I am torn about how this review ended up, mostly because of QC issues with this one sample that may well not affect the rest of the product line. However, despite multiple attempts at communication with Bitspower spanning almost two months filled with promises to ship the mounting kit and also some excuses in between about the retail sample not being one, all I ended up getting was an AMD AM4 platform mounting bracket which came out of nowhere and does not solve anything here! This is not new for them, unfortunately, with similar experiences reported by others and even myself before. As such, I have no alternative but to go with what I have, and that does not tell a good story.

Lack of due diligence is perhaps the best way to summarize the Summit EF-X, with name changes galore and QC issues popping up. Even the backplate provided can interfere with some motherboards, preventing a flush contact, and this has nothing to do with the plating or mounting-hardware issues I had either. For a $95 product, I expect nothing other than near perfection, and we have much less than that here.

There are some silver linings in this dark cloud, however, with good packaging and very good relative flow restriction. Thermal performance was not too bad either, just disappointing again considering the predecessor performed nearly the same.

Overall, even without the QC issues considered, there are simply too many options available that cost less and perform better. As such, I can not recommend the Bitspower Summit EF-X as it is now. Improve QC, get someone to actually handle customer support, cut prices by $10-15 and then we will talk.