Lesson learned: never buy 'open box' motherboards.

[Glocksman]

I build/repair PC's on the side, and a friend wanted to do a cheap upgrade of his P4 2.4Ghz system while keeping his existing AGP card, Audigy 2 sound card, PC2700 memory and ATAPI/IDE optical and hard drives.

After discussion, we settled on an Asus A8V-MX micro ATX mobo and a A64 3700+ processor.
We went with the mATX board because I couldn't find a vendor that had the full size A8V in stock.

Anyway, to cut costs we ordered the mobo as 'open box' from Zipzoomfly.
Big mistake.
After installation the machine would randomly hang on reboots until it finally refused to boot at all right after I managed to get Windows installed.
On closer inspection I noticed that not only were the retainer tabs at the 'north' end of both memory slots missing, but the sticker on the BIOS chip indicated that the chip went to an A8V-X motherboard, but it had the latest correct BIOS for the MX board flashed on it.

I suspect that either someone 'repaired' their old board with parts from this one and then RMA'ed it to ZZF for a refund, or ZZF themselves 'repaired' the board with a BIOS chip from a dead A8V-X and flashed it with the latest A8V-MX BIOS.

Either way, my buddy was pissed because he'd be without a machine for a week or more until ZZF replaced the board.
He told me to go to a local store and see if I could get a replacement.
Luckily, they had new in the box A8V-MX's in stock and it went in smooth as silk and since the boards were identical, I didn't even have to reinstall XP.

He's happy that he now has a working machine, but is pissed because now he gets to go round and round with ZZF over a refund.
I'm pissed both because I wasted an hour troubleshooting it just to be certain it was a bad mobo and because I felt like an idiot after recommending ZZF as a reliable vendor.

[Crayz9000]

I had some similar problems with ZipZoomFly (back when it was Googlegear, before they got buggered by Google's legal team) and bad hardware.

So far I still haven't had a problem buying stuff on Newegg, but I agree that it's a good idea to be wary of open box items. Fry's Electronics has a huge problem of getting items back like the one you mentioned and just dumping them back on the shelves.

[Instant Sunrise]

At Fry's it is a pretty big problem for two reasons: One, they have a very liberal and abused return policy. A return policy that often ends up as a selling point for the product. Two, the people in the service department are supposed to check and test hardware before it goes back to the floor. Doesn't always happen though. I've seen stuff come back to the floor that should have been marked as "Return to Vendor"(Bluetooth headsets, VOIP Phones), or did have an orange "Return to Vendor" sticker on it. Often the customer doesn't explain that it doesn't work, and so the returns people assume that said customer returned it because they didn't need it, or couldn't use it (ex. bought a PCI-E card but only has AGP slot).

Yeah, I will not buy open box items from Fry's, ever.

[TrailerParkJawa]

Fry's is probably the worst offender I know for OB product. Back in the day when I worked at Circuit City, we all knew that some Fry's would simply put the product back on the shelf. At that time I don't think they even offered a discount. Now when you go to Fry's (especially the one on Brokaw in San Jose) its chalk full of OB products.

Basically, you should never trust a computer component that users themselves work on as an open box purchase. A TV is okay, motherboards, cpu, video cards are not.

[Darth Quorthon]

Ah, Fry's. Their return policy does strike me as a bit liberal. I returned two motherboards last week, one was an open-box, the other was an Intel 945 chipset. After I returned with the 945 POS mobo, I was told I could get only store credit, since it was part of a bundle. Fine, I said, I'll pick out something else. I chose an Asus open-box board that looked pretty sweet, with the 975X chipset, 8 SATA ports and Crossfire support, all for just $95. I hook everything up, I see red light coming from inside my case, and realize to little LEDs on my Radeon X1950XTX are lit up red. My heart skips a beat, I'm thinking I may have fried my video card. After trying several power plugs, I pull out the open-box ASUS, and plunk in my old motherboard, and my Radeon powers up happily. So I returned to Fry's and explain what happened, they take it back with no resistance, and I chose an MSI P965 Neo-F board. Now my Core 2 Duo E6600 and pals are going along swimmingly. That was fun though; Four days, four motherboards.

Here's a big +1 on the "don't buy an open-box item".

[phongn]

I've seen some threads on Ars noting that ZZF's quality has taken a nosedive in the last half-year or so.