Video Card Rating

[glc]

Same reason Asus makes good Asus and bad Asrock.

[Khalil]

Yep, manufacturers buy huge volumes of chips and GPUs, even though those chips and GPUs are made by the same factories, they are not all the same quality so what the Video Card or Motherboard makers do is create a sub brand to move the lesser product with a different warranty and support. The premium components are put in the Main brand (Asus, Sapphire) medium quality workable go into (Asrock, Zootac) Asus won't use the poor quality components and sell them for recycling however PCChips probably uses them to make ECS and XFX products.
You get what you pay for. This is why glc and I are constantly harping on people to get quality components.

My conclusions are my opinions based on examining and working with thosuands of different motherboards and graphics cards and may not be 100% accurate as I have no way of knowing for sure what goes on at Asus, PC Chips etc..

[id10x]

yes khalil i get ure point .. zotac is not cheap at all i paid good 200$ for my 9800gtx+
in april i could have got a 4890 by now ..

it was the only brand in yoyo anyway ... so i am a no choice man ..

i just hop i get lucky like my 6200 xfx card , it has been working very good
for over 4 years now

[id10x]

Originally Posted by Khalil The premium components are put in the Main brand (Asus, Sapphire) medium quality workable go into (Asrock, Zootac) .[/I]

but haw can they use ati materials to make nvidia ? is that possible ?

and btw xfx is an expensive brand guys :

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814161278
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150368



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150401
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130504


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130339
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150341

[Khalil]

If you buy an XFX/Zotac and you are happy thats great, our experience tells us not to recommend XFX/Zotac.
How much they sell for is not really relevant to how well they are built, when a new card is released or is top of the line all the prices regardless of brand is comparable, it is later when the prices begin to drop is where you see the difference in pricing.
Price is not the issue here, it is the warranty and support after the sale. There are XFX/Zotac cards out there that will work forever without breaking down. No one is suggesting that every XFX/Zotac is going to fail, we are simply not recommending them because of the high rate of failure and the bad customer support they offer.
All we can do is recommend and it is up to the buyer to make the right choice becasue the buyer is the one who will be living with their choice.

[id10x]

Originally Posted by Khalil You get what you pay for. .[/I]

i was commenting on that
yes i understand what you said ,, i wanted evga but they only sold zotac at yoyo shop
you dont always have the choice ... i just got worried when u said

I tried XFX on 2 different large builds, one of them was for 68 systems, we had 32 fail while burning them in.


am not arguing .. so dont waste ure time doing that

[id10x]

Originally Posted by jdeb kool! i think you will be ok with the zotac though, for what it's worth

do you consider this as recommendation ?



edited : hey what about palit ?

[liambl]

Even is XFX quality is low, I don't find their support terrible and lack of RMA. When I reported my GT200 buzzing, they offered me a replacement RMA (so much for Khalil saying its non existant), and even offered to test the replacement card before it was sent to me to make sure it didn't have the same problem. They responded in a matter of hours and were friendly and helpful (stark contrast to ASUS). If that is not good support then I don't know what the heck is.

[Khalil]

Originally Posted by liambl (so much for Khalil saying its non existant)

You are in New Zealand, XFX support in that country if it is as you alleged may differ than what we get here in the United Sates. I recommend you think before you attempt to discredit someone like me. My experience is for the United States Market, I live and build computers in the United States. I realize you might be burned and mad as hell because you bought something the rest of us here are saying is crap but that is a choice you made, don't take it out on me!!

[liambl]

From my experience Leadtek has been quite high in quality (I have a few GeForce 4's and FX's that still work fine), and their products seem to be well made. I would probably put them in the black zone as I havn't dealt with customer support.

[ynehl06]

MATROX has been around for a long time. Most of their stuff isn't for gaming or end-user builder systems.
IIRC, Matrox stuff is used in servers and workstations in which only minimal graffix is required. I am a bit surprised at the fact you have ranked XFX so low. I have used their cards a few times along with recommending them to others and have NEVER had an issue. I haven't heard too many bad things from reviews either. This is really pertaining to the nVidia side though, not ATI.

I have also used MSI for a long, long, long time and they have never given me a problem. Their customer support has always been EXTREMELY awesome and fast about anything I have ever needed. I remember at one point, when I had my 6600 GT's running in SLi, both heatsink fans went out around the same time... I talked to MSI customer support and they shipped both for FREE, very, very quickly.

[Khalil]

I only reported through my experience, I buy in volume, normally 50-100 or more cards at a time, my rating is based on the brands I used, the rate of failure, how the manufacturer responded and dealt with the problems and the speed of RMA. I have no doubt others will report different experiences and this is why I believe the mods left this thread open so others like yourself can input.
I own an XFX 5200 Ultra that is 8 years old, it is still running strong, not every single card XFX makes is going to be faulty, they would have gone out of business by now, however I will continue to not recommend them because of the high rate of failure I have experienced with their brands (ECS).
As far as MSI, I think they make really innovative computer parts, some of their motherboards have incredible features for the price, recently I bought 3 790FX-GD70 motherboards for folding from MSI (to use 4 GTS250 cards per motherboard), every one of them failed within the first 2 weeks, they RMAd me replacements fast but 2 of the 3 that came back were DOA.

[tomster2300]

Guys, just use common sense when you purchase cards. Of course not every card from every manufacturer is going to be poor quality - like Khalil said, XFX would have gone out of business by now if that were true.

Congrats to you too if your decade old card is still running - by design they're supposed to work or they wouldn't be much of a product.

I don't typically respond to threads full of back and forth ranting, but please quit making Khalil continuously have to defend himself. I appreciate his input, especially since his opinions are based on large batch orders / builds instead of just one or two card purchases. If samplings from a certain company continue to produce duds, then the possibility of you picking a future dud with your one purchase increases dramatically. It's just simple statistics.

Just my two cents.

[Disgrace]

Anyone heard of Gainward? My vendor sells a lot of them, just for your information...

[Khalil]

I used a few of them (no more than 10), never had one come back, I no longer buy from the distributor that sells them so my experience is very limited with Gainward.
This does not mean I am recommending this product!!

[David M]

You have to go with experience of someone with thousands of builds....not ones persons personal experience with one or two cards. Its called using statistics to your advantage. The larger the sample field, the more accurate the statistic. Its not hard to understand.

[glc]

I'd like to add that I just had a very good RMA experience with MSI. The procedure was easy (online) and prompt. I prefer not to buy them, but at least they did stand behind it.

[id10x]

i think zotac is pulling up a notch . they have big propaganda with the new fermi cards
well my zotac amp factory oced card is very good . and never runs hot over 75c

and also why you did not rate palit ? its very famous and i would like to see were they stand .
thanks OP

[glc]

Palit is not rated because very little is sold in the US, and apparently Khalil has never dealt with them. YOUR Zotac card may be fine, but he is going by general history.

[MaxRat]

As glc said...

Palit covers very little USA market and at one point last year pulled from the US markets but came back early this year....

Palit is also known as Gainward...

[glc]

I remember Gainward - isn't that also Leadtek?

[jdeb]

I find some of these posts quite amusing... All these experts having the inside clues and such. I am looking at the same zotac and a saffire card right now (with the fan covers off). not one bit of difference in the chips except for the dates of manufacturing. I guess it may come down to dates.

I agree about quality chips and all but the average consumer or technical guy won't know about these. My experience has been it's a roll of the dice no matter what brand you buy. I have had more Asus failures than any other brand, Foxconn is still the most reliable board from my experience.

[glc]

I didn't know Foxconn made video cards.............

[jdeb]

Originally Posted by glc I didn't know Foxconn made video cards.............

I started out ... never mind it's not worth arguing.

http://www.foxconnchannel.com/product/GraphicCards/

[David M]

Originally Posted by jdeb I find some of these posts quite amusing... All these experts having the inside clues and such. I am looking at the same zotac and a saffire card right now (with the fan covers off). not one bit of difference in the chips except for the dates of manufacturing. I guess it may come down to dates. I agree about quality chips and all but the average consumer or technical guy won't know about these. My experience has been it's a roll of the dice no matter what brand you buy. I have had more Asus failures than any other brand, Foxconn is still the most reliable board from my experience.

The more computers one builds, the larger ones field is to draw up accurate statistics.

I would trust the opinions and experiences of someone like Khalil who has built thousands of computers over the experiences of another who has only built a few computers.

For them, the brand of graphics card does make a difference, from what I have read of their experiences.

[Khalil]

Originally Posted by jdeb I find some of these posts quite amusing... All these experts having the inside clues and such. I am looking at the same zotac and a saffire card right now (with the fan covers off). not one bit of difference in the chips except for the dates of manufacturing. I guess it may come down to dates. I agree about quality chips and all but the average consumer or technical guy won't know about these. My experience has been it's a roll of the dice no matter what brand you buy. I have had more Asus failures than any other brand, Foxconn is still the most reliable board from my experience.

Hey Jdeb, I am glad I amused you

[matt99881]

I have never had an issue with XFX and I thought their customer service was actually pretty decent...

What happened to you lol?

[glc]

NOTES:

Sapphire does in fact have end user support. I have not tried the support but I just got a RMA processed in a very timely fashion.

You can create a support ticket on their website (sapphiretech.com) but you have to create an account. I have NOT done this. You can also get support by e-mailing tech@althonmicro.com. I have not done this either. I got my RMA by e-mailing rma@althonmicro.com. Within 20 minutes they e-mailed me back a RMA form (Word document) to fill out and return with a copy of my receipt. I printed a copy of my Newegg invoice to PDF and attached that along with the completed form. Within another 30 minutes I had a RMA approval and instructions. It took 2 weeks from start to finish, but all but 3 days of that was in shipping both ways. That's an excellent turnaround.

MSI: I used the online RMA request on their site a couple years ago, and service was almost as timely as my experience with Sapphire.

[tomster2300]

I know this is an old thread, but I was wondering if you guys still considered Diamond as a top-tier video card manufacturer? I haven't paid attention to video cards since my last post in this thread from 2009 talking about the Radeon 4870 purchase (which proved to be a stellar card, btw), but just picked up a Diamond Radeon 7850 the other day and wanted to know if they were still top-tier.

Thanks!

[karapet]

Originally Posted by Khalil This is a similar post like I did for the motherboards but for Video card brands. Blue Excellent Quality with Superior tech support and Fast RMA Service. Green Excellent Quality With not so good Customer Support and slow RMA service Purple Mid Quality with Good Customer support and fast RMA service Black Mid Quality with Poor Customer Support and bad RMA Service Red Very Poor Quality with Very Poor Customer support and non-existent RMA service "you are on your own" ATI (workstation cards, not for gaming) Matrox (workstation cards, not for gaming) rating per glc ASUS Diamond EVGA Sapphire HIS Gigabyte PNY Sparkle Biostar PowerColor MSI VisionTek Galaxy Apollo Zotac XFX Jaton Chaintech BFG (OUT OF BUSINESS, DO NOT BUY, NO MORE RMA'S, IF IT BREAKS YOU EAT IT) I have never used Sparkle or Matrox so I have no rating for them

Very helpful info list, but as I noticed it was created 3 years ago. Could anybody please confirm that this list is still correct or if any adjustments has to be done to the list.
Please post it.

Thank you