Terrible customer service and turn around times

In February 2020 bought a new high end ASUS ROG Strix Scar II gaming laptop I could mainly use for work but also game on from Evetech 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 until the job was complete and the lady who I spoke to asked me to email her my address to courier the machine back to me. 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. The day I finally spoke to the technician assigned to fix my laptop I nearly had an aneurysm trying to make out what he was saying over the phone. The phone line quality is really terrible and I don't think the guy had any idea what he was talking about either.

I was told that the CPU and or motherboard was being replaced after the technician wasn't happy with just cleaning the fans and replacing the thermal paste but then got a different story later claiming that they just cleaned it and replaced the thermal paste. I fail to see how that took a month to accomplish if that's all that needed to happen.

In the end I got my laptop back on the 20th December from Pinnacle but 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 both Evetech and Pinnacle about this. Pinnacle didn't even bother to respond while Evetech claimed they couldn't perform the final quality assurance checks because Pinnacle shipped my machine back directly to me instead of back to them. I requested it be shipped directly to me because I was incurring huge costs having to drive in 3hrs of traffic every single day to either my company or client offices in order to work from there since I was unable to remote in from my machine for 2 months. Not to mention the R200-R300 of airtime wasted on calls trying to get feedback because Pinnacle support staff never called me back with updates as promised.

I now have to send it back again to Pinnacle's Cape Town branch 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 Evetech about the expired warranty which they kept ignoring me and at one point **** about it 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 Evetech or Pinnacle again if I can help it once I get my speakers sorted. This was the worst customer service experience I've had in a very long time.