No matter the price bracket that you want to party in you are always going to find things to complain about. For just a bit more I could have gotten a pretty awesome 1060. Or even stepped up to the 1070.
Yes. I was looking at those too. I think I'll wait for the time being as bells and whistles and RGB really are secondary with respect to my current build. As I type its posting on an old ATI 5450 which is pretty much all I need to start setting up the build. I can afford the luxury of taking my time window shopping. That XFX card really did get my attention though. Too bad they didn't make a less glitzy version of the same card sporting the same performance and cooling solution.
EVGA for Nvidia, and XFX for AMD. Only companies I will by from, but they both are US companies that have real people to talk to and stand behind their products. As far as I am concerned any tech company can have a bad product or 3, its more about what they do to make it right and stop making the error latter for me. YMMV
EDIT: maybe this shows my age, but REAL customer service does matter to me.
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I can't stand the RGP crap.
Just another sales gimmick. People who want bells and whistles and lots of shiny lights can always install them independently IMO.
Yeah, I enjoy minimalist design.
Move out of canada :I
Brand loyalty is never a good idea. You have to evaluate products on a case-by-case basis, with no exceptions. EVGA cut a lot of corners on their 1st iteration 10 series cards, and the more budget XFX 480's are pretty terrible, too.
EVGA customer service is good, sure, but, it doesn't matter if they replace your cards quickly if the first 3 you get (in my case) burst into flames or pop a mosfet within 3 weeks of purchase/replacement, and then they try to charge you $100 for an upgrade to the non-exploding model of the same chip.
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Explosions are fun though!
not if the things doing the exploding are doing days-long renders that you get paid for
I still like the Sapphire cards. And let's be fair, Polaris is not a high-end GPU. So I can totally see why Sapphire is not over-engineering the crap out of it. My Fury Nitro is a completely different beast and that is the level of quality I would expect from a RX Vega Nitro card.
Each to their own, name another company that happily replaces a $450 motherboard because water got on it?
I had 0 issues with my 1080, but only had it for 2 weeks before I was shipping it back for the Ti,
Like I said, it's about the individual product. Brand loyalty is dumb, every brand in the industry is more or less hit and miss.
From what I hear the new 1070/80's fix a lot of the problems and poor design in the first iteration. I'd have no problem recommending those cards, but I almost never recommend any brand because there's always lemons, EVGA = most recent case in point.
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^This. Every company makes at least some junk. Going with an MSI board "because it's MSI and MSI are always amazing" is a pretty dumb and ignorant reason to get one. You should balance the features you want with the price point you're looking at, with the reviews of the product. and always read those reviews properly.
my own example: The Asus DirectCU II cooler on the HD7970 was terrific (albeit huge), but on the one for the 290X iirc one or two heatpipes didn't even make contact with the die. They'd used the cooler from the 780Ti. What they got was a hot, loud Asus cooler that would have been fine had they just re-engineered the cooler.
Most people only realize this after they've been gaming or been in the industry for long enough. It's usually the new less experienced ones that fall for the brand loyalty trap.
Over the last 10+ years I've had parts from every manufacturer under the sun every brand has had it's share of garbage in there and with every purchase there was a salesman or friend who tried to tell me otherwise.
Sometimes they where right, mostly I was right, because I didn't evaluate parts on a brand name basis, I evaluated them each on their as their own and checked them against standards and production quality. There where a few duds I purchased (most recently some RAM for Ryzen that turned out a fail) but brand never played a part in it. Choosing PC parts is a bit like a Job Interview, you don't want the guy who already looks most like the other guys in your office, you want the best one for the task at hand at a salary you can afford to pay.
Yeah, seems like ryzen really dislikes everything except b-die kits at the moment for whatever reason.
G.Skill is marketing the shit out of that fact right now, selling b-die kits as "amd compatible" or "ryzen optimized" so expect that brandshare to explode in the next few weeks.
I must be one of the exceptions then. I was a loyal ASUS client at least since 2002. The very first GPU I ever owned was on an ASUS NVIDIA card and the card is still fully functional. I blossomed into a fan boy after my first ASUS build and it's been nearly two decades for me but I have to say that in the last 5 years I've seen over all quality in ASUS products plummet. I'm not sure if this is limited to personal experience but I've read many complaints about this from others as well. To me it really seems a shame but I learned my lesson about being a fan boy for sure. I didn't really bully anyone who didn't like ASUS products but they used to be my #1 choice. My last build persuaded me to stop being such a fan boy. I mean, man when you have to return a motherboard 4 times and the last three weren't even worth putting on a test bench by just looking at them that's really gotta tell you something. It's a little hard not to take it personal.
I also had a problem with my Asus mobo. The integrated network card stopped working for a few days and I already had ordered a new Intel PCIe network card for 41€. I shutdown my PC always for the night, those shutdowns didn't get the integrated the card working again but then I left from home for the weekend and unplugged the power from the wall and when I came back on sunday the integrated card magically worked again.
could be a thermal issue
How? Like the integrated card overheated? Or some other component affected it? Btw This happened a year ago and the mobo has been working fine otherwise, have been using the Intel card anyway so don't know how the integrated one is doing.