Spring 2004 DVD Performance Roundup: More DVD Dual 8X

Tech Support

One key item that we have overlooked in most of our optical display reviews is technical support. Our very our Evan Lieb originally pioneered the tech support benchmark for motherboards; and today, we will attempt to replicate that benchmark with our optical storage vendors.

We took three camoflagued email addresses and emailed each vendor particularly trivial questions concerning our burners. If tech support was capable of responding to all 3 emails within 72 hours (3 business days), we averaged the three times together for a final result.

Average Customer Support Response Time
ASUS (Dec 2003)	No Response
ASUS (Mar 2004)	No Response - Invalid
ASUS (April 2004)	66 hours, 20 minutes
AOpen (April 2004)	No Response
Gigabyte (Dec 2003)	38 hours, 12 minutes
Gigabyte (April 2004)	No Response
LiteOn (Dec 2003)	41 hours, 20 minutes
MSI (Dec 2003)	No Response
MSI (Mar 2004)	27 hours, 11 minutes
NEC (Dec 2003)	29 hours, 48 mintues
Nu Tech (Dec 2003)	N/A
Nu Tech (April 2004)	No Response
Plextor (Dec 2003)	11 hours, 10 minutes
Sony (Dec 2003)	6 hours, 44 minutes
Sony (April 2004)	7 hours, 21 minutes
Toshiba (April 2004)	N/A

We retested our ASUS tech support email under the suspicion that our tech support emails were being filtered by spam software. We worked with ASUS to rectify the problem, and the results for this roundup were much more favorable. As with the other benchmarks on ASUS' tech support, we found almost every answer to our questions from their website. An important thing to consider with ASUS' tech support email: if you do not receive an email confirmation within 30 minutes of your initial request, your email has probably been blocked by their spam software. Using their tech support line, (510) 995-0883, seems to be the best solution for immediate help.

AOpen and Gigabyte both had similar problems. For both manufacturers, your information must be entered into a form and then your problem should be answered within 48 hours. Unfortunately, neither website sent us a confirmation after submission, and neither website responded to our questions within 72 hours.

NuTech has a contact information page that brings up an email window for you to email some of their technical contacts directly. There are some general FAQs on their website, but they do not have the knowledge base of AOpen or ASUS just yet.

Since we received our Toshiba drive very late in the review, we did not have the opportunity to test customer support response time before the publish date of this article.

Again, Sony leads the pack in product support, and not just in the timed response aspect. Not only were we able to find all of our questions answered in their FAQ section, but there was also an online email submit form. Probably the icing on the cake was Sony's instant help chat. The first two questions we asked took less than 30 seconds for a Sony rep to walk us through. The third question took about two minutes. The rep also emailed us a log of our conversation for later. The live chat is available 24 hours a day. The extra cost of a Sony drive is easily justifiable if product support is an important issue.