The people who cite Stern as the model of quality and customer service is laughable. They've had all kinds of quality issues that they haven't stood behind and created huge PR disasters while people waited for some sort of resolution - ghosting, dimpling, cabinets splitting, spike issues, node board failures.

Let's do a little comparison. The Stern warranty is only 2 months and only covers the PCB and 9 months on the monitor. API is 3 months on *ALL* parts of the pinball machine except plastics, rubbers and posts and 1 year on the monitor. I had a plastic bust and API had new plastics shipped to me in 3 days at no cost to me.

This is the first bad node board from API that I've heard about. It's not like a there has been a flood of boards dying. API has bent over backwards to listen to their customers and to help their customers on this forum. Barry was great to deal with.

To the OP, you might want to check with Multimorphic to see if they would cover the part under their warranty. I'm not sure what the terms are but it's worth checking. Plus, the part might be cheaper directly from them.

Don't be silly. I said it was the first node board issue *I* heard about. I didn't claim to have insider knowledge. These boards are widely used in many, many machines outside of API and have been available for quite some time and I haven't heard that there is a problem with the P3-ROC. Do you have some data that you'd like to share that would make me more enlightened?

What I have heard is a flood of Stern bitching over the last couple years over all sorts of quality issues that they didn't cover INSIDE the warranty period and all of a sudden Stern is this perfect company that stands behind everything and API is the devil after one person reports that a node board died OUTSIDE of the warranty period. I'm not even arguing that the OP shouldn't be pissed off but this mob mentality over one report is rather overstated. That is the point I was trying to make.

Or the same community that bitches constantly about Stern quality and then throws money at them every time they release a new title? I call BS on this whole band of brothers thing.

I'm not picking on you personally but I find it amusing that literally hundreds of people on this forum bemoaned Stern's lack of quality over the past few years and declared that they would never buy another Stern. Now API has one customer with one bad board out of warranty and now they'll never buy an API. Both seem like irrational responses.