Here I’ll tell you my journey going through a RMA with NVIDIA in order to replace my expensive and perfectly functioning graphics card.

On the first weekend of December 2023, I upgraded my gaming PC from AM4 to AM5. I was sporting an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU (I went bonkers on the core count there because I was initially allowed to use my personal PC for work during the plague) on an ASRock X570 Taichi Motherboard and thought time was right to upgrade my build to an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D on a Gigabyte B650E AORUS MASTER (caps not mine!). The jump to AM5, DDR5 and an X3D processor seemed like a good fit to go with such a beast as my RTX 4090 Founders Edition.

The upgrade didn’t go smoothly only because I forgot to plug the CPU power cables to the Motherboard, which led me to believe that I had a faulty CPU or Motherboard. One day later I realized my mistake, paid the usual blood price to the CPU cooler fins for installing those cables while having the rest of the system already in place, and all worked as expected!

But I digress. Kinda. As the change in Motherboard plays a very important role in this whole RMA business.

You see, I was never much of an RGB guy, and always used some RGB software (I used to suffer through proprietary bloatware, but have found enlightenment through OpenRGB) to turn all the lights off (of course, I have the usual Rainbow Puke profile handy whenever I want to show the Disco mode to someone). And this FE GPU isn’t smart enough to save the last RGB setup, so it always lights up on boot and stays on until OpenRGB kicks in and knocks it off.

Now, my GPU has 2 RGB zones, one “V” shaped on top of it (which actually can go all RGB colors) and a “GEFORCE RTX” one on the side (this one only lights up white).

After all this (necessary, you’ll see) preamble, here comes the kicker: after the upgrade, I noticed that there was what seemed to be a crack on the RGB diffuser (piece of semi-transparent plastic that makes individual RGB LEDs seem like a single lit surface), because the RGB was “shining through” one slice of it:

It is hard to capture it, but I hope you see the “crack” that outshines the rest of the “V”

After a bit of internal and external discussions, given the cost of this card, I wanted to have a perfectly functioning product, so I decided to try and RMA it, even if that meant being without my gaming GPU for as long as the process took.

While gaming was off the table, at least the PC stayed usable due to a trusty GT 1030 I had around for setting up a headless home server.

So I contacted the webshop I bough it from, they told me I’d get a faster RMA if I talked directly to NVIDIA, which I did. The initial exchange happened over a website chat, where I went through some troubleshooting, sent pictures, copy of the invoice, etc.

The RMA got accepted, a courier would pick the card at my place and deliver it to NVIDIA the next day (if I could have delivered it myself, I’d be there in 30min by bike, their closest distribution center is in Amsterdam!), after receiving the card they’d take up to 5 business days to inspect the card, check for problems and to ship me a replacement, which could be a refurbished or a brand new retail unit.

To cut to the chase, I received a new retail unit as a replacement and… its top “V” RGB LED looks exactly as the one of the unit I shipped back for RMA.

Since the replacement is brand new, came in a retail box, has a new Serial and everything, I’m inclined to believe that the LED is supposed to look like this after all!

The catch here is that for more than 1 year I had never seen the top “V” RGB LED properly, even when the PC was booting. And this is because the space between the CPU socket and the first PCI-Express slot was smaller on my first motherboard, which caused my bulky CPU cooler (Noctua NH-D15S) to be closer to the top of the GPU, obstructing my view.

ASRock X570 Taichi Gigabyte B650E AORUS MASTER

The images are out of scale, but trust me on this one

I did not know that the RGB LED had always looked like that, the NVIDIA rep saw the pictures on this post and did agree with me over chat that there might be a problem, and there was no RMA assessment (I assume) other than verifying that I had shipped the RTX 4090 with the correct serial number (I hope, for NVIDIA’s sake). So I don’t blame myself for this.

For all my trouble, I now have a brand new GPU (the “old” one had 2 small scratches), that seems to perform the same, run a tad cooler and have less coil whine.

The whole RMA process took 20 days from when I initially contacted the retailer I bought the GPU from to when I received the replacement, 8 of which I was without a gaming GPU. This is the timeline:

  • 2024-01-06 I reach out to the retailer via online form about wanting to exercise my warranty
  • 2024-01-09 The retailer tells me via email that going to NVIDIA directly will be faster and better for me
  • 2024-01-09 I reach out to NVIDIA via a website chat and after ~1h of waiting, chatting and sending pictures, docs and reports, I get my RMA for replacement request started
  • 2024-01-11 I get an email saying that my “RMA request for replacement is now initiated” and I could ship my GPU following some instructions. But no shipping label or code was provided
  • 2024-01-12 I reply asking about the shipping label and get a response on the same day that they could schedule a pickup, with 2 dates suggested
  • 2024-01-13 I reply choosing to have it picked up on the 18th (the earliest one)
  • 2024-01-15 No response so far, so I nudge them again. To which I get a reply that “the pickup request has already been updated to the concerned team. As soon as the pickup confirmation is received from logistics partner, our warehouse team will keep you updated.”
  • 2024-01-16 I finally get the label and final instructions for packaging. I ask for some clarifications, and they reply on the same day.
  • 2024-01-18 My GPU is picked up
  • 2024-01-19 It is received by NVIDIA, so I ask if they’re gonna give me any interim updates about the RMA process. I get a reply with an outline of the process, but nothing about updates.
  • 2024-01-23 Two work days and not even a confirmation that my package was received by the RMA team, I ask again what’s up
  • 2024-01-24 Got a response: “We have forwarded your query to the warehouse team, as and how we receive an update from the team, we will keep you posted with the shipment ETA / Tracking number shortly.
  • 2024-01-25 Four work days since the receiving of my package, I get a confirmation that a replacement unit has been shipped and will be delivered the next day
  • 2024-01-26 The brand new replacement surprisingly arrives, after the delivery company forecasted that it would get delayed by 1 work day (3 actual days!)

And no, I don’t think I’ll ever RMA such an expensive product again due to RGB LED problems (imaginary or not).

If only EVGA, who did cross-shipping for GPU RMAs, still sold GPUs…