an early preview, we are still doing internal verification before we can provide a stable release with a fully warranty"?
Also IIRC the phrasing was "installing this will void your warranty" which is not true. It would have been better if they were clear that "damage done to your hardware by non-stable BIOS are not covered by warranty".
It allows the the media companies access to the failed hardware to do their own autopsy on it, and it saves the users from needing to go through a painful RMA process, complicated by companies not willing to admit fault.