Gigabyte USA review: Denial of warranty coverage

In USA and Canada, as far as I know, consumer protection laws require companies to repair or replace items bought that because of a manufacturing defect were unable to function as advertised. I had exactly such a situation with a motherboard I purchased from Gigabyte technology, inc. (a Taiwan company with USA subsidiary). The motherboard boasts 3 year warranty. My issue was immediately evident, but because of the nature of the problem, took me a long time to diagnose. (a few months). I am an advanced user if not outright expert in computer hardware setup and trouble shooting, with 25 years experience of building computer systems from parts, as well as high level training in electrical engineering. I am a chemist by trade, the above is a hobby I am passionate about. My training is through continuing education programs and high school electronics classes.

When I set up this motherboard [gigabyte AURUS TRX40 master rev.1.0] I immediately had problems configuring NVMe Raid, and this simple task took me over a month to successfully set up. The problems continued, lots of crashes, always seemingly random and very severe, blue screen or even power fault shutoffs. These are not at all normal errors. My system ran very hot also, and it was during an upgrade of cooling systems that I discovered the bent pin in the CPU socket, I attempted to remove the CPU but it seemed stuck, again, very unusual behavior, and when I gave it a stronger pull, it did pull free, but pins were damaged. This is not something caused by my incompetence, I have set up at least a dozen systems with the threadripper AMD style socket without incident. I followed directions to the letter and used the supplied torque wrench to tighten the CPU retaining screws. The logical conclusion is that the motherboard was supplied with a subtle imperfection in the socket, which passed both visual QA and my inspection prior to CPU installation. These pins are tiny, it is easy to miss one of them pointing a little to the side or whatever.

My main evidence is the trouble I had started from the first moment I had it. It did not develop over time. The strangeness of the problem made it not easy to identify, and as such I spent months of frustration trying to figure out what I did wrong. I will always assume I did something wrong until evidence is clear I did not; that is what makes me good at my job, and unfortunately, it also made me easier to discredit by the warranty denial team at gigabyte! They asserted that CPU sockets are not covered by warranty, but I countered with consumer protection laws, easily goggled under consumer protection bureau of trade and commerce or something like that. This was not in the script of the RMA team, and they continued to look for excuses. "Why didn't you return it immediately?" I explained my professional ethos of assuming the problem is with me until I can prove it isn't, but again, this idea was completely incomprehensible to them. I made several efforts to remedy this problem, I even surrendered and said "fine, I will pay for the reballing of the socket" [they first quoted me $100 but later decided to double this for no reason. I said go ahead and fix it anyway. They replied by sending the MB back with a one line comment "we found a short in the MB, and this is now 2 problems, so it is not repairable."] I am certain you are experiencing the same reaction as I had.

How did the standard slip so far down to allow this kind of abuse?