Gadgetory

so if you bought one of the AMD Raven Ridge AP use and you tried to stick it into a motherboard that had not been flashed to support them obviously it wouldn't have worked you'd get a black screen and the correct approach would be to either hopefully you have a board that supports USB flash or find a Rison or similar a m4 processor socket it flash bios and then put your new raven or cpu in there unfortunately not everyone has extra CPUs lying around so AMD can't with a boot kit program which we've tested by basically going through the warranty process as a customer would we've done this in the past with system integrators where it's more or less a GN goes undercover and acts like a customer to see how the warranty and the service program is so this is a kind of a mini review slash recap of that process and if you're stuck on what to do with an APU we can finally give you some direct feedback of what to expect from the boot kit and how to use it before that this video is brought to you by the new cable mod pro series cable mods a new pro cables come with pre-installed closed combs for clean builds accompanied by a revamp to color style and vibrance the cables are now using thicker wires and they've also added right-angled internal USB 3 extension and right angled SATA data cables by the pro series cable kits at the link below or customize it your cable set with the configurator also linked below the AMD boot kit for the AP use is pretty straightforward it comes in this box and what they send out is an APU from last year it is the as6 9500 it's a 56 ish dollar CPU through US retailers has an AR 5 integrated graphics processor on it not particularly impressive but you're not supposed to keep it either so this goes back to AMD their service was actually pretty good they provide a shipping label and everything so they make it easy for you which was I wasn't expecting the shipping label so that was nice the cooler they technically allow you to keep there's not a lot of reason to actually use it it's not very good but it's kind of neat they let you keep it I guess honestly it's probably more of like a freight or get rid of the Thane's thing than anything but whatever you get a cooler out of it maybe you can use it on something low-end in the future so that's what we get the process for getting it is what we're here to talk about mostly so this would be the customer service process going through customer support like a real consumer and seeing how they treat us versus how media gets treated for example and we were honestly pretty impressed we first reached out to Andy via their boot kit application website on February 17th and they replied with an automated response that just said your customer your service request has been received and will be processed shortly and depending on the nature of it dictates how quickly they get back to us that was on Saturday the 17th that we emailed them we got a response from an actual person on the 21st so Wednesday and the response was a form letter that said dear Steven your service request ticket number was received and they said thank you for your request to loan a boot kit from AMD before approving your request I'd like to verify that you've tried to contact your mother board manufacturer or their local authorized service provider and they have established that your motherboard requires a BIOS update and we're not able to help you perform that update please provide a summary or copy of your communication with the motherboard manufacturer to indicate why support from the original design manufacturer is not suitable MD is in a position to be able to loan a boot kit such that you can flash the BIOS yourself to qualify for the service MD will require a picture of your Rison with Radeon at Vega graphics processor that clearly shows the model number and serial number plus a copy of your purchase invoice once we receive this information we'll be happy to review your claim to establish let legibility that's not a that's not me miss speaking legibility for a boot kit loan if you no longer require this service no response is required we replied to that pretty quickly and just sent a note that said we spoke with a motherboard manufacturer and that the manufacturer didn't provide any direct support and flash in the BIOS we didn't say anything about retailer communication this was me being a dumb customer basically so I just said we spoke to someone and they couldn't help us which wasn't true but the point was to see do we have to jump through hoops to prove that we spoke to someone at which point I'd probably email Asus for gigabyte and ask them for some help but so yeah it's just pretty simple I said yes I talked to them no they couldn't help me what can you do for me and they asked for a photo of the processor so I just took the processor honestly wasn't motherboard at the time was socket and had a cooler on it didn't really feel like hunting it so I took another APU another the 2200 G and took a photo of that next to the box for it where you could clearly see the serial number on the box I provided them the serial number the model all that stuff sent it over and they replied pretty quickly as well and we get the timeline on that so we responded on the 21st with the photo and the communication info and they responded on the 22nd actually at 4:00 a.m. so pretty quickly thereafter and they stated thank you for the response and providing details to qualify for the service and they will require a copy of your purchase invoice once we receive will be happy to establish your legibility for the boot kit I can't really knock them too bad for messing up that word twice I guess but so that's all we had to do just send them an invoice basically from Newegg so sent them an invoice from Newegg and the photos and we got a boot kit within a couple days the whole process start to finish was from point of contact to receiving the apu in the mail was about nine days and that's considering we contacted on a Saturday not that bad so it's about a week and I could be up to 10 days or more depending on how slow your representative is from what we understand but not bad honestly so going into this you should first know that if you actually end up in this situation you have an AM four board that doesn't support Raven Ridge first go to the retailer if you're lucky enough to have the Micro Center or similar near you they should probably flash it for you I think they're supposed to so through AMD guidance I'm pretty sure that the retailers are supposed to offer some service hopefully without charging you for it that's my understanding if the retailer is no good for that then the next step I think is technically supposed to be contacting the motherboard manufacturer at which point they either cross ship p1 or they flash it depending on their warranty policy that could potentially take longer than getting a boot kit I don't know what kind of wait times there are for these things obviously there wasn't much of one for us and we applied early for it so honestly in that position personally I just get the boot kit straight away because it might be faster than going through a board vendor where you could be waiting a couple weeks this was 9 or 10 days so yeah support was pretty good as far as using it if you actually need help with that it's time put the CPU in the socket turn it on boots a BIOS download the relevant BIOS from the motherboard manufacturer specifically for that board - a USB key plug it in go to their Flash utility and navigate to that BIOS and hit enter and then that's it turn it off replace it with APU and you should be good to go cpu goes back to AMD they actually did provide like I said a shipping label so it's very happy about that as far as customer service process goes considering the situation where you just bought a new CPU you probably bought a new motherboard and you can't use either that's pretty frustrating experience if you if you're not positive why they're not working you might not know that there's a BIOS flash saying considering that's the situation to be able to get something from support that allows you to self-correct the issue within 10 days is certainly not the worst it'd be nice to be faster but if you're not near a retailer it's not going to be and the process overall the support representative we worked with was very clear they communicated well they had very clear instructions when we asked questions of those instructions they were acted they're hand-holding basically for a dumb customer so they do all the things you'd want so yeah I was I was pretty impressed with the warranty process for this we haven't tested actually like a broken GP or CP or anything but for a boot kit or worked out pretty well if this is the route you want to go we can recommend it straightforward and easy and if you have trouble flashing bios tweeted at us because it should be solvable in a couple seconds so oh yeah that's it not really much there other than saying the boot kit process was was pleasantly surprising in the support department because we've gone through support a couple times with other things we've done like undercover support stuff with some s eyes that doesn't always turn out that well I guess the best example would be look at how Rockstar Games support coverage from a few years ago there's a reason that was popular but that's it for this one as always subscribe for more if you like this type of kind of like GN goes undercover thing let us know we'll try and do more of it I just need to break something first so that I can have a reason to go through a warranty and subscribe for more patreon.com/scishow tops that directly go to store that cameras nexus net to backorder one of our mod mats they were coming back in stock end of March early April and we'll ship them out I'll see you all next time