Graphics Card Build Quality Complaint

[Freddie1980]

This is aimed at AMD, Nvidia and all there respective board partners (Sapphire, Asus, EVGA, MSI, XFX, XPert Vision, VTX et el).

Now earlier this week my friend was having some problems playing Counter Strike Source but he was unable to play as he was getting artifacts, screen corruption and loading the game would lead to he's PC hanging after a period of time. In the end I took out my video card and went over to he's house and swapped out his video card (Geforce 9800 GTX+) with my Radeon 5770 and after I sorted out the drivers Counter Strike played fine as did all the rest of he's games. To make sure it was his video card that was causing the problems I took it home and installed on PC and I got the same issues and these issues got worse and worse and now my PC can't even boot to Windows without the screen artifacting or crashing.

Now my mate is forking out £85 to replace he's video card but I couldn't help but think he's been let down. I'll accept the 9800 GTX+ is an old card but I know for a fact that my friends 9800 GTX has had a very easy life and by the same token he's a simple gamer and not a computer enthusiast and to him overclocking means he's watch has been wound up to much. You have alos to bear in mind he only upgraded he's PC 3 years ago so if could play Star Craft 2 (he thought along with a lot of other people the game was going to be released some time in 2009) and he's been busy studying for he's CIMA membership and the games he does play aren't that demanding (most demanding game he has is Medieval Total War).

If you stalk this forum for a week you will find countless threads on dead video cards yet we are all to quick to write it off to bad luck and get to business of finding a replacement. So I ask why is it the discerte video card industry can't/won't make video card longer then 3 years without something going wrong on it? Are designers and manufacturers purposely designing and building these cards to fail after a set amount time forcing us to part with our hard earned? Why is it every CPU, motherbaord and Ram I've owned over the last 15 years worked flawlessly yet just about every video card I've owned has failed or gone wrong?

 

[eddiew]

CPUs are incredibly hard to break unless you hit them with a hammer, voltage, or heat. Motherboards... well, I've definitely had duffers, from leaky caps to randomly not finding my hard drives. RAM, I've had that pop as well. And my voodoo banshee one day wouldn't go into 3D mode

Consider a 3 year graphics card failure to be the karmic compensation for having other stuff that lasted a long time?

As for are things made to fail: frankly, yes. Almost everything is these days. If it weren't, we'd all buy 1 car, 1 dishwasher, 1 laptop, 1 TV, and be happy until we die, while the manufacturer goes bust because nobody is buying anything anymore. In a saturated market, it's suicide to create products that last a lifetime.

(Also graphics cards endure some of the highest temperatures in a PC, sometimes touching 90 degrees C under normal operations, let alone when the fan is full of fluff.)

 

[Lunawolfy]

Everything is made to break. As above Manufacturers will use the cheapest parts possible to maximise profits.

You can't skimp in a GPU warranty, RMAs do seem commonplace, however if we all decided to each make a thread tomorrow titled 'My GFX card works fine!' frankly the forums would die XD

As for the length of warranty I've one word: EVGA

 

[Semple]

In a saturated market, it's suicide to create products that last a lifetime.

(Also graphics cards endure some of the highest temperatures in a PC, sometimes touching 90 degrees C under normal operations, let alone when the fan is full of fluff.)

Couldn't agree more with both of these statements.

 

[Tealc]

Solder reflow it in an oven. It's a well known thing with older Nvidia cards. Some people buy broken cards on eBay, bake them for 20 minutes and sell them on for profit.

 

[nshire]

Why Products don't last

Luckily I have never had a GPU die on me but had a motherboard (gigabyte P35 (2years)) die and believe my OCZ SSD (Since May) is faulty (testing in my laptop at present time before RMA)