Terrible after sales and customer service as well as questionable business practices

In February 2020 paid about R42000 for a new high end ASUS ROG Strix Scar II gaming laptop I could mainly use for work but also game on. The sales process was fine and it was advertised and sold with a 3 year ASUS warranty.

In early October I noticed that the CPU was thermal throttling itself at 96°C when trying to game and frame rate kept dropping to a maximum of 4FPS. I did some research and found a few threads on ASUS forums saying it was caused by a BIOS update they pushed that enabled Intel Turbo Boost which didn't appear to be optimized for the Intel 8750H CPU and caused it to overheat. Some people resolved it by reverting the BIOS update (which I tried myself) and replacing the thermal paste on the CPU as well.

I mentioned this to Evetech support but it went ignored for a few weeks while they chased their tales. They told me the Samsung M.2 NVME SSD was underperforming and could be overheating and causing the CPU to overheat so they opted to replace it first under warranty. It was pretty obvious that this wasn't causing the CPU to overheat but after waiting a few days for them to replace the SSD I told them I wanted proof that they ran some performance benchmark tests to confirm the CPU was no longer overheating.

The tests obviously failed and they said they couldn't check/replace the thermal paste without voiding the non existent warranty so they wanted to rather send it to Pinnacle in JHB on 28th November to let them investigate further.

This then led to another month long **** show with Pinnacle support in JHB giving me 4 or 5 different stories about what was going on with my machine including replacement of faulty components which never actually happened. Worst part is that not once did Pinnacle contact me (Evetech only called me once the whole 2 months as well and only responded to emails a few days later most of the time). I had to keep calling Pinnacle and sit on hold for up to 20mins at a time being constantly redirected and given vague or incorrect information.

In the end I got my laptop back on the 20th December from Pinnacle without all the original packaging and missing the headset and mouse I sent back with it, go figure. I then had to contact Evetech again and they managed to locate the headset and mouse on their end and needed to ship it back separately.

A couple days later I then noticed that the built in speakers sounded like they were blown or weren't fitted back correctly and massively distorted the sound when playing anything over half the max volume which was never a problem before. I asked them about this and they then claimed they couldn't perform the final quality assurance checks because Pinnacle shipped my machine back directly to me instead of back to them which I didn't want to take another chance on and wait another month for them to send it back to me.

I now have to send it back again either to Evetech or the Pinnacle branch in CT which I requested instead of wasting my time and money constantly calling Evetech and Pinnacle in JHB for feedback and either being ignored or **** to by both parties. After continually questioning them about the expired warranty which Evetech kept ignoring and at one point **** about saying that they extended the warranty with ASUS but they never did. I was later told that the warranty was now in place with Pinnacle only and not ASUS.

Safe to say I'll never deal with either of them again if I can help it once I get my speakers sorted as long as nothing else goes wrong while it's still under warranty.