nVidia reliability

[sschaem]

Well, another nVidia chip bites the dust. So far 2 laptop and 1 desktop IGP and 2 desktop cards, all nvidia... dead.
I think my EVGA card used low quality ram I can boot, but the screen is just garbage.
It had a 10 year warranty but I didn't register within 30 days, so this card is just landfill material.

The interesting part is that EVGA now only carry 3 years on the 6 series, but 10 years on the 5 series.
I like the 660 Ti, but not with a 3 year warranty.

So I might spend an extra $90 and get this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814103210

It seem more future proof then the 660 ti.. or get a cheap second hand 560 ti class card.

[Jive]

How old are these GPUs that crapped out on you? If it is more than 5 years then it is not unreasonable for them to die... The most likely culprit is the capacitors, in which case the same can happen to any Radeon card.

[Krogoth]

Outside of the infamous "bumpgate"*. Nvidia silicon works just well as anything else out there. Their drivers are pretty solid for the most part unless you are using beta releases.

It sounds like most of your victims were part of "bumpgate".

*- Bumpgate was basically a manufacturing issue where the soldering in FCBGA would "ooze" out slightly from thermal expansion and contraction. It would be just enough to cause hardware failure. The soldering quality was party at fault, since it had to use more environmentally friendly materials in order to be ROHS compliant (no lead). It mostly affected silicon made during G8x-GT2xx era. Laptop units saw this more due to their thermal cycle and usage patterns. Nvidia tried to bury this issue under the rug, but got a ton of flak for it. IIRC, they end-up replacing a bunch of units.

There were some users who decided to bake their own cards in a house oven (IIRC, it was around 300-350F) for about 30 minutes and got their cards working again.

[Madman]

Never had a problem with Nvidia cards. Maybe something else is going on there? Power spikes?

[Arclight]

Outside of the infamous "bumpgate"*. Nvidia silicon works just well as anything else out there. Their drivers are pretty solid for the most part unless you are using beta releases.

OH NO YOU DIDN"T
nvidia drivers can be and for many people are bad.

[JustAnEngineer]

Outside of the infamous "bumpgate"*. Nvidia drivers are pretty solid for the most part unless you are using beta releases.

OH NO YOU DIDN"T
nvidia drivers can be and for many people are bad.

Like this?
http://www.pcworld.com/article/191813/n ... _risk.html
NVidia's 196.75 drivers actually destroyed many GPUs.

[Chrispy_]

It's Krogoth; You do know he's just trolling you, right?

[Krogoth]

Outside of the infamous "bumpgate"*. Nvidia drivers are pretty solid for the most part unless you are using beta releases.

OH NO YOU DIDN"T
nvidia drivers can be and for many people are bad.

Like this?
http://www.pcworld.com/article/191813/n ... _risk.html
NVidia's 196.75 drivers actually destroyed many GPUs.

That's completely unrelated from bumpgate.

196.75 problem came from incorrect fan profiles on a large range of GPUs. By default, the FAN speed would be set to low all of the time and never turn up at max speed. Nvidia's QA team royally screw up on this one. I'm more surprised that Nvidia didn't pulled the drivers from their website once the problem became apparent.

ATI/AMD had their fair share of drivers causing major issues over years. AGP issues, GDDR5/voltage settings related problem, Catalyst AI bugs, etc.

[Waco]

Sounds like it's time for the oven trick!