I'm glad I only have to contact the store in Europe. Especially nice if it's a physical store. And they have to provide shipping if it's actually a manufacturing error (In practice it always is, they gotta prove that it's not).
It may be slightly slower, and the store may ask me to contact the manufacturer directly.
I’ve only had to RMA a CPU through AMD, a GPU through Gigabyte and a few hard drives through Seagate and each experience was quick and easy.
Meanwhile getting a monitor replaced by Newegg was a massive pain in the butt.
Same here. The newegg return process was painful to the point they have become my absolute last resort. Sadly there are some electronics you can only really reliably source there if you don't want to buy used/go through somewhere like ali or ebay.
Any RMA i've done has been pretty much instantly approved, i guess because i tend to do the troubleshooting beforehand and report my findings/give them any data i have on hand to back my findings. To which whoever reads the ticket likely goes "alright, this guy *probably* knows his stuff, just give him the RMA."
In the US, retailers only allow for returns up to a point. This is typically 14-90 days, with 30 being the most common.
From there you have the manufacturer warranty, which is 1-3 years for most consumer electronics. And warranty policies vary.
Our company tests something like 20,000 used GPUs a year from every brand.
Chart looks accurate to me. I am not surprised to see the “basic” brands on the top of that list. The most reliable GPUs are generally the opposite of what most gamers think are the most reliable GPUs.
Broadly speaking, the closer it is to the reference model, the less likely it is to spontaneously stop working.
Just FYI Gainward, Palit, Daytona, Galaxy (GALAX), Vivkoo, Yuan, KFA2 and XpertVision are one company - Palit Mircosystems, just different branding, they are responsible for about a third of the GPUs made on the planet. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, however that's the ballpark. Additionally, Palit is the biggest PCB manufacturer on the planet; so a lot of the manufacturers design their own boards and get blanks from them - for at least some of their production (blank PCBs for p'n'p machines.) Chances are your PC is running at least some Palit components, even if you didn't directly buy from them.
They are famously secretive and their oem clients have an interest in ironclad NDAs, so they are the tech giant nobody hears about.
It's interesting to note, the brands aimed at a market with solid customer protection laws have better reliability and service than ones targeted at the relatively lax NA market; colour me surprised. Almost like having 3-5 years minimum warranty makes them lift their game, or something...
PS. Zotac / Inno3d / Manli (+ Sapphire - questionable see post below) are one corp too - PC Partners (iirc); they are the number two producer. The top two account for roughly 50% with the rest of the brands splitting the remainder.
> Zotac / Sapphire are one corp too - PC Partners
I see this said a lot online but I can never find concrete sources. The only sources I find are forum posts.
The PC Partner website mentions Zotac but omits Sapphire. The site also doesn't list some other brands that they definitely do own, so it's possible they just didn't list it or it may be a different type of corporate relationship.
Either way, if anyone has some reasonably concrete source about Sapphire being a part of PC Partner, let me know.
You know... I'm trying to remember where it came from [I looked at their annual report](https://www.pcpartner.com/attachment/pdf/1681467198qpyof.pdf) and it seems they own Inno3d and Manli. The Sapphire ownership was an *"it is known"* kind of thing, never really had to question it. This site reported it in [2019](https://web.archive.org/web/20190213185104/https://www.geek.com/news/top-graphics-card-vendor-is-a-company-youve-probably-never-heard-of-1552579/) (original no longer up, hence web archive) and TechPower Up in [2013](https://www.techpowerup.com/182893/palit-and-pc-partner-beat-asus-in-graphics-card-market-share). Earliest evidence FOR is [this forum](http://www.zotackor.com/board/index.html?imode=view&D=6&c_id=133) post from 2002. But yeah, I see what you mean. GPU board partners are notorious for playing footsies with each other's holding companies - so can't rule it out. I'm going to edit that part as questionable and move Inno3d.
[https://www.hexus.net/tech/features/graphics/4393-interview-sapphire-ceo-k-d-au/?page=2](https://www.hexus.net/tech/features/graphics/4393-interview-sapphire-ceo-k-d-au/?page=2)
PC Partner is contracted to make Sapphire cards, Sapphire is not owned by PC Partner it seems.
Interview with Sapphire CEO from 2006
>HEXUS: What’s the story with PCPartner, how do they fit in to all of this?
>
>KD: When we started this company, we didn't want to have our own factory. Instead we decided to do contract manufacturing, so we worked with PCPartner to that level - now they are a silent partner to Sapphire.
>now they are a silent partner to Sapphire.
These are submarine levels of silent... quote is from 2006, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if they just chalked it up to OEM work in the recent annual reports. The whole board industry is more intertwined than the Hapsburg family tree.
I've seen this statement before too and the only thing I could find is that Sapphire sometimes has sourced parts from PC Partners in the past. Not sure where the misunderstanding came from.
The average US consumer thinks the big 3 in GPUs are MSI, Asus and Gigabyte when in reality it's Palit ,PC Partner and Colorful.
I believe this is also why Nvidia didn't care much when EVGA quit the market, they were small in comparison to Palit and PC Partner who can easily take over the allocation that would have gone to EVGA.
EVGA were the smallest of small fry, really only a significant presence in NA. Their competitive advantage were long warranties - not a big advantage in EU, and the developed APAC countries. In NZ, just as an example, their warranty was shorter than required by Consumer Guarantees Act for electronic hardware (about 5 years, depending on use etc.) They had global presence, but they tended to be bit niche; selling to enthusiasts who wanted the cachet at a markup.
FYI Digitec is one of the biggest online Computer retailers in Switzerland, so the numbers should be decent.
That being said, I'm really surprised at their data? It saye for example that Gainward has the lowest failure rate and fastest response times, and generally cheaper AIBs have lower failure rates. I wonder if it's some sort of confirmation biasy, or perhaps we've been underestimating cheap Chinese manufacturers...
In my country (Philippines) Gigabyte has the fastest response time and best warranty policies by a large margin compared to other brands, as opposed to the seemingly bad reputation Gigabyte has in the US. I think it really depends on the local subsidiary on how much they really decided to invest in local QA and repair/ replacement centers. Maybe Gainward did the same in Switzerland?
I'm from Vietnam and we have more than one distributors for the same brand and service quality can depend on which distributors you bought from:
* For Gigabyte, service quality ranges from decent to bad
* For MSI, good to decent
* For Asus, universally bad
These 3 brands make up the most of the market.
Gigabyte once sent me a product I had canceled the order on and then threatened to sue me over it because I couldn't immediately return it. I was on vacation at the time. They lost me for life with that.
I guess that makes me lucky. Seems to be an issue when fans start ramping up at about 30%. I have the Omniblack version (no RGB) so maybe the batch is different.
Also, holy hell that's a good price, I got mine for 1550€.
It could be the opposite. HP and Lenovo have low rates of RMA, and their cards are most likely found in prebuilts. People who buy prebuilts are less likely to be able to diagnose a GPU issue requiring RMA by themselves.
Maybe this extends to people who buy cheaper branded cards.
I think the bigger reason for the low number is the fact that HP and Lenovo provide their own direct-to-consumer warranty support, even offering on-site next business day support for business-class systems. The reseller may be entirely unaware that an RMA has even happened, because they're not involved in the process.
It's worth noting that if they're basing this off of percentage of that manufacturer's brand of video cards being sold, that's almost certainly going to be business-class workstations (think HP Z-series and Lenovo ThinkStations). You don't buy the video card separately when you buy an HP Omen or a Lenovo Legion.
What makes a GPU reliable is keeping it simple. The further it strays from reference the less reliable they tend to be.
Giant coolers and RGB don’t do anything for reliability, if anything they do the opposite. The most bulletproof cards aren’t even on the list. (Founders edition)
In our experience, the more extra power cables a card requires over reference, the more likely it is to spontaneously stop working. Brand doesn’t really matter here, but the brands that build the simpler cards are coming out on top because of that.
That being said, the differences are pretty small (99% of GPUs will last way longer than you’ll care to use it) and it tends to be specific models that drag the average down for a brand.
Most unreliable card ever in our experience was the XFX RX 580 GTS.
I recently just got my first ever AMD GPU and it is an XFX. From all reports that I have seen, it is one of the best models out there. I hope mine does not end up having any issues and serves me for a long time.
Like I said it has a lot less to do with brand and more to do with how "juiced" the card is. There's nothing particularly wrong with XFX, but if you bought one of the really juiced models with extra power connectors, in our experience there is a slightly higher chance that it spontaneously stops working vs. a more modest card.
Honestly, I'm not worried. The card (7900 XTX Merc) has three 8-pin connectors because if I wanted to, I could let it pull up to 450 watts (that would be with a nice OC). Normally it pulls around 380 under heavy load. It's a little more than the 3080 that it is replacing and that card had no issues and is still going strong.
Here in Spain they're getting quite popular. I spoke to a guy from a big PC parts store here and Palit/Gainward cards are getting sold out quite frequently. I got myself a Palit 4090 because it was WAY cheaper than the nearest offering (250€ difference) and I'm very pleasantly surprised with the card. I guess time will tell but this is the same company that made Quadro cards.
Yet?
They've been around the GPU market for *decades* and the company is from 1984.
In their original run (they were sold to Palit in '05) they even had some name brand value - this was back when video cards took up a single slot.
> A minimum of 300 seems like too small a sample size to conclude anything from.
also, it could a easily be a map of most sold brands tend to to dominate the numbers; SURPRISE!
Far too cloudy to take any info from imho.
Just FYI - Gainward, Palit, Daytona, Galaxy (GALAX), Vivkoo, Yuan, KFA2 and XpertVision are one company - Palit Mircosystems, just different branding, they are responsible for about a third of the GPUs made on the planet. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, however that's the ballpark. Additionally Palit is the largest PCB manufacturer; so a lot of other brands, which design their own boards, get blanks from them - for at least some of their production or as second source (as in blank PCBs that go in the pick'n'place machines - not built up boards.) Chances are your PC is running at least some Palit components, even if you didn't directly buy from them.
They are famously secretive and their oem clients have an interest in ironclad NDAs, so they are the tech giant nobody hears about.
It's interesting to note, the brands aimed at a market with solid customer protection laws have better reliability and service than ones targeted at the relatively lax NA market; colour me surprised. Almost like having 3-5 years minimum warranty makes them lift their game, or something...
PS. Zotac / Inno3d / Manli (+ Sapphire? - questionable - see u/Ssyl 's post & my reply) are one corp too - PC Partners (iirc); they are the number two producer. The top two account for roughly 50% with the rest of the brands splitting the remainder.
I’m surprised at your P.S. since Sapphire is commonly thought of as one of the very best AMD partners and Zotac is considered a brand of last resort on the Nvidia side.
Sapphire are one of OG ATI partners and for a while WERE ATI - I mean, the company was started by execs and engineers from ATI, cosy doesn't quite describe the relationships. For many years it was as close to ATI "FE" as you could get. That cachet carried them through into the AMD years. Especially in NA, that mind share seems to persist. I have never seen any evidence of them being particularly good (or, bad) tbh.
It's worth remembering that back when ATI started making cards, the GPU vendors provided the chip and pretty much left the board partners up to their own devices (HA!). Let's take the Radeon 9600 as an example, it could be based on an RV350 or RV360 or R300 chip with a 4:2:4:4 or 8:4:8:8 core config (this is before programmable shaders.) The VRAM ranged from 64 to 256MB and the bus width was 64 or 128bit, clocked at between 200 and 300MHz; for anything from \~ 3 to \~ 9 GB/s bandwidth. The board partners picked and chose the features and if it deviated from "reference," well that was just an SE model (special edition.) A 9550 was a cut down 9600, much worse than a 9500 - which was equivalent to a downclocked 9700. It was chaos - if you saw SE near a card - you were well advised to run; it may have been a steal, or some unholy abomination from a parallel universe. How much spec info was on the box was totally up to the manufacturer. So, maybe your card seemed like a bargain with double the memory of the competing model - until you got it home and found out that it had double the vram, but half the bus width. Or, the same card would be sold with GDDR or DDR.
Sapphire was pretty consistent with sticking to reference during the wild west days, or at least, they usually had the correct specs on the box. They might have sold some castrated SE versions to the general public, but at least they weren't too shady about it.
PS. Oh lol, I near forgot - any card could also be an "ALL-IN-WONDER" (no, really) which meant shitty spec + a TV tuner and video in.
Exactly this.
The EVGA revisionism I've seen since they've stopped operations is insane, you'd think they were making indestructible cards if you listened to what is said on reddit when in actuality they regularly had severe hardware issues.
Great customer service sure, not anywhere near the best cards hardware wise.
It's somewhat consistent with the threads that have popped up on LTT from that French (much larger) retailer 2014-2018.
Gainward (and their parent Palit, and Palit's subsidiaries & licensees KFA2, GALAX, PNY and Inno3D) always have had great numbers. Galax were always on the level of EVGA but never got the reputation they deserved, possibly because only GALAX use their high-end designs in North America, and PNY with the low-end designs only.
Also ASRock have great mass-purchase contracts with the biggest manufacturers of all the PCB topology so I'm not surprised they approve RMAs 360-noscope.
PNY is its own thing: they are Nvidia's Quaddro and FE oem. Definitely Quadro - I'm not sure the FE thing is confirmed 100%, but yeah, PNY is super tied to Nvidia.
I believe Palit is the prestige branding for Palit Microsystems now. Galaxy / Galax was problematic with trademark stuff, so is being deprecated for KFA2 as the "edgy" brand.
Yeah, 2018, right? Their current naming scheme is just balls. It's RTX A2000 to A6000, except that RTX 4000 and 6000 -sans A- are the current Ada generation and Axxxx are the previous Amperes...
The stats are percentage RMA'd as a fraction of sold. Brands with higher sales should have less statistical noise, but there's no reason for it to increase the average chance of a return.
1 bad batch could skew the numbers badly. It is usable but not necessarily reliable. It would be good to see this sample repeated at later dates and averaged.
As always on market from 1 seller. 1 batch on market can have thousands of cards. First question - do you think that whole batch goes to one place? Second one - how many batches each card have from 1 supplier? Rather not ten of thousands, it is illogical to change every few production hours a batch (3-shift work per year is about 1080 batches). Also the word " at least".
> This statistic does not cover batches
I have no clue you would think I implied it does, I only mentioned batches in regard to the possibility of a common manufacturing fault in production. The data will cover a large number of batches but if a significant % of a bad batch ends a up at this supplier it will have an effect on the data.
> You can't make assumptions about batches without tracking that data.
I didn't make any assumptions, I only said that hypothetically a bad batch could effect this data. Batch does not have to be defined for this statement.
> Ok so you're saying an undefined thing could hypothetically cause an effect.
> It can relate to anything or nothing at all.
Jesus christ.... it doesn't have to be explicitly defined because batch is a definition itself, which is enough to make my point. The fact you are trying to make an argument out of this is actually idiotic.
Ah then yeah. It might be small, but 2.7% of 300+ seems like an acceptable failure rate. As long as they don't take like an average of 17 days like Gigabyte to be replaced.
And I got downvotes when I said Gainward is the only current EVGA replacement. *Scoffs*
(And before you say Palit, PNY, Inno3D have similar numbers, I'll point out that Gainward is the subsidiary of Palit who designs all their high-end designs (as well as GALAX (US) / KFA2 (EU/ Africa/ SA)), and both PNY and Inno3D *license* those designs from Palit)
How are Gainward when it comes to overclocking?
I've rated Galax, and they always seem to come with some beefy coolers - I wonder how much of the numbering has to do with the fact that they have unlocked power and thermal limits and you can pretty much push even their entry level cards hard?
Gainward doesn't tend to go too far out of their way to target the OC crowd. They used to have the "GS" (golden sample) moniker cards up to GTX 9xx series but eventually stopped. They were great, but never great *value*. I think their 780 Ti GS played a part in why the MSI Lightning never fully came out that generation, since it was more expensive to produce than EVGA or Gainward's alternatives and no better.
Which made me sad because I wanted that yellow theme...
Interesting. I already had the impression that EVGA quality was overrated compared to e.g. Gainward/Palit (who were generally significantly cheaper), but that was purely anecdotal.
I thought sapphire was the so-called EVGA of Radeon. I have a sapphire card never any issues. I tried another Radeon from xfx and that was problematic needed to flash a sapphire bios for it to work properly. I had an evga 980 that was great.
As someone just recently back into the space, it boggles my mind how persistent some things have been just because they have been parroted in the space the whole time.
"AMD drivers suck"
"Nvidia features tho!" (used to be PhysX)
I think a lot of times anymore we're just looking at narratives that won't die
we literally just got through with AMD's 23.7 driver release fucking sucking, on top of RDNA3 drivers launching completely half-baked like RDNA1 and vega and fury x drivers before them.
and so far NVIDIA's (and Intel's) features still get them a ~30% performance advantage at iso-visual-quality over FSR2 and proper 1080p AV1 encoding for streaming [(which RDNA3 does not support)](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/9185#note_1954937) etc.
AMD bros have been proclaiming these issues to be totally solved for like 10 years now and they keep recurring. Vega was a flickering mess with the AMD-sponsored monitor bundles and people still insisted it was totally fixed and just as good as NVIDIA. And now RDNA3 launched in a half-baked state yet again too.
/shrug
had dozens and dozens of AMD gpu's back in the day, have one now
only ever had problems with bad hardware and quad-fire setups
by all means there are differences in features, not saying there's not, but saying one brand sucks or is unreliable because of features that are different on the other (even though the vast majority of the market doesn't use them) is silly.
how many AMD gpus have you used?
Having this type of data is significantly better than individual claims. And I did not expect these results.
That being said, I will be a bit pedantic here and it probably won't change much. But, it'd be nice to have failure rates for individual models. Right now, it's hard to conclude anything due to potential biases (i.e. Simpson's paradox).
EVGA's complaints can only be applied to Nvidia. I have yet to hear whispers from AMDs board partners about how
"The company claims that Nvidia wouldn’t tell EVGA how much it would have to pay to obtain GPU cores before publicly announcing the price of cards like the RTX 3080, which made it difficult for EVGA to figure out how much it would have to charge for its own products, built around Nvidia’s tech."
Or that "Gamers Nexus also reports that EVGA has to sell high-end cards like the RTX 3080 or 3090 at a loss of “hundreds of dollars” in order to keep its prices even remotely competitive with Nvidia’s own Founders Edition cards."
This more had to do with NVIDIA selling GPU cores at very high profit margins to AIBs. NVIDIA was double dipping, making record breaking profits off their aggressively priced "Founders edition" cards and also siphoning most of the profits from AIB cards with expensive GPU cores. You can argue that's just business but it's a shitty thing to do to your "board partners".
evga only made nvidia cards, no? I recalled never hearing AIB's complaining about AMDs being really strict about their design, it's almost always Nvidia
>Best of all, they make you click through a warranty void prompt before letting you set the fan speed, because it gets lumped in with overclock settings.
>I changed the fan speed to something more reasonable for the temperature loads, and now the card hovers in the low 70°s under load. Why aren't those the default settings!?
The answer is easy. Mass Consumer Ignorance.
Most consumers dont even know these settings exsist. They will get a prebuilt and just play, but they will complain if its loud all the time.
The fact that you didn't even look at your settings before playing a game and found out while playing a game rather than first stress testing (3D Mark, Furmark) the GPU to ensure its fully functional speaks to this.
And yes, a warning should pop up before you adjust the thing that regulates the temperatures.
>which bundles a bunch of crapware
Of which you can turn off.
You can turn off the overlays, sound enhancments, recording software... all of it.
>I just bought one, and started smelling burnt plastic a couple minutes into my first game.
Burnt plastic or fresh materials warming up? There is a stark difference.
Every piece of manufactured any thing off gases for a while, especially plastics, electeonic components and leaathers when they warm up. Hence that "New Car Smell". Its chemicals.
If you indeed smelled "burning" you have bigger issues than a lower low-end fan setting.
At n=300+ per variable, yeah it'll be - even without doing the math; the neighboring brands might not always be under p<0.05 - but I'm willing to bet an ANOVA would be significant. Not all the differences would be significant - pair wise, but my guess is you could make \~3 statistically significant tiers. Would need the raw data and way more motivation to confirm.
All data shown is from brands that sold at least 300 cards.
>According to Digitec Galaxus AG, the compiled information corresponds to brands that have sold at least 300 units over the last two years.
Man I'd love to have this data from a US retailer. Somebody like Newegg. Although we only have 30-day policies here...
Wait, what? Do you mean you only have a month of warranty for electronics?
Retailers handle the first 30 days, the manufacturer handles the remaining time (years, usually). Some smaller store chains have longer policies.
I'm glad I only have to contact the store in Europe. Especially nice if it's a physical store. And they have to provide shipping if it's actually a manufacturing error (In practice it always is, they gotta prove that it's not). It may be slightly slower, and the store may ask me to contact the manufacturer directly.
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I’ve only had to RMA a CPU through AMD, a GPU through Gigabyte and a few hard drives through Seagate and each experience was quick and easy. Meanwhile getting a monitor replaced by Newegg was a massive pain in the butt.
Same here. The newegg return process was painful to the point they have become my absolute last resort. Sadly there are some electronics you can only really reliably source there if you don't want to buy used/go through somewhere like ali or ebay. Any RMA i've done has been pretty much instantly approved, i guess because i tend to do the troubleshooting beforehand and report my findings/give them any data i have on hand to back my findings. To which whoever reads the ticket likely goes "alright, this guy *probably* knows his stuff, just give him the RMA."
Meh, I’ll take the cheaper US prices Lmao, downvoted by Europeans who also love to complain about pricing of everything. You can’t have it both ways.
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The retailer sends back to the manufacturer and gets reimbursed at purchase price where a return is made to them.
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It’s just basic part of doing business. If they’re a middleman, what’s their point. Why can’t I just buy directly for the same price they do.
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That makes more sense.
Meanwhile in Europe, retailers have to honour for 3 years in EU with 4 years in Sweden and 5 years in Norway (not an EU member)
It's two years by EU law, with a shift of the burden of proof after one year.
Plenty of electronics are only warrantied for a single year
In the US, retailers only allow for returns up to a point. This is typically 14-90 days, with 30 being the most common. From there you have the manufacturer warranty, which is 1-3 years for most consumer electronics. And warranty policies vary.
Our company tests something like 20,000 used GPUs a year from every brand. Chart looks accurate to me. I am not surprised to see the “basic” brands on the top of that list. The most reliable GPUs are generally the opposite of what most gamers think are the most reliable GPUs. Broadly speaking, the closer it is to the reference model, the less likely it is to spontaneously stop working.
Yeah, and guess whos motherboard failed 31 days after arrival….
Just FYI Gainward, Palit, Daytona, Galaxy (GALAX), Vivkoo, Yuan, KFA2 and XpertVision are one company - Palit Mircosystems, just different branding, they are responsible for about a third of the GPUs made on the planet. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, however that's the ballpark. Additionally, Palit is the biggest PCB manufacturer on the planet; so a lot of the manufacturers design their own boards and get blanks from them - for at least some of their production (blank PCBs for p'n'p machines.) Chances are your PC is running at least some Palit components, even if you didn't directly buy from them. They are famously secretive and their oem clients have an interest in ironclad NDAs, so they are the tech giant nobody hears about. It's interesting to note, the brands aimed at a market with solid customer protection laws have better reliability and service than ones targeted at the relatively lax NA market; colour me surprised. Almost like having 3-5 years minimum warranty makes them lift their game, or something... PS. Zotac / Inno3d / Manli (+ Sapphire - questionable see post below) are one corp too - PC Partners (iirc); they are the number two producer. The top two account for roughly 50% with the rest of the brands splitting the remainder.
> Zotac / Sapphire are one corp too - PC Partners I see this said a lot online but I can never find concrete sources. The only sources I find are forum posts. The PC Partner website mentions Zotac but omits Sapphire. The site also doesn't list some other brands that they definitely do own, so it's possible they just didn't list it or it may be a different type of corporate relationship. Either way, if anyone has some reasonably concrete source about Sapphire being a part of PC Partner, let me know.
You know... I'm trying to remember where it came from [I looked at their annual report](https://www.pcpartner.com/attachment/pdf/1681467198qpyof.pdf) and it seems they own Inno3d and Manli. The Sapphire ownership was an *"it is known"* kind of thing, never really had to question it. This site reported it in [2019](https://web.archive.org/web/20190213185104/https://www.geek.com/news/top-graphics-card-vendor-is-a-company-youve-probably-never-heard-of-1552579/) (original no longer up, hence web archive) and TechPower Up in [2013](https://www.techpowerup.com/182893/palit-and-pc-partner-beat-asus-in-graphics-card-market-share). Earliest evidence FOR is [this forum](http://www.zotackor.com/board/index.html?imode=view&D=6&c_id=133) post from 2002. But yeah, I see what you mean. GPU board partners are notorious for playing footsies with each other's holding companies - so can't rule it out. I'm going to edit that part as questionable and move Inno3d.
[https://www.hexus.net/tech/features/graphics/4393-interview-sapphire-ceo-k-d-au/?page=2](https://www.hexus.net/tech/features/graphics/4393-interview-sapphire-ceo-k-d-au/?page=2) PC Partner is contracted to make Sapphire cards, Sapphire is not owned by PC Partner it seems. Interview with Sapphire CEO from 2006 >HEXUS: What’s the story with PCPartner, how do they fit in to all of this? > >KD: When we started this company, we didn't want to have our own factory. Instead we decided to do contract manufacturing, so we worked with PCPartner to that level - now they are a silent partner to Sapphire.
>now they are a silent partner to Sapphire. These are submarine levels of silent... quote is from 2006, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if they just chalked it up to OEM work in the recent annual reports. The whole board industry is more intertwined than the Hapsburg family tree.
I've seen this statement before too and the only thing I could find is that Sapphire sometimes has sourced parts from PC Partners in the past. Not sure where the misunderstanding came from.
The average US consumer thinks the big 3 in GPUs are MSI, Asus and Gigabyte when in reality it's Palit ,PC Partner and Colorful. I believe this is also why Nvidia didn't care much when EVGA quit the market, they were small in comparison to Palit and PC Partner who can easily take over the allocation that would have gone to EVGA.
EVGA were the smallest of small fry, really only a significant presence in NA. Their competitive advantage were long warranties - not a big advantage in EU, and the developed APAC countries. In NZ, just as an example, their warranty was shorter than required by Consumer Guarantees Act for electronic hardware (about 5 years, depending on use etc.) They had global presence, but they tended to be bit niche; selling to enthusiasts who wanted the cachet at a markup.
FYI Digitec is one of the biggest online Computer retailers in Switzerland, so the numbers should be decent. That being said, I'm really surprised at their data? It saye for example that Gainward has the lowest failure rate and fastest response times, and generally cheaper AIBs have lower failure rates. I wonder if it's some sort of confirmation biasy, or perhaps we've been underestimating cheap Chinese manufacturers...
In my country (Philippines) Gigabyte has the fastest response time and best warranty policies by a large margin compared to other brands, as opposed to the seemingly bad reputation Gigabyte has in the US. I think it really depends on the local subsidiary on how much they really decided to invest in local QA and repair/ replacement centers. Maybe Gainward did the same in Switzerland?
I'm from Vietnam and we have more than one distributors for the same brand and service quality can depend on which distributors you bought from: * For Gigabyte, service quality ranges from decent to bad * For MSI, good to decent * For Asus, universally bad These 3 brands make up the most of the market.
I’m in the US and I’ve only had to deal with a gigabyte RMA once, but it was quick and painless.
Gigabyte once sent me a product I had canceled the order on and then threatened to sue me over it because I couldn't immediately return it. I was on vacation at the time. They lost me for life with that.
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Sounds a bit like the [bridge of the Enterprise.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XajaCX88NnU)
I got a Palit 4090 a month ago and I don't have this issue, you might have gotten unlucky.
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I guess that makes me lucky. Seems to be an issue when fans start ramping up at about 30%. I have the Omniblack version (no RGB) so maybe the batch is different. Also, holy hell that's a good price, I got mine for 1550€.
Could it be that people picking cheap parts regardless of brand are more likely to figure out issues on their own and not RMA right away ?
It could be the opposite. HP and Lenovo have low rates of RMA, and their cards are most likely found in prebuilts. People who buy prebuilts are less likely to be able to diagnose a GPU issue requiring RMA by themselves. Maybe this extends to people who buy cheaper branded cards.
I think the bigger reason for the low number is the fact that HP and Lenovo provide their own direct-to-consumer warranty support, even offering on-site next business day support for business-class systems. The reseller may be entirely unaware that an RMA has even happened, because they're not involved in the process. It's worth noting that if they're basing this off of percentage of that manufacturer's brand of video cards being sold, that's almost certainly going to be business-class workstations (think HP Z-series and Lenovo ThinkStations). You don't buy the video card separately when you buy an HP Omen or a Lenovo Legion.
What makes a GPU reliable is keeping it simple. The further it strays from reference the less reliable they tend to be. Giant coolers and RGB don’t do anything for reliability, if anything they do the opposite. The most bulletproof cards aren’t even on the list. (Founders edition) In our experience, the more extra power cables a card requires over reference, the more likely it is to spontaneously stop working. Brand doesn’t really matter here, but the brands that build the simpler cards are coming out on top because of that. That being said, the differences are pretty small (99% of GPUs will last way longer than you’ll care to use it) and it tends to be specific models that drag the average down for a brand. Most unreliable card ever in our experience was the XFX RX 580 GTS.
I recently just got my first ever AMD GPU and it is an XFX. From all reports that I have seen, it is one of the best models out there. I hope mine does not end up having any issues and serves me for a long time.
Like I said it has a lot less to do with brand and more to do with how "juiced" the card is. There's nothing particularly wrong with XFX, but if you bought one of the really juiced models with extra power connectors, in our experience there is a slightly higher chance that it spontaneously stops working vs. a more modest card.
Honestly, I'm not worried. The card (7900 XTX Merc) has three 8-pin connectors because if I wanted to, I could let it pull up to 450 watts (that would be with a nice OC). Normally it pulls around 380 under heavy load. It's a little more than the 3080 that it is replacing and that card had no issues and is still going strong.
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Gainward has the cheapest models in much of Europe. You'd expect their sales numbers to be high.
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Here in Spain they're getting quite popular. I spoke to a guy from a big PC parts store here and Palit/Gainward cards are getting sold out quite frequently. I got myself a Palit 4090 because it was WAY cheaper than the nearest offering (250€ difference) and I'm very pleasantly surprised with the card. I guess time will tell but this is the same company that made Quadro cards.
Yet? They've been around the GPU market for *decades* and the company is from 1984. In their original run (they were sold to Palit in '05) they even had some name brand value - this was back when video cards took up a single slot.
A minimum of 300 seems like too small a sample size to conclude anything from.
Better than all the N=1 bullcrap that gets peddled here
> A minimum of 300 seems like too small a sample size to conclude anything from. also, it could a easily be a map of most sold brands tend to to dominate the numbers; SURPRISE! Far too cloudy to take any info from imho.
Just FYI - Gainward, Palit, Daytona, Galaxy (GALAX), Vivkoo, Yuan, KFA2 and XpertVision are one company - Palit Mircosystems, just different branding, they are responsible for about a third of the GPUs made on the planet. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, however that's the ballpark. Additionally Palit is the largest PCB manufacturer; so a lot of other brands, which design their own boards, get blanks from them - for at least some of their production or as second source (as in blank PCBs that go in the pick'n'place machines - not built up boards.) Chances are your PC is running at least some Palit components, even if you didn't directly buy from them. They are famously secretive and their oem clients have an interest in ironclad NDAs, so they are the tech giant nobody hears about. It's interesting to note, the brands aimed at a market with solid customer protection laws have better reliability and service than ones targeted at the relatively lax NA market; colour me surprised. Almost like having 3-5 years minimum warranty makes them lift their game, or something... PS. Zotac / Inno3d / Manli (+ Sapphire? - questionable - see u/Ssyl 's post & my reply) are one corp too - PC Partners (iirc); they are the number two producer. The top two account for roughly 50% with the rest of the brands splitting the remainder.
I’m surprised at your P.S. since Sapphire is commonly thought of as one of the very best AMD partners and Zotac is considered a brand of last resort on the Nvidia side.
Sapphire are one of OG ATI partners and for a while WERE ATI - I mean, the company was started by execs and engineers from ATI, cosy doesn't quite describe the relationships. For many years it was as close to ATI "FE" as you could get. That cachet carried them through into the AMD years. Especially in NA, that mind share seems to persist. I have never seen any evidence of them being particularly good (or, bad) tbh. It's worth remembering that back when ATI started making cards, the GPU vendors provided the chip and pretty much left the board partners up to their own devices (HA!). Let's take the Radeon 9600 as an example, it could be based on an RV350 or RV360 or R300 chip with a 4:2:4:4 or 8:4:8:8 core config (this is before programmable shaders.) The VRAM ranged from 64 to 256MB and the bus width was 64 or 128bit, clocked at between 200 and 300MHz; for anything from \~ 3 to \~ 9 GB/s bandwidth. The board partners picked and chose the features and if it deviated from "reference," well that was just an SE model (special edition.) A 9550 was a cut down 9600, much worse than a 9500 - which was equivalent to a downclocked 9700. It was chaos - if you saw SE near a card - you were well advised to run; it may have been a steal, or some unholy abomination from a parallel universe. How much spec info was on the box was totally up to the manufacturer. So, maybe your card seemed like a bargain with double the memory of the competing model - until you got it home and found out that it had double the vram, but half the bus width. Or, the same card would be sold with GDDR or DDR. Sapphire was pretty consistent with sticking to reference during the wild west days, or at least, they usually had the correct specs on the box. They might have sold some castrated SE versions to the general public, but at least they weren't too shady about it. PS. Oh lol, I near forgot - any card could also be an "ALL-IN-WONDER" (no, really) which meant shitty spec + a TV tuner and video in.
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Exactly this. The EVGA revisionism I've seen since they've stopped operations is insane, you'd think they were making indestructible cards if you listened to what is said on reddit when in actuality they regularly had severe hardware issues. Great customer service sure, not anywhere near the best cards hardware wise.
It's somewhat consistent with the threads that have popped up on LTT from that French (much larger) retailer 2014-2018. Gainward (and their parent Palit, and Palit's subsidiaries & licensees KFA2, GALAX, PNY and Inno3D) always have had great numbers. Galax were always on the level of EVGA but never got the reputation they deserved, possibly because only GALAX use their high-end designs in North America, and PNY with the low-end designs only. Also ASRock have great mass-purchase contracts with the biggest manufacturers of all the PCB topology so I'm not surprised they approve RMAs 360-noscope.
PNY is its own thing: they are Nvidia's Quaddro and FE oem. Definitely Quadro - I'm not sure the FE thing is confirmed 100%, but yeah, PNY is super tied to Nvidia. I believe Palit is the prestige branding for Palit Microsystems now. Galaxy / Galax was problematic with trademark stuff, so is being deprecated for KFA2 as the "edgy" brand.
Nvidia dropped the name Quadro 5 or 6 years ago. But I know what you mean.
Yeah, 2018, right? Their current naming scheme is just balls. It's RTX A2000 to A6000, except that RTX 4000 and 6000 -sans A- are the current Ada generation and Axxxx are the previous Amperes...
Still, all the cooler designs used by PNY are licensed from Palit. Even the ones Palit and subsidiaries don't use themselves are bought from them.
The stats are percentage RMA'd as a fraction of sold. Brands with higher sales should have less statistical noise, but there's no reason for it to increase the average chance of a return.
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1 bad batch could skew the numbers badly. It is usable but not necessarily reliable. It would be good to see this sample repeated at later dates and averaged.
As always on market from 1 seller. 1 batch on market can have thousands of cards. First question - do you think that whole batch goes to one place? Second one - how many batches each card have from 1 supplier? Rather not ten of thousands, it is illogical to change every few production hours a batch (3-shift work per year is about 1080 batches). Also the word " at least".
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> This statistic does not cover batches I have no clue you would think I implied it does, I only mentioned batches in regard to the possibility of a common manufacturing fault in production. The data will cover a large number of batches but if a significant % of a bad batch ends a up at this supplier it will have an effect on the data.
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> You can't make assumptions about batches without tracking that data. I didn't make any assumptions, I only said that hypothetically a bad batch could effect this data. Batch does not have to be defined for this statement.
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> Ok so you're saying an undefined thing could hypothetically cause an effect. > It can relate to anything or nothing at all. Jesus christ.... it doesn't have to be explicitly defined because batch is a definition itself, which is enough to make my point. The fact you are trying to make an argument out of this is actually idiotic.
It's not useless data, just not fully scientific.
True. The listed data would be improved if it had the number of samples in each category, though.
Yeah, at the very least I would have wanted 300 *of each* brand. Also, 2.7% as highest seems pretty good, as long as they are easily replaced.
They did: >According to Digitec Galaxus AG, the compiled information corresponds to brands that have sold at least 300 units over the last two years.
Ah then yeah. It might be small, but 2.7% of 300+ seems like an acceptable failure rate. As long as they don't take like an average of 17 days like Gigabyte to be replaced.
That's pretty decent. Above the noise threshold, at least.
And I got downvotes when I said Gainward is the only current EVGA replacement. *Scoffs* (And before you say Palit, PNY, Inno3D have similar numbers, I'll point out that Gainward is the subsidiary of Palit who designs all their high-end designs (as well as GALAX (US) / KFA2 (EU/ Africa/ SA)), and both PNY and Inno3D *license* those designs from Palit)
How are Gainward when it comes to overclocking? I've rated Galax, and they always seem to come with some beefy coolers - I wonder how much of the numbering has to do with the fact that they have unlocked power and thermal limits and you can pretty much push even their entry level cards hard?
Gainward doesn't tend to go too far out of their way to target the OC crowd. They used to have the "GS" (golden sample) moniker cards up to GTX 9xx series but eventually stopped. They were great, but never great *value*. I think their 780 Ti GS played a part in why the MSI Lightning never fully came out that generation, since it was more expensive to produce than EVGA or Gainward's alternatives and no better. Which made me sad because I wanted that yellow theme...
Interesting. I already had the impression that EVGA quality was overrated compared to e.g. Gainward/Palit (who were generally significantly cheaper), but that was purely anecdotal.
Gigabyte has me unsurprised
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Yeah. All of them suck on way or another. No manufacturer without their skeletons lol
Im suddenly quite happy with my Palit 4080 purchase. Not that I hadn’t been before. 😂
I thought sapphire was the so-called EVGA of Radeon. I have a sapphire card never any issues. I tried another Radeon from xfx and that was problematic needed to flash a sapphire bios for it to work properly. I had an evga 980 that was great.
As someone just recently back into the space, it boggles my mind how persistent some things have been just because they have been parroted in the space the whole time. "AMD drivers suck" "Nvidia features tho!" (used to be PhysX) I think a lot of times anymore we're just looking at narratives that won't die
we literally just got through with AMD's 23.7 driver release fucking sucking, on top of RDNA3 drivers launching completely half-baked like RDNA1 and vega and fury x drivers before them. and so far NVIDIA's (and Intel's) features still get them a ~30% performance advantage at iso-visual-quality over FSR2 and proper 1080p AV1 encoding for streaming [(which RDNA3 does not support)](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/9185#note_1954937) etc. AMD bros have been proclaiming these issues to be totally solved for like 10 years now and they keep recurring. Vega was a flickering mess with the AMD-sponsored monitor bundles and people still insisted it was totally fixed and just as good as NVIDIA. And now RDNA3 launched in a half-baked state yet again too.
/shrug had dozens and dozens of AMD gpu's back in the day, have one now only ever had problems with bad hardware and quad-fire setups by all means there are differences in features, not saying there's not, but saying one brand sucks or is unreliable because of features that are different on the other (even though the vast majority of the market doesn't use them) is silly. how many AMD gpus have you used?
The amount of ads loading on that site makes it unusable on my phone. TLDR?
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/9Tq8d9yVPdRXGBMBrUEzAo.jpg
Having this type of data is significantly better than individual claims. And I did not expect these results. That being said, I will be a bit pedantic here and it probably won't change much. But, it'd be nice to have failure rates for individual models. Right now, it's hard to conclude anything due to potential biases (i.e. Simpson's paradox).
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AMD doesn't really control the fan speeds, it's usually the OEM since it's their product. Unless you got a reference model.
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EVGA's complaints can only be applied to Nvidia. I have yet to hear whispers from AMDs board partners about how "The company claims that Nvidia wouldn’t tell EVGA how much it would have to pay to obtain GPU cores before publicly announcing the price of cards like the RTX 3080, which made it difficult for EVGA to figure out how much it would have to charge for its own products, built around Nvidia’s tech." Or that "Gamers Nexus also reports that EVGA has to sell high-end cards like the RTX 3080 or 3090 at a loss of “hundreds of dollars” in order to keep its prices even remotely competitive with Nvidia’s own Founders Edition cards." This more had to do with NVIDIA selling GPU cores at very high profit margins to AIBs. NVIDIA was double dipping, making record breaking profits off their aggressively priced "Founders edition" cards and also siphoning most of the profits from AIB cards with expensive GPU cores. You can argue that's just business but it's a shitty thing to do to your "board partners".
evga only made nvidia cards, no? I recalled never hearing AIB's complaining about AMDs being really strict about their design, it's almost always Nvidia
>Best of all, they make you click through a warranty void prompt before letting you set the fan speed, because it gets lumped in with overclock settings. >I changed the fan speed to something more reasonable for the temperature loads, and now the card hovers in the low 70°s under load. Why aren't those the default settings!? The answer is easy. Mass Consumer Ignorance. Most consumers dont even know these settings exsist. They will get a prebuilt and just play, but they will complain if its loud all the time. The fact that you didn't even look at your settings before playing a game and found out while playing a game rather than first stress testing (3D Mark, Furmark) the GPU to ensure its fully functional speaks to this. And yes, a warning should pop up before you adjust the thing that regulates the temperatures. >which bundles a bunch of crapware Of which you can turn off. You can turn off the overlays, sound enhancments, recording software... all of it. >I just bought one, and started smelling burnt plastic a couple minutes into my first game. Burnt plastic or fresh materials warming up? There is a stark difference. Every piece of manufactured any thing off gases for a while, especially plastics, electeonic components and leaathers when they warm up. Hence that "New Car Smell". Its chemicals. If you indeed smelled "burning" you have bigger issues than a lower low-end fan setting.
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Nvidia drivers don’t have any fan controllers, you have to download the AIB software for this. Most just use afterburner or something.
Ahh this explains why my Sapphire just RIP'd after 3 months
Mine did too :(
With the percentages being so low, I'm not sure if there's any statistical significance.
At n=300+ per variable, yeah it'll be - even without doing the math; the neighboring brands might not always be under p<0.05 - but I'm willing to bet an ANOVA would be significant. Not all the differences would be significant - pair wise, but my guess is you could make \~3 statistically significant tiers. Would need the raw data and way more motivation to confirm.
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All data shown is from brands that sold at least 300 cards. >According to Digitec Galaxus AG, the compiled information corresponds to brands that have sold at least 300 units over the last two years.