#149 ... I agree. I don't think it's the power supplies, but it might have been the person who speced them. Cost constraints are engineering and consumer nightmares in the making. Someone always gets bunt from it.

#145 ... No, actually that's the opposite of what I said.

The fact is that I had lost a few, and that I know others that have lost a few where we had never lost a few before. I don't know what I problem is, or who caused it. I do know that we are not alone. I do know that there are people taking action for the failures. I know that Nvidia is going through great lengths to make us all happy, which is great, and we're happy that they are taking a stand to correct the problems. And, I do know that we usually lose a card every couple years at most, but we've lost 7 in the last two. All of which were Nvidia 88 series and discrete. I really like some of the 8 series cards personally. For instance, I have a pile of MSI Fanless 8600GTSs that have been chugging away for the last 2 years. Their slow, and can't be used in SLI on most boards, but they have never given me the slightest issue.

When you have someone breathing down your neck to finish a 600mb tiff for a project and your machine fails in the middle of it, you look bad, your boss looks bad, and evenone in the office feels the tension that much more.

The "specuation" seems very accurate to me personally, but I'm not an electrical engineer so I couldn't tell you what caused our problems. I just know their dead when they shouldn't be dying. This costs us time and money, and makes our hardware decisions that much harder to justify to the GM. There are better cards on the market today, with a company that has a better internal track record, so why should we waste our time?

LOL out of 1.9 million shipped since November 07 turns out 188 were faulty.
You "Nsist" on Nvidia types want some icecream with that humble pie?

I have always maintained that ATI/AMD sucks. To be more precise, they might currently have a small lead over Nvidia in the market right now, in spite of beating nvidia's top GPU with 2x their GPU's but eventually those ATI chips will fail. I've had problems with overheating many times. Since then I always nsist on nvidia now.

Anyway, this is getting off-topic. This is about Radeon failures.

#141 The problems not with the design, it's with the process itself. And yes, it effects 8800 series parts as well. I have lost a several of them here, however you would have to have some one that's in the know to be able to tell you if this is really the issue. You can find information out about it here: http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=707920 the article origionally comes from TG daily, and it's very specific unlike Charlie's rant. I should also mention that I have NEVER lost an ATI card, Ever, and I have been through more then most will in their lifetime.

As far as price, I was talking one 4870 X2 verses two 280s in SLI. Or as I'm using them (2) crossfire 4870 x2s to three 280s. Not that price is so much an issue. I think I paid $2600 for these Quadro 3450s over three years ago, but their long in the tooth and Quadro/FireGLs just don't seem worth the money to me. They've been good cards, but I don't have SLI because I use two monitors. I remember talk of duel monitor SLI here recently, but I havn't looked into it further. Kind of seems pointless. I had considered testing a pair of the GX2s some time ago, but there were some driver and support issues at the time.

As a side note. Although I sounded like a fanboy before, my personal machines all have 8800 or 8600 series chips. I even have a Nvidia discrete GPU in my Laptop. So I'm just as aggrivated as everyone else about the whole deal.

Why does tech chat have to get so personal every single time? Some of the people here really need to look up what "anecdotal evidence" means and stop taking their pooter hardware so damn seriously. All of it becomes obsolete and inconsequential in a couple of years anyway.

I love that when I clicked on this article, I saw an ad for a Diamond 4870.

I starting reading all the messages, then gave up have way. Let's look at the facts:

The problems were with a specific vender, not ATI's chips, and is one reason why ATI doesn't like to sell it's chips to independant board manufactorers. Not only that, but GeCube goes on record as saying that there was a incorrectly installed capacitor on the cards, and that the power supply units were incorrectly rated for the job. So unless ATI's making the capacitors and power supplies, then this is not any of their concern.

Secondly, Nvidia is the company currently having problems from faulty chips. Not the cards, not the capacitors, the chips. Why do I know this? I have one. Two in fact if you include the laptops I deal with at work. Nvidia is being sued for these chips, and their failure rate is more then twice the ATI cards. That being said, there are some things I like about Nvidia cards now, and in the past, but I wouldn't touch one right now.

I am a professional. I am a Snr Graphic Artist and Draftsman with over 15 years exp. I sit here typing on a duel Quad Xeon workstation with 2 Quadro 3450s and a pair of 24" Samsing monitors. I also purchased 12 4870 x2s yesterday for department upgrades. Why? Lower failure rate, better performance, better Directx 10.1 support, better display quality, better driver support, and finally they were simply cheaper. The only advantage to going Nvidia at the moment is the new cuda features in Adobe CS4, but ATI is involved with the meat of that too. Just my 2c.

Well, this doesn't change much. I really don't understand corporate loyalty...

I'm still wondering though: Where is Charlie reporting this ?...oh right, he's too busy fabricating rumors against NVIDIA.

#16, LOL at your fanATIsm...

I'd like to know what an acceptable failure rate is for cards.

nvidia chips are falling like a rain :)

When I saw 123 comments, I said to myself "either a lot of gerbils have bad cards, or a flame war hath erupted."

Didn't take long to get an answer. :-\

I don't know what are you trying to prove Asif1924. But, i can tell you that your way in discussing things is pretty openly selfish and arrogant.
your opinions about Nvidia/AMD are .......BS...and worthless.
I have my powercolor 4870 clocked at 865/1080 and the fan set to 35% and the card loads under 60c.

best wishes for less stupidity from Robspierre6.
Ohhh and i hate your nick Assif.

Fighterpilot: Looking at Asif1924 maybe you will see how silly you seem most of the time. Just an FYI, eye openers like this don't come around too often so I didn't want to pass it up ;)

Asif1924: 2K a week isn't much, as you yourself stated. One of the places I work at does that a week strictly in hardware for systems and servers and a small but still significant percentage of that is actually high end systems which include high end video cards.

Failure rate from both camps is almost nonexistent. Really the only time we have problems is from crappy fans that die (both camps suffer from this) and trying to be cheap and buy the least expensive cards we can find. Dirt cheap Nvidia/AMD PCI cards for dual head support in operatories almost always meant we were going to have a problem of some kind. Neither of these instances usually apply to the high end video cards.

Really out of all of the high end gaming machines we have put together I would say the most telling issue of all is that some Nvidia cards seem to have this weird stuttering problem. It tends to be with specific games and drivers have zero impact. The games can even show a high FPS but are almost unplayable. Not saying it was frequent but if we have any problem with a card it’s usually that. After an RMA it usually clears up too so I have never really wanted to pin it to other components or the software. Throwing an AMD card in its place clears it up too.

If anything, seeing the failure rates from a system builder is more telling than your experiences, hopefully that clears it up for you. Perhaps you have had bad luck with your home systems. I also don’t want to step on any toes of other Nvidia fanboys, this is a pretty rare occurrence but since someone wanted to get down to the brass tacks when it comes to reliability I wanted to share my experiences.

GPU Temp at LOAD:

GTX280 - 76 C
4870 - 84 C

Looks like your attempt to counter me failed :-)

Oh man I SO want to see a three-way anonymous internet posting fight between Adisor, Krogot and this Asif1924 jackass. That would be the rumble of the century!

"It is time to kick ass and chew bubble.... I am outta gum......"

-Duke Nuked going postal on a certain poster. XD

"Nsist on Nvidia","NVidia FTW" ...lol
Guess us poor old ATI owners will just have to soldier on with what we have and hope they don't blow up.
This new troll Asif is such a good partner for Prime1 I could hardly have organized it better myself :)

The 3800's were garbage anyway.

Man, this Asif guy is a real piece of work. You spend $2k a *week* on hardware, huh? Good for you. Everyone, let's all give a round of applause and salute Asif's enormous e-peen.

These kind of people make me sick.

This news comes from the Inguirer.It has been reported according to TI that a shipment if DIAMOND's 3870 were found to fail at relatively high rates,2-10%.this new shimpent.
Diamond doesn't make cards, they buy cards from large board makers. This is very common, most GPU sellers in fact do not make their own boards, they contract out to large Taiwanese OEMs, or in some cases, rival board makers.

The boards appear to be made for Diamond by GeCube,So these chips are not the reference ATI chips.

Some blame GeCube for sub-standard boards. Others blame Diamond for installing a substandard BIOS.
But again,It's not the 3800 series it's a new batch of 3870's and some 3850's cards that Alienware got from diamond.And those boards were manufactured by GeCube not ATI.

the irony here is deliciously melting

If Radeon chips are also suffering from chip related problems. It is most likely a problem with TSMC.

I was going to buy a 1GB diamond 4870, but now I wonder if I should go with another brand.

I am waiting for the first company that makes a card go into low power mode say 25 to 50 WATS at idle, no more than 75 while on the desktop. I could care less for cards that pull 120 + while sitting idle at the desk top, and all I have seen so far is the power requirements going up so all you gerbils can argue who is better and or faster. Where are the innovations? Because if you think about it, no one card will ever be fast enough.

Where's Fighterpilot to pull his "Minister of Information" act.

Nothing to see here....the US troops are nowhere near us.

LOL

eventually, this is a problem that only Alienware have had.That if.....they have had it.Cuz these days you have to take everything with a lot of salt.
What if the whole article form TGdaily is false.and it was/is planned or directed by Nvidia to weaken the attention to their faulty chips.

/me looks at his Diamond Stealth 3d 2000 video card

While it's not proof, I did run into POST problems when my Diamond HD3870 was in my system previuosly. Went in lots of circles troubleshooting memory and BIOS setting during the boot process. Eventually got a HD4870 for different reasons, but this makes me wonder.