MSI DR8-A: The Plextor 708A's little brother

Tech Support

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

We used three camouflaged email addresses and emailed particularly trivial questions concerning our burners to each vendor. If tech support was capable of responding to all 3 emails within 72 hours (5 business days), we averaged the three times together for a final result. Our original results from the last DVDR Roundup combined with the DR8-A are below:

Average Customer Support Response Time
ASUS (Dec 2003)	No Response
Gigabyte (Dec 2003)	38 hours, 12 minutes
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
Plextor (Dec 2003)	11 hours, 10 minutes
Sony (Dec 2003)	6 hours, 44 minutes

When inquiring about our DR8-A, we received much better response than our original inquiry with the DR4-A in December of 2003. We also found better help on the MSI support center; it looks like our comments from the last DVD roundup may have caused them to improve their customer support. Even though MSI has been downsizing recently, it is good to see that they are still improving their customer support, doing more with less.