Well, I received my new Classified board at the end of last week and got around to installing it Saturday morning.  I couldn't get the thing to POST.  The diagnostic LED would only display the letter C with no number.  Contacted support and went through re-seating the processor and RAM with no change.  Robert recommended that I return the board to Amazon.  I had been on the fence between the Classy and the FTW K, and while discussing it all, Robert mentioned the FTW K had an instant rebate this weekend, so I went ahead and pulled the trigger on that and just did a straight defective return to Amazon for the Classified.
 
Anyone else had a defective Classified out of the box?  I mean, I've had issues with past boards where they needed BIOS updates out of the box to truly be functional but this was the first time I had picked up a board that failed to POST.

howdy2u2
Nothing as far as DOA out of box, just BIOS like yourself. I steered away from the Classified on Amazon since none of them were shipped and sold BY Amazon.(Affects "Step up" and such) Then I was looking to see if the Classified on the EVGA web store was "On Sale" and noticed the FTW K was $120 off................and poof it ended up in my cart, ordered/paid for now just waiting for it to be shipped!

bdary
That's a bummer, but it can happen.  I've bought many EVGA products over the years and never had one DOA, but I did have a motherboard (X79 Dark) with a dead PCIe slot once.  Of course, EVGA replaced it without hassle and the replacement worked great and is still in service today.
 
Enjoy your new FTW-K board when you get it all up & running...

I hope to.  Still up in the air as to whether the issue is the CPU as I didn't have another 2011 unit to throw in there.  Robert felt the MB was the likely culprit.  I still can't believe they were running a $120 instant rebate on the FTW-K.  That is a huge savings on that board and if it had been going on at the time the Classified was actually ordered, I would have went for the FTW-K up front.  I have no reservations about buying EVGA.  I've never had complaint for how they have handled any device I've had with issues when I've reached out to them.

When I RMAd my X79 Dark last year for a boot issue (turned out it and the replacements just needed the supplemental PCIE power plugged in when I wasn't even running two GPUs) I did get a replacement in that was DOA with a C post code.

The funny thing was that the DOA board was brand spanking new, still shrink wrap.

iSpot
The chances of having a DOA on a new MB is slim to nothing, specially from a great brand name as EVGA. All product goes through validation and quality check prior to packing. I run a mid size computer hardware retail business for over 25 years and most of the time, if not all the time, DOA is always from mishandling, installation mistake, or due to some other user related issues. I had 5 different x99 classified boards recently, and I do not have any issues related to hardware defect. I love EVGA as a company, they have the best support staff I ever delt with in my over 35 years of my professional computer life.

I definitely agree on EVGA's support staff.  They are why I buy EVGA in the first place.  As to the chances, I can only say that it wasn't mishandled during the installation and only top grade components from case to power were used.  i got into building my own PCs back in 1991 with a 486dx-33 on a Gigabyte AT motherboard and there have been too many to count since then.  This is the first machine I've had not POST.  To me, there is still a real concern that the issue is with the i7-6850k processor as I didn't have another board to test it in, or another CPU to test in the Classified.  I'll know the answer to that this weekend as the FTW-K is due to arrive on Friday per UPS tracking.

Good to hear...

Nice

 
Glad everything worked out fine.