[Update] MSI paying reviewers to remove their bad reviews of their products

[SpaceGhostC2C]

On 7/16/2020 at 10:25 AM, PoopThatTookAPee said:

and thats without even getting to the part where she builds the pc

Funnily enough, the build itself is flawless (although they edit out the plugging of 90% of PSU cables).

 

3 hours ago, D13H4RD said:

Harbor Boxed

 

49 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Their CEO recently died,maybe it's related?

How?

 

 

 

 

What's strange is putting so much effort in silencing a small channel. If it was Nintendo-style ("we go against Disney or against your camcorder video from 30 years ago because we're zero-tolerance like that"), then we would know from other outlets as well. But if you let bigger outlets speak their mind, and they either have positive things to say about a product or just aren't covering it, then who cares if some guy somewhere speaks badly of it? How much is it worth to have him keep the video offline?

Maybe someone messed up sending a review unit outside of the pool of usual suspects in an attempt to score an internal point and it backfired when the review wasn't good, then tried to bury the attempt.

That's just pure speculation anyway.

[AlTech]

@GoodBytes This is the product affected/video of the laptop from the source.

 

 

[5x5]

On 7/17/2020 at 6:10 PM, Vishera said:

Asus is worse,they really don't like to release updates for motherboards after their replacements arrive to the market,you can also see their stance on Zen 3 support for B450 and X470 boards - they were against,MSI was for it and Gigabyte was on the fence.

The only reason MSI were for it was because otherwise they'd have multiple class action lawsuits and sanctions put in place. Basically, they were very fucked because they ran their mouths too much

[Godlygamer23]

On 7/15/2020 at 5:31 PM, emosun said:

I'm sorry but msi was blacklisted for me in 2006..... why was it ever whitelisted for anyone else?

Is Diablotek gonna all the sudden become whitelisted? Is Dynex a good manufacturer now?

I hate how people forget things , it's beyond annoying. Asrock is still on my shit list. Will never forgive them for the absolutely terrible motherboard I bought from them in 07

Was it a defective product though? Understand that every manufacturer puts out defective products in some form. The defect rate might be something like 0.01%, but someone eventually is going to purchase it and have to deal with it. 

 

If most motherboards of that model were fine, then it was probably just a defective product - no reason to hold a grudge against them. The other aspect to consider is if a company improves on their practices. If your own workplace changes daily, it could be the same for manufacturers. 

[emosun]

11 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

 

Somebody hasn't experienced asrock from the mid 2000s before

[Godlygamer23]

5 minutes ago, emosun said:

Somebody hasn't experienced asrock from the mid 2000s before

You're right. The earliest motherboard I have is around 2013, which is still in use. 

[Falkentyne]

1 hour ago, Escanor said:

Never trusted MSI since i saw a user report that he's motherboard catched fire.

You never saw the Asus and Gigabyte boards catch fire?
Boy you must not have been building computers or reading forums very long.  Oh dear...

Go look up the X99 VRM issues...

[SFFDesigns]

I’ve seen a lot of arguments about MSI products here. This thread is about a specific issue.

 

does this issue mean MSI makes bad products? No, products are not the brand. That is not to say they have not made bad products (from the looks of it, this laptop may be one of them) though, but I consider that separate from this specific issue

[LAwLz]

14 hours ago, Hymenopus_Coronatus said:

does this issue mean MSI makes bad products? No, products are not the brand. That is not to say they have not made bad products (from the looks of it, this laptop may be one of them) though, but I consider that separate from this specific issue

Judge products based on their own merits rather than make overly simplified generalizations about brands with thousands of products based on a handful of peoples' experience with one or two products?

You're expecting way too much from people here.

[thedangerine]

Man I have had numerous MSI mobos that I really liked so to see this sucks, I expected more out of the company. glad that youtuber stood up to them and that AMD took their side

[thedangerine]

Linus and Luke had some good points on this subject 

 

[GoodBytes]

GamerNexus releases a video about the topic including its own experience with MSI (its not different)

 

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

GamerNexus releases a video about the topic including its own experience with MSI (its not different)

 

I know I've posted on this thread already, but MSI, is simply known, and has been known for a good 20 years, of selling "bad" hardware, but it's been a crapshoot as to if you get it or not. To me, any time stuff "catches fire", that's a good enough reason to put that company on the "do not buy" list for an entire year until that product is out of the retail channel. Not every MSI product is a bad product, but they show up enough that simply typing "MSI catches fire" in google brings up a lot of serious reports.

 

https://hardforum.com/threads/a-warning-about-msi-and-its-graphics-cards.1851435/ (2013)

https://hardwarebbq.com/msis-stealth-chassis-catches-fire-reviews-bsn/

 

 

Like if I were a new reviewer (does the world need more bored nerds reviewing hardware? No.) I probably would tell MSI, or any other company that trys to delay the review, to stuff it. If you don't want me to post it, then you sign a contract buying the rights to the one video for 12 months, for like $100,000. You put a high dollar value on it explicitly to dissuade them from trying to buy you off.

 

If you want ethical reviews of anything, you can't rely on review samples, you need to actually buy the thing off the shelf and do it. Review products are supposed to build hype, and unfortunately there are reviewers who will readily astroturf a product for a hardware vendor, for very little money, and that's just embarrassing. It's not your job to say nice things about a product, it's your job to actually use, test, benchmark, do things that users would readily do to it, and see if it holds up.

 

https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/about-us/what-we-do/research-and-testing/index.htm

 

Quote

After additional research to define any testing project's scope, staff shoppers or one of our anonymous “secret shoppers” buy the products we use as test samples — in fact, some products, like house paint and food, can vary by climate or region, and because we need to make sure our tests reflect a national consumer experience, we purchase products from across the country. Our shoppers pay full retail and purchase all the products we test to generate our ratings from the same places consumers do; we accept no sample products for testing. 

 

So just like CR, if you want reviews to be truthful, you need people in different countries reviewing the same product, because sometimes those products are in fact not the same. (See all the different models of Samsung smart tv's and cell phones as one blatant example.)

[HM-2]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

but they show up enough that simply typing "MSI catches fire" in google brings up a lot of serious reports.

Try that with most other vendors and you get exactly the same results, though. You get the same result searching "ASUS catches fire" or "EVGA catches fire". Trying to pay reviewers to cover up poor reviews is pretty damn unethical (though hardly unheard of in this industry and many others), but there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that MSI products are "more prone" to catching fire than those made by other vendors- not least because they're by and large made of exactly the same components.

 

As the poster above says, judge products on their merits, not your view of the company who produces them. You only need look at the PSU tier list to see how true that mantra is. And yet you still get people who refuse to countenance something like a Corsair AXi series PSU for their build because they read three people on Reddit complaining their orange-label rebrands went pop and therefore "everything made by Corsair must be rubbish".

[5x5]

35 minutes ago, HM-2 said:

Try that with most other vendors and you get exactly the same results, though. You get the same result searching "ASUS catches fire" or "EVGA catches fire". Trying to pay reviewers to cover up poor reviews is pretty damn unethical (though hardly unheard of in this industry and many others), but there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that MSI products are "more prone" to catching fire than those made by other vendors- not least because they're by and large made of exactly the same components.

 

As the poster above says, judge products on their merits, not your view of the company who produces them. You only need look at the PSU tier list to see how true that mantra is. And yet you still get people who refuse to countenance something like a Corsair AXi series PSU for their build because they read three people on Reddit complaining their orange-label rebrands went pop and therefore "everything made by Corsair must be rubbish".

The issue with MSI isn't component quality, it's design. They make incredibly stupid design decisions and end up with shit tier products because they charge 1000$ for a product that barely qualifies in the 500$ category (laptops for example)

[CommanderAlex]

3 hours ago, 5x5 said:

The issue with MSI isn't component quality, it's design. They make incredibly stupid design decisions and end up with shit tier products because they charge 1000$ for a product that barely qualifies in the 500$ category (laptops for example)

Sounds like other companies *cough cough* Apple. There is always shady business going on in any company, from the cow industry, oil industry, technology industry. 

[5x5]

7 minutes ago, CommanderAlex said:

Sounds like other companies *cough cough* Apple. There is always shady business going on in any company, from the cow industry, oil industry, technology industry. 

MSI's laptops are nowhere near as bad as Apple. They're still mediocre but the closest Windows equivalent to Apple's abhorrent designs are Razer's abominations

[CommanderAlex]

6 minutes ago, 5x5 said:

MSI's laptops are nowhere near as bad as Apple. They're still mediocre but the closest Windows equivalent to Apple's abhorrent designs are Razer's abominations

Yes, but whenever a problem arises with a faulty SMD on a logic board in their MacBooks, they say the WHOLE logic board is defective and want to charge you MORE than the cost of the laptop originally, forcing the user to buy another laptop to increase their profits or go ahead and replace the logic board. Apple's "Genius" Bar is not transparent with board repair and rip off people. Ever watch Louis Rossmann's videos? 

[5x5]

3 minutes ago, CommanderAlex said:

Yes, but whenever a problem arises with a faulty SMD on a logic board in their MacBooks, they say the WHOLE logic board is defective and want to charge you MORE than the cost of the laptop originally, forcing the user to buy another laptop to increase their profits or go ahead and replace the logic board. Apple's "Genius" Bar is not transparent with board repair and rip off people. Ever watch Louis Rossmann's videos? 

Of course - I've watched many of his investigations and fully agree. But Apple will have to adapt and change policy as they are starting to suffer the consequences of the failed 2016-2019 designs that REALLY put a large portion of customers off of buying MacBooks due to the massive defects and lawsuits.

[Falkentyne]

20 hours ago, Kisai said:

I know I've posted on this thread already, but MSI, is simply known, and has been known for a good 20 years, of selling "bad" hardware, but it's been a crapshoot as to if you get it or not. To me, any time stuff "catches fire", that's a good enough reason to put that company on the "do not buy" list for an entire year until that product is out of the retail channel. Not every MSI product is a bad product, but they show up enough that simply typing "MSI catches fire" in google brings up a lot of serious reports.

 

This is nothing more than confirmation bias.  It's the same thing racists do when they go into a hate group where everyone agrees with them and then they go "see? I told you so!".  I am not sure what logical fallacy this is, but indeed as the poster above said, you can find just as many posts about other companies boards catching fire, like Asus and especially eVGA.  I'm surprised you left eVGA out because eVGA had the LARGEST amount of 1080/Ti cards (It may have been 980's--I do not remember at all) reported as catching fire, more than any other company, and I don't remember what the cause was, but I think it was extremely shoddy or absolutely no proper cooling of the VRM's.  And this was not an isolated problem.

 

Regardless of other "normal failures", have you seen the assembly lines?  The SMD and other little components aren't made by MSI (or anyone else at the other motherboard companies).  Yes they silk screen the PCB's, but all the little tiny components come from other factories, semiconductor fabs and so on, and I'm not just talking about VRM's.  MSI simply gets all the parts, prints the board and then uses robots (yes, robots) to mass solder them on.  They're assembly line made.  A few components are hand assembled, and there are QA checks done by real people, on every part, but some failures simply can't be caught this way (flaky out of spec SMD, weak soldering job from a badly calibrated robot drill, etc), and unless the failure is systematic and affects an entire run of cards (which can be traced back to the line), you can't even do a recall for a sporadic failure within the realm of the 0.1% failure rate, or whatever this value is for accepted failures.

 

There are several assembly factory videos that have been posted by gamersnexus and by some other reviewers.  One a few years ago posted a laptop assembly line (MSI).

 

I'm not getting into crappy design decisions and skimping on quality of parts, rating or cooling.  These don't cause systematic fires unless it's extremely ...dereliction of duty bad (e.g. eVGA GTX 1080's/Ti's (or 980) etc)

[Kisai]

 

3 hours ago, Falkentyne said:

This is nothing more than confirmation bias.  It's the same thing racists do when they go into a hate group where everyone agrees with them and then they go "see? I told you so!".  

I don't think that's a hill you want to die on.

 

What you're looking for "begging the question", assuming truth from the conclusion. The conclusion is that MSI knows they are selling garbage, and is trying to bury it by threatening the reviewers smart enough to do more than a superficial review, because people tend to think it's their own fault and just replace the item instead of warranty exchange, or even class action lawsuit.

 

And I'm not saying MSI is the only one that does this. MSI is however the only one that seems to sink a lot of money into marketing things:

 

(indeed the NCIX stores used to be wrapped in MSI marketing , and the Canada Computers kept it up )

 

Meanwhile. ASRock was cheating, Gigabyte has some bad warranty support, ASUS has been found cheating, EVGA also had some Geforce cards catch fire, etc. If I want to go dig up dirt on a specific brand, I absolutely can. But MSI tends to be the one that gets dragged the most because of this.

 

There is no excuse, zero, none, reason for an item to catch fire. If something is catching fire, your engineers are either incompetent, or their manager is extremely incompetent. If the company was pushing broken things out the door, and then trying to silence reviewers, that is the company being evil, plain in simple. 

 

[HM-2]

20 minutes ago, Kisai said:

MSI is however the only one that seems to sink a lot of money into marketing things:

Eh? The amount of aggressive marketing MSI does pales in comparison to the likes of ASUSTeK. 

 

Every major vendor offers a wide gamut of products ranging from excellent to dreadful. I can cite off the top of my head pervasive problems with just about any other vendors products quite easily; I've even experienced some like ASUS' Broadwell-E motherboards dumping 1.5+v into chips straight out if the box whilst reporting "everything's fine" in the BIOS.

 

I don't think there's any empirical evidence to suggest that, on the whole, MSI products are either less reliable or more prone to catastrophic failure than those of Gigabyte or ASUS or EVGA or ASRock or take-your-pick. And I would hazard that you don't have any evidence either.

[Shintoki_0169]

On 7/17/2020 at 10:27 PM, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

 

Marketing in the nutshell

[DemiGod]

I fully agree to the support for the guy but I hope people realize this all could be a fake story where a guy got payd by competitor or just wants attention to ruin MSI name. 

[5x5]

1 minute ago, DemiGod said:

I fully agree to the support for the guy but I hope people realize this all could be a fake story where a guy got payd by competitor or just wants attention to ruin MSI name. 

Gamers nexus, LTT, Hardware unboxed and others have already confirmed it's legitimate. GN even confirmed the same situations have occurred with them