Well...everything seemed to be going fine the RMA. BUT…
It seems they are good and fast ISSUEING the RMA. Not so good acting on it. I requested (and paid for) a cross ship and upgraded (2nd day) shipping as soon as I got my RMA number. I did this at about 3pm pacific, August 11th. On the 13th I get a call from Abit telling me I have an outstanding balance of $172 ($150 deposit, $15 shipping, and $7 cross-ship handling fee). I explain that I paid it and gave them the PayPal transaction information. She also asks the revision number, I tell her. The next day I get ANOTHER call, which seemed strange because I assumed it should have shipped already, asking me the revision again, again I tell them v.2.0. I am told it will ship that day. This bothers me a bit as I expected to have the replacement by Friday, August 15, but Monday seemed good enough, the blackout would have messed up the shipment anyway, but that's beside the point. Later that night (after the power came back on) I get an email from UPS with my tracking information, here's the problem, it SHIPPED GROUND! This is a major inconvenience since I live in NY and they are in California, meaning 6 days transit time instead of the 2 I paid for.
So, today I call them to see what they can do about this glaring error. After some checking I am told that they did in fact ship it incorrectly, which was no revelation to me. He offers to refund the shipping, which is nice, but doesn’t get me the board any faster. As one last thing I asked how long it would take them to mail my refund. He says one to two weeks; this seems absurd to me, so I ask if it would be ONE or if it would be TWO weeks. He isn’t sure; seemingly he just made up the one to two week timeframe. So I asked him if he could find out how long it would REALLY take so I would know when to call back to complain again. He comes back and says they would mail the check Monday, apparently sensing my rising ire. If that happens I will probably get the check before I get the replacement board.
Needless to say I am VERY unimpressed with Abit. Perhaps this lack of attention to detail is an institutional problem, not just affecting RMA but their engineers and manufacturing as well. Could this be why the siren problem is fairly common to NF7 boards? This is the first Abit product I own, and will defiantly be the last. In the end it will be 12+ days without my desktop functioning because A) Abit can't make a reliable motherboard and B) they don't know the difference between GROUND and 2nd Day shipping. And this is assuming UPS doesn't 'mis-route' another of my packages. And who's to say the replacement board won't do the same damn thing in a month...
BTW - I'm not saying no abit boards are reliable, but obviously they have some quality control issues since there are many treads here and on the official abit forum describing EXACTLY the same problem. So I didn't just get a unique bad board. You have to figure this is their 4th try at the NF7 (1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 2.0) and they have obviously not ironed out all the problems yet. Most companies get it pretty close to right on their first try, or at least the second.