Killshot: MSI’s Shady Review Practices & Ethics

[Music] i just saw this and the wording on this is a bit negative towards our brand is there any way to not use such term like overpriced vrm on the title was it necessary to include the damage to the laptop in the article i would like to share the review i just wouldn't like to have readers make any wrong assumptions about the product and its quality is that okay if we don't publish this review please please do not publish anything and let us try to remedy this while we sync to work together my hq is not really happy with this just another question would you think we we don't expect the video could be taken off but do you think that for the video title we could just do msi bravo 15 review and take the disappointing out the reason we offered the money to you is because we believe your time is valuable if you spend a couple hours on the review and then you don't release it we should compensate your time it's not paying you to say positive on the msi product it's about we pay you because you spent time to do this but eventually you can't release the video because we have to consult on the product review i just feel like if it is not a factory defect or result of a widespread known issue that we should exclude it from the article this isolated case is something our headquarters is taking very seriously before that this video is brought to you by you and the gamers nexus store at store.gamersnexus.net we're forfeiting the last lag of an ad campaign with msi after the company's latest outburst of what we think to be unethical behavior and the only reason we can walk away from the advertising money is because our viewers support us this level of independence is thanks to all of you buying gamers nexus pc building mod mats which are high quality anti-static materials to protect tables and components alike it's also thanks to purchasing our desk size mouse mats with a fully custom blue rubber underside blue stitching and pc component wireframe designs to fit your building hobby and our shirts glassware and posters the mod mats and mouse mats are on backorder and sell through constantly and instantly but the next round arrives in just a few weeks to guarantee you'll get the next run go to store.gamersnexus.net and get an order in today while supporting our independent reporting we fired a warning shot in 2015 and now we're more going straight for the nail in the coffin with this one our reviews are often brazenly critical that's not news to anybody watching this but that comes with it the territory of a trail of bridges in various states of burning smoldering in the background that's okay though because companies blacklists reviewers all the time happens to us yearly with a revolving door of companies coming in and out of who's blacklisted us next but typically by the next review cycle it's fine it all smooths out so maybe you miss one product but for the most part people get over it pr people move around in the industry all the time and the really good pr people the really good tech marketing people who want to see things improve they're doing the right thing they want to see the product improve and they're normally more on the reviewer's side than they are on the company side but not every company has one of those people msi is one of the companies that is lacking that person to push back on headquarters and say you know what they're right the people in media are right about this product and we could do better so in this one we're going to be talking about years of examples about how we feel like msi tries to subtly strong-arm reviewers into taking down or changing reviews that are critical and about how we think they try to delay reviewers and prevent publication of critical reviews so that the review becomes irrelevant by the time it does get published and basically do everything possible to prevent the publication of something bad rather than trying to fix the issue and work with people and this is coming up now as opposed to years ago when a lot of these things happened with us because tech team gb a youtuber experienced issues recently and tagged us in the tweets about it so if you missed it check out tech team gb's coverage of the laptop but his main issues were that he found some thermal concerns and if you look at the underside of the laptop with the cover on and then with the cover off which you can see in his review and we'll show it you'll see that the the fans have really no access to air so regardless of what numbers exactly msi is producing this is still a terrible design it's a horrible design oversight and the company is trying to not only defend it but if you've been out of the loop on the story look through tech team gb's twitter feed you'll see that part of what they've done was to also offer compensation if the review went unpublished msi framed this by saying that this is for just paying for the time but obviously the perception is that it feels a little bit worse so tech team gbe has done a great job of standing up to this bad behavior and if you haven't subscribed to him you should check him out he's trying to build a channel that's built upon the values of doing things ethically like we have always done and we're happy to point you his way in the past we published an article called the slimy underside of the hardware industry that was in 2015. at the time i was the one who wrote it and i had a good amount of experience in the industry but not nearly as much as today obviously it's about doubled in the time since i've been doing this since about 2008 but only in the hardware side since maybe more seriously 2012 or so so 2015 is when we published the slimy underside of the hardware industry the companies in that piece were not named we did that explicitly the entire point of publishing that piece was to be a warning shot so that the companies who were kind of watching our site and staying in tune with what we do would be aware of okay let's not try things like functionally attempted bribery to get something taken down which has happened to us that was one of the things we detailed we've had other companies assert that they want strong reviews referring to the product saying they don't want to send them out just because they're worried that the roundup will conclude with you should buy this if you do x and you should buy that if you do y which is of course the actual conclusion not you should always buy x for everything but that's what one of the companies in the past wanted to see we haven't named them and unless something happens we won't but msi now does get named and that's because of how it's behaving at this point so if you're wondering what are our credentials for criticizing msi and experiencing some of the things that these newer youtube channels are experiencing apparently and we have seen the conversations with tech team gb and msi so we are aware of that one actually definitely happening um if you're wondering our credentials we've got quite a few of them and the video editors should be flashing through them on the screen now so we have a lot of experience criticizing msi and dealing with this type of stuff so let's recap the tech team gb thing first before really getting into this recently youtuber tech team gb tweeted that msi had requested him to take down a review of a laptop whereupon tech team gb found several thermal issues and other issues related to the laptop before that it felt like msi was stalling tech team gb on publication for as long as possible which is a common tactic that we certainly feel like the company has used on us in the past when we were less scary i guess than now and we've experienced both of those but mostly we've handled it privately this happened to us again as far back as 2015. we'll go over those emails msi is still continuing with this behavior with younger outlets and that means it's time for us to sort of to try and correct it from the position we're in today and leverage the position we're in today to try and do some good for the newer youtubers the newer reviewers and therefore the industry at large because it feels like msi and others attempt to strong-arm reviewers and in our opinion as they do that they are going to damage the industry they're going to damage the credibility of reviewers and they're going to cause ethical problems in the review space where there are already enough ethical concerns that exist we don't need more of them so that's why this video needs to happen it is not our intent to uh to destroy msi in any way it's our intent to hopefully inflict change msi you need to change and at this point it's it's obviously not going to happen privately so we're doing this publicly and all this is backed up by emails so msi deal with it it's it's your writing that we're reading as an example of things we've dealt with in the past from companies we have dealt with everything from uh simple stuff like threatened review samples review samples getting pulled that's typically what we mean when we say the word blacklisted and we've also dealt with things like threats at lawsuits but haven't actually been through one yet so it is a concern obviously in the reviews industry but products we've reviewed that have been proven commercial failures and were later fixed by the companies which we can't name for this one uh we have been aware of considerations of lawsuits so it's pretty serious when you review a product critically this is not something that it doesn't matter if they're right you can sue anyone at least in the us for any reason and even if the person doing the suing isn't correct it still costs both parties money and one of them is a lot less powerful than the other so my advice to the newer youtubers is to if you're right and you can prove you're right try not to back down and if you need it reach out to me and we'll try and help you out but on the legal side we haven't had to go through it just wanted to point out for people watching that this is a consideration that we all have uh it is not one i think many reviewers have been through but we've kind of stepped on a lot of toes and uh that's that's where you start hearing about that stuff getting discussed anyway that's different discussion so uh msi as tech team gb pointed out sometimes feels to reviewers like us like msi is using tactics to try and stall newer reviews and if criticisms are published it seems like it tries to get them removed msi's defense to this would be that technically they're just asking a question could you change the title but it's sort of like going into an alley and an eight-foot tall guy with a knife says it'd be a good idea if you gave me your wallet to reviewers especially smaller ones that feels intimidating even if it's technically asking a question can you withhold this review from publishing this behavior overall it's extremely important that we note this is rare it's very rare not many of the companies behave like this the ones that do if you're a new reviewer just ignore them and do your thing do the right thing if you want to be anything like us do what you think is right and [ __ ] the companies like just do what you think is right by the people buying the stuff that's me talking to any new reviewers out there or smaller channels who are maybe afraid of review samples getting threatened don't be afraid of that doesn't matter you lose some access yes you'll get it back go work with someone else and then talk about your experience and grow from that that's my advice but uh and i'm sharing that because i would rather see the industry move in the direction of being ethical and honest about things and not being overpowered by companies that are threatening in any way question of why now well why now again is because this is still happening and we want to make sure that it is unsuccessful in trying to silence meaningful valid and well-tested criticisms and that msi instead pursue maybe improving its products and if there is a criticism which is invalid then perhaps work with the reviewer to try and figure out what the problem is get the product back retest it whatever needs to happen to to get the data to the point where it's correct and accurate from both parties testing okay uh there's a lot of other stuff we should really sort of preface here but the main one is is that as you get deeper into the industry you learn that the engineers and the pms are sort of the good guys and a lot of the media reps at these less than ethical companies uh those are the ones you want to bypass those people they're put there as linebackers to try and block the engineers engineers are often not allowed to talk to reviewers for a lot of good reasons they don't have media training they say things that are often true and that's a lot of the engineers we work with will willingly tell us the faults of the product so those are what we consider the good guys in terms of trying to work with someone who actually wants to build something good uh and not worry about the pr side of things that said there are a lot of extremely good pr people a lot of extremely good technical marketing people and these people typically shuffle around between companies you carry the relationship with them when they move from one to the next so you lose someone at one place you gain someone somewhere else that's the nature of the industry and the people who are really good at this are typically it feels like more on our side than they are on the side of of the company they work at which is great because they want to improve the product so not everyone's like this really trying to make that clear so that people don't get the wrong opinion about the entire industry it's really not it's not like this it's just msi is making everyone look bad right now let's get into our examples before we go through more of tech team gbs it's going to be a long video because there's really a lot of important stuff to say our first one is from an old written review from 2015. this was way back when we reviewed laptops msi sent us a laptop that had this problem there was clearly a design flaw that caused the lid to crack when the screen was opened we talked about this in the written article we were more of a written article site back then than youtube and this is something that today probably i would make a huge deal out of and put it in the thumbnail but um we were more focused on the overall product we sort of being newer at it took msi at its word that it had never seen this before before i learned that's what everyone says and uh and we sort of talked about it in the first page of the review and then moved on to the rest of the product so anyway clearly a design flaw we were relatively positive about the laptop overall we pointed out that the lid snapped immediately we also said that it's easy to put back together because it was and we also reached out to msi and asked for comment which they provided for review so we noted that we were concerned that the housing would crack after repeat openings and closings and we think that everyone would agree it would be unfair or unfitting of a reviewer trying to do their job properly to forget to publish this information even though you can easily snap the lid back together didn't ship that way so msi didn't agree with this the next email is from a former msi representative who transferred to a few other companies and this email was sent by that representative in response to our notification awesome thanks steven however was it necessary to include the damage to the laptop in the article i just feel like if it is not a factory defect or result of a widespread known issue that we should exclude it from the article there's more to this but we're going to stop there i responded to this in a very professional mature calm and measured way back then but i i haven't grown up in this industry it's gotten less patient over time so first of all msi this ain't no we you aren't we we're not in this together we're not a team it's not uh what was the exact quote here we should exclude it from the article there is no we so msi you weren't here when i was making 180 in my first year working every hour of my life to build what became this you weren't here for that it's not a team effort we could exist without msi ever working with us again and it's unlikely we would notice so that's how i felt about that email then i responded an extremely unbelievably professional fashion i can't believe that i did because that email is outrageous anyway secondly msi says it can't be a widespread issue well duh because it was a review sample which typically means that it's from before it goes public third it's a review sample our policy is pretty simple if we find a flaw in the product we're going to cover it doesn't matter if it's review sample the liam li mesh case that we looked at not long ago actually the pre-mesh but the lancole 2 we talked about how there was a chip in the magnet in the door that you'll never see that's not a big issue lanley didn't freak out about it you know what they did they put foam on the freaking tiny magnets and that issue was resolved that's the correct response msi instead is trying to say that we shouldn't talk about it or we shouldn't have back then because somehow this is not going to be a widespread issue and we're supposed to trust them and here's the thing if you can't get a laptop to reviewer without defects why should we trust that you msi can get a laptop to a customer without defect that's what i didn't voice as angrily as i am now so you know where it's going you know why it's going there and it should be in the best state possible this i took them at their word back then i was naive but it wasn't shipping damage looking back at it uh this is this was just actually a problem with that laptop it might have been a manufacturing defect but anyway let's get back to the email quote i would like to share the review i just wouldn't like to have readers make any wrong assumptions about the product and its quality so i i'm not bowing to a bully here that is a threat and it's if it's not intended wasn't intended to be one it was perceived as one and msi knows that between the lines bs that they're playing it's basically that's a nice review you have there it'd be a shame if something happened to it so back when we were smaller a lot of our early traffic came from social media sites and shares on facebook when it was relevant msi was trying to use that as a lever to remove the criticism of its fatberg of a product at the time and so we replied again a lot more kindly than i would have today uh but here's the response just to give you an idea this is from us quote i understand your concern and empathize with where you're coming from our loyalty lies with our readers and we have to make sure that all defects even if they are rare are reported fairly to maintain the correct balance of reporting rarity does not negate occurrence a bit later in the reply we wrote this quote the section comprising the damage is 84 words the entire review runs 3 200 words most of them positive the 84 words used to describe the defects contain the following sub quote we've encountered one somewhat major issue with our gt72 unit but suspect and have been informed that it is likely that this is shipping damage it popped back together easily enough end quote further in the email we said if reporting a defect excludes a review from being shared that is an exchange i am willing to make in order to retain integrity objectivity and independence from industry pressure to curate review content if you're new to this you want to be like us that's that's the way to do it you gotta if you really believe in what you said and what you found stand by it uh so anyway at the time we said that uh because of discussions with msi at the time it could have been shipping damage and really looking back today if i were told that now i wouldn't have believed it and i would have pressured a lot harder but the point is that msi freaked out about something that was a really small section of a review and that was from my perspective today i have so much much more experience now uh that was what i would consider to be too light-handed in my review talking about that defect and they still freaked out so anyway we want to have the patience for that kind of response today but that's why we are where we are now uh before we make even more points about how this issue is deeply ingrained in msi's culture allow us to present further examples this next one is from 2017 and it's from a different representative back when we released our pcb analysis on the msi x370 titanium hosted by bildzoid we posted the video with the title quote overpriced vrm design on msi x370 x power titanium the thumbnail read quote disappointing vrm and still does that board was killed quickly by msi in terms of production it kind of left the market and that series hasn't made much of a return and the company eventually came back to make some of the best brm's and boards on the amd market but it did take a few years and it wasn't without attempting other methods at improving public perception first the first attempt to not fix the products but fix the image was to contact us and request a change here's a screenshot of the conversation quote hey steven and then a screenshot of our video i just saw this and the wording on this is a bit negative towards our brand first of all this is more or less exactly what msi said to tech team gb so it is still using this phrasing this is different representatives across multiple years so this is something that we think might be trained at the company although we can't uh we don't have evidence to support that it's trained at the company but certainly one could assume that based on this behavior it might be msi at the time was upset that 26 000 people had seen a video that it perceived as quote negative towards its brand we can see how many people hear about that now see it see how that worked out so uh continuing on we responded with quote yeah it's a price disproportionate vrm design on a 300 board you guys used the same fets on 150 boards and then we affirmed our trust and bill zoid's opinion msi said quote but he didn't have the board question mark he was using photoshop to do the video is the board picture from you we said that's the style we do for all those pcb videos check any of his pcb analysis videos for example and then we linked our msi 1080 ti gaming x analysis which was actually positive it wasn't an accident that we linked this one it was a reminder that we play fair if it's good we say it's good if it sucks we say it sucks msi then had the wherewithal to ask this quote is there any way to not use such a term like overpriced vrm on the title and we said you take the good with the bat the motherboard is way overpriced the gpu is pretty good msi's representative said to us quote i think that's what they are concerned about uh the they here breaking the quote is in reference to the taiwan headquarters which receives the blame for all of these actions we asked msi what we ask any angry commenters did you even watch the video after confirmation we said okay so then you know that the title is pretty tame if i titled it something i firmly believe it i will forfeit sponsorships before i change my content to match a manufacturer's request msi's rep said okay gotcha i will check with hq on this and discuss about them with the video we suggested that they ask hq why hq uses the same mosfets on all the motherboards we'll put the rest of the conversation on the screen but won't read it further so here's our opinion of this situation it seems that no one is standing up to hq the us headquarters has its own staff and can stand against the main headquarters without risking losses but it has decided not to do so other companies like gigabyte employ people in the us whose entire job is to push back against hq's demands when they are not compliant with how the media should work in this instance msi doesn't have an equivalent contact who pushes back this next section i'm going to talk about how it seems like msi tries to stall criticism this is one that a lot of reviewers have run into probably with more companies than some of the other issues and it's less directly evil or slimy and more of just it's it's either a stalling tactic to try and delay publication and delay harm so that the content goes up after it's relevant and people don't care as much don't watch it as much or sometimes it's genuinely because the company's trying to fix the product we've certainly seen that a lot several of the case companies over the years we've talked about how they have tried to fix things because of the reviews we've had in flight and progress not published yet but in this case msi uses delaying publication as a tactic to try and reduce the relevance and diminish the meaning of the reviewer's work such that the viewership is lower and so msi's damage is is perceived to be lower so this is one that we can talk about from the perspective of both gn and from what tech team gb has shared with us msi tries to stall publication of criticism it promises internal validation of results we've learned that going straight to the pms and the engineers solves basically all this you need to know the right people in the company you scoop past pr and you go straight to the people who actually do the work and in every instance and basically all these companies we've worked with the engineers and the pms as stated earlier have always been pretty honest with us so if you can get to them then you might get an answer on the follow-up testing that msi keeps promising and begging you to delay content we'll put some screenshots of conversations on the screen during all this but they beg to delay the content so they can look into it which is fine that's fair but there's a limit to the amount you can delay and one does expect at some point that the results will come back and they'll say whether it's valid or not as a few examples back when we tested msi's m.2 heat shield we did a lot of testing and were able to produce content around the fact that the shield at least with the hardware we tested actually made thermals worse and msi called it literally a heat shield it was intended to be a sink not a shield but the end result was that in a lot of instances it made performance worse but we validated it on multiple other products msi internally validated the results as well and it just never shared them with us so instead what happened was the company kept telling us please please stay tuned for we're going to test it please don't do follow-ups we're going to try and see what's happening and then the company goes silent and about a year later after i had toured several factories and facilities of msi in various parts of asia we learned from engineers that they were able to validate our results and they saw the same stuff as us and this has also happened with hardware unboxed by the way where he's done work where msi has validated his results with vrm testing in the past and msi doesn't always share it directly but i'm sure he's got ways to go fetch it just like we do if you bypass the wrong people so anyway msi in that instance actually attacked us in public streams msi uh later removed those streams after we went through legal channels and said uh wtf you doing like one year wrong to your attacking media and uh three your engineers proved you're wrong so anyway that was kind of how they dealt with it at the time they removed all the content where they attacked us we did save it all though and that was their way of dealing with criticism with tag team gb we have several additional examples of where msi was trying to stall his publication of the review and they were trying to do so it seems indefinitely so it's one thing to ask for some time to validate data but it does need to be validated and shared with the reviewer that's the fairness you're saying i will give you time out of fairness but you need to come back to me with your results otherwise i'm publishing last section here not going to read the emails but we'll put some of the stuff on screen so we've had numerous instances of how msi strings along reviewers as well it does this with new reviewers we don't have this issue these days again we could we buy any part we want to test and if that's the way we need to do it that's fine we have done that but with newer reviewers it's not wrong as a reviewer to try and get samples and it's not wrong especially as a newer reviewer to do what you can in the ethical sense to get in the door with the company and get the samples that might include meeting them at a trade show meeting them at their hq whatever but you're trying to show like hey i'm serious i'm not just trying to get free stuff but what msi does is they will repeatedly over years in the cases of our email threads we have with them promise that you'll get to keep the card next time or whatever it is it was always video cards for us and uh to just explain if you're not aware reviewers often want to keep the product not because they or we want to use it personally i have an fx 8370 at home it's underclocked and undervolted i have an old video card i don't care all this stuff stays here specifically for the business so reviewers typically want to keep the stuff for regression testing all those revisits we do that's because we try to keep the hardware or because you're doing work where you're you're trying to provide a value for the viewer and do more than just benchmarking the newest stuff so you can have a comparative as new things come out which is sort of regression testing but slightly different so that's why you try to keep the cards if you can and what msi will do is in when you're in the process of reviewing something it will repeatedly promise that you might get to keep it you'll get to keep it next time whatever and the whole point of that we think our perception is to try and get it so that the reviewer leans positive such that msi will fulfill its promise of letting you keep the product next time that clearly didn't work with us but it could work with some people especially if they're new they don't have money they're trying to get this thing going and they think you know what i can sacrifice a little bit of ethics right now for longer term gains or whatever but uh even if it's not conscious like that it's very likely subconscious or at least msi hopes it becomes subconscious or the reviewer is tweaking what they're saying in their write-up or video as it is these days uh so that they can try to keep the card next time but it ends up backfiring in cases with us we've got plenty plenty of examples of that and hopefully we sincerely hope it would backfire with other reviewers too who want to be ethical and do this the right way but that's what msi tries to do they try to string you along and say you'll get it next time with the implicit being that it might tweak consciously or subconsciously the opinion that is presented at the end with hopes of keeping the next product so we think this is als also very unethical even if msi doesn't msi would never admit to doing it this way they'd be like well it's we don't have enough of them but some of these products they had a lot like they couldn't even sell some of these because they no one wanted them so our perception is that it's a tactic and our perception given the context of everything else is that msi has a deeply rooted problem where it is training people we think to go out there and try to influence reviewers in a way which is beyond what is acceptable in a way which is beyond reason there's a lot of things that people will try to do to sort of pull your arm a little bit and whether or not the company's representatives are ethical really hinges upon is it is it pulling your arm like trying to twist it to change your opinion of things uh which would typically be done with threatening samples or is it more like trying to like hand this fruit over you put have like a fishing rod with some money on it or something to try and pull you along and that's where as a reviewer it's really important if you're watching this and you're in this space it's really important that you decide what kind of outlet you want to be and what kind of things where do you draw the line on where you allow the companies to help you and where you don't and stuff as simple as dinners we don't you know flights we don't hotels we don't anymore so anyway our thoughts are that msi has serious problems they are deeply rooted the company is behaving exceptionally unethically it is not okay and we're not going to go easy on them when talking about things like this but it also won't influence the review of the products because unlike msi we actually have ethics and we will try to draw the line to divide where the product starts and where the company's shitty behavior starts that's what i think so that's it for this one uh check out tech team gb definitely his dedication to doing things correctly is admirable it reminds me of how when i started i would struggle with these same types of issues and not have quite the platform to deal with it in a way that was as it didn't have as much impact as it does today so check them out but msi get it together go to story.camerasnexus.net to help us out directly and offset the cost of us forfeiting the ads we just gave msi or go to patreon.com gamers nexus helps out there as well subscribe for more thanks for watching we'll see you all next time [Music] the

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 695,477

Rating: 4.9654016 out of 5

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, msi, reviewer blacklist, what does blacklisted mean, techteamgb, msi bravo 15 review, msi bravo 15 laptop review

Id: O6BXwCJtaZE

Length: 33min 37sec (2017 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ser_renely]

Damn...Steve had enough. Good stuff.

Will be interesting to see what blow back he gets.

[u/captmorgan0210]

TL;DR: MSI has a consistent history of trying to silence poor reviews. They do this by either low-key offering bribes to not publish bad reviews, making false promises about being able to keep review samples, among other things. MSI has been doing this for years and for the most part the more tenured reviewers have handled it behind-the-scenes; however, what broke the camel's back was MSI pulling this stuff with a smaller reviewer, who then posted exchanges with the company on Twitter and tagged Gamers Nexus. Steve then promptly proceeded to kick MSI in the dick several times and severed his ad partnerships with them.

From the comments in the video, it seems ASRock also got pissy with both Hardware Unboxed and Gamers Nexus over their Z490 reviews.

[u/Padpigfrogurt]

Hardware unboxed also did a video on the same subject. https://youtu.be/79ToTB08TY8

[u/mon0theist]

All that effort and resources put towards trying to silence bad reviews when it could've been put towards making better products

[u/ZacXme]

Which manufacturer to go for then?

ASRock isn't any better, same for ASUS and also Gigabyte?

[u/TanishqBhaiji]

I am just fed up with all manufactures crippling AMD laptops everywhere, no AMD laptop has a display with above 100% sRGB display, more than 400 nits, more than 1440p resolution, good cooling for the CPU and GPU, any thunderbolt port ( but that may be more of AMD’s fault),an alarming number of laptops have TN and other crappy panels even the Zephyrs G14, a GPU above a 2070 Max-Q (I don’t believe the bullshit that AMD didn’t have enough PCIe lanes for scaling, Intel had only 8 till 10 Gen but they got paired with the highest end GPUs, even in SLi sometimes), only some have acceptable build quality and track pads, a surprising number of laptops have soldered RAM. This not a conspiracy or AMD being bad in being able to collaborate with other companies, it’s them manufacturers taking Intel’s thick checks and getting willing enslaved by Intel .

[u/lutel]

MSI just stop your media reps contacting reviewers or you will get burned badly. Let the engineers talk to engineers. Your messages looks like threats, actually there are regulations and laws that could be used to protect consumers against deceptive practices.

[u/jahan4516]

I recently bought a MSI B450 Tomahawk Max because it was highly recommended by every reviewer that did a piece on it. Heavy reliance on reviews is very common among PC building enthusiasts.

Imagine buying a completely shit product because you can't find any negative reviews of it. Or worse, buying something, say, a month after launch and only then seeing negative reviews pop up because of these shady delay tactics.

I am not sure if this is just their PR team or a systemic culture of pushing sales regardless of product quality. Either way this needs to stop.

I am very happy with my MSI GPU and motherboard and will keep buying from them, but I will certainly refrain from buying anything MSI at launch.

[u/InvincibleBird]

This video is in large part connected to the controversy regarding the way that MSI handled a negative review of their Bravo 15 Ryzen laptop. The video also covers a situation from 2017 when an MSI representative had issues with the PCB breakdown of the X370 Titanium motherboard. As such I believe that it is relevant to this subreddit.