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PowerColor; bad manufacturer?

lolage

lolage

lolage

fiveub's Slave
Associate
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1 Sep 2007
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1,461
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OcUK HQ
Hey, I've got the choice to either get my computer fixed tommorow at a local computer shop free of charge (instead of £20) if i buy a PowerColor HD 5770 for £130.

However, I also have the option to just pay the £20 and buy for example a better brand with a better warrenty. But would be good going to the local shop as they will be able to help out in future if i have other problems.

So, is the power color brand actualy that bad? Any advise would be great - thanks.
 
The legal minimum warranty is 12 months.

I would say that if a gfx card is going to die, it will be dead the first time you ever use it.
They do break outside warranty (I would think mainly from massive overclocks) but with electronics if it is going to break then it is usually broken when you get it.

Does not matter on the brand, they are all the same underneath.
 
I had a Powercolor 4870X2 die on me and they replaced it, was good customer service, just very slow. I shipped it to the netherlands I think and they posted a brand new, sealed one back. I'd buy their cards again.
 
PowerColor do quality producs, no idea how good their Customer Care is or RMA but the products they manufacture are top quality. I prefer Sapphire but that's not an option here.
 
I think the only 2 brands worth getting at the moment are xfx and gigabyte, correct me if I am wrong though as regards to good fast uk based rma service.

If we are talking rma gigabyte has uk returns based system and xfx has that ocuk premium warranty service.Rest of them you probably have to send to germany or holland at your own expense.


xfx gets my vote at the moment because of this
***EXCLUSIVE Premium Priority 2 Year Warranty***

In the unlikely event of your card failing within 2 Years, OcUK will replace your card with a brand new one, pending testing within our standard RMA terms and conditions
Click to expand...
 
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But the OP isn't getting it from OcUK. (even though it's cheaper at oc)

OP, nothing wrong with powercolor in my experience (3 cards), all of them still going strong to this day.
 
I won't buy a Powercolor card ever again, they never even bothered to reply to numerous requests for an RMA for a dead £300 card.

Thieves.
 
......... I wouldn't buy another PowerColor - if the card tanks and you need to use their RMA process you'll come to regret it.
 
mglover070588 said:
The legal minimum warranty is 12 months.

I would say that if a gfx card is going to die, it will be dead the first time you ever use it.
They do break outside warranty (I would think mainly from massive overclocks) but with electronics if it is going to break then it is usually broken when you get it.

Does not matter on the brand, they are all the same underneath.
Click to expand...

Partly true.

I used to repair TVs. New TVs would usually be faulty out of the box, or show a fault within a few days/weeks of use. However, faults do occur after a period of "wear and tear". I would think that with graphics cards it`s a similar story - either faulty in early use, or faulty after a longer period of use. I suppose the least likely time for an electronic item to show a fault is after a few months of use/before several years of use.
 
Aye, capacitors and resistors can change their values over time with heating/cooling cycles as well. Once they go too far out of tolerance they will evetually disrupt anything further down the chain. Not to say that will always happen, you will get some that drift a lot and others that hold their spec for years.

My PowerColor 4850 has held up really well so far, it gets a crapload of usage and had no problems.
 
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p0rks0da is right. Electrolytic capacitors do eventually "wear out". If they are exposed to too much heat, they dry out and lose their capacitance. This will often lead to all kinds of faults. Heat will also cause solder joints to crack or go high resistance.

BTW. Ain't nothin' quite like sittin' 'round the house swillin' down them cans of swine.
 
Although I've had one or two powercolour cards, which never died on me, they won't be at the fore front of my mind when I make future purchases. At least for a while anyway. It would seem they have a poor customer service reputation. However, like Asus, I consider them to deliver decent products and like I mentioned, the cards I had worked perfectly fine and were among the best I've owned.

In fact, the quality or workmanship is seldom the issue when looking out for potential pitfalls. It's the integrity of the company customer service which helps enormously in generating more sales. That's what I consider most before pressing the buy button.
 
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The best brand to get is rather irrelevant, a good retailer will test the card, find it faulty, send a replacement same day from stock, RMA the dud card, get a brand new one in return and put the brand new one in stock for normal sale. AIB's have entirely no problem with that setup, neither do distributor's. I can count on one hand the number of companies who ship repaired parts back for replacements, they are VERY few and VERY far between.

Asus were about the best, we filled out serial numbers of items in a rma form, no other info necessary(to distributor who covered Asus for us), we sent them off and we got brand new stuff back VERY quickly. Company I worked for has sinced gone under though, but a good retailer will pretty much shield you from all RMA woes, they are very few and far between themselves though. a certain very very small, and direct company from up north insisted on waiting to replace my not made any more gigabyte board, and 5 weeks later ended up replacing it with a newer version from stock anyway, which I asked them to do the second they confirmed it was broken.

Needless to say I don't use them anymore, they used to be fantastic though, bought a gf4 ti200 way back, tried it, was completely unimpressed as an upgrade from a gf3, asked if I could return it and buy a 9700pro from them when it was out in a few weeks, they said no problem and held back a 9700pro from the first shipment they had, I had one days after release, and it was freaking awesome. Not as good anymore though :(


Powercolor barely do anything to the card anyway, at the moment AIB's are basically putting stickers on still, thats about it, everything else is done for them, some 3rd party ones are out and are slightly different, generally still made by the same people to the same quality level.

Most cards will be DOA, the odd one dies in shipping or slips past QA, the massive majority of the rest will die, eventually through overheating, clogged fans and or overly hot rooms and cases. A few will die due to users smegging up, replacing heatsinks, not installed correctly, something along those lines.

ACtually quite a lot die after fans die, which again leads to overheating and long term damage. Asus cards were ruddy awful for that ages ago, their custom 2 fan coolers had horrible fan quality, we got loads of those cards back, x800 era, and both fans were dead.
 
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Cards are fine, but from reading people's opinions on customer service, they sound poor when trying to RMA a card. a lot of people don't want a PC card because of it.
 
This is a funny thread simply because there is an ad for the Powercolor HD 5870 in the top-right corner as I am reading this hehe
 
The thing is, if you were selling a card for cheap (let's say it was a 5850) and it was a Powercolor, you would probably have trouble selling it, just because of past experiences with Powercolor have been difficult for the majority of customers.
 
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