Is anyone boycotting nVidia yet ?

A ton of people are really **** off because of the high nVidia GPU failure rate, especially in notebooks. If your noteobook has not failed yet then you can get a BIOS update that will turn your fans on all the time and have your battery or fans go first - in any case, problem will show up until way after 1yr warranty runs out. nVidia is also #1 in trashing Vista reputation because of crappy video drivers. Any thoughts on this?

I have an 8600GT in my laptop, but it has great heat dissipation.

I have not finished boycotting ATI for the ATI AIW 9700 Pro fiasco I had.

By the way, I have a GeForce 7900 GS in my laptop and I love it.

A ton of people are really **** off because of the high Xbox 360 failure rate, especially RROD. If your  Xbox360 has not failed yet then  there is no fix, just hope it fails before your warranty expires - in any case, problem will show up until way after 3 yr warranty runs out. Microsoft is also #1 in trashing Vista reputation because of crappy UI design. Any thoughts on this?

My 8800GT died (it actually started smoking), my 6600GT before that died, and my 8600MGT in my laptop died.  Luckily all were replaced under warranty,  but still, a pain.

Sucks to be you. I am using GeforeForce 8800GT on my desktop. Still alive (reminds me of Portal song). I prefer nVidia over ATI. I had 9700pro or 7900pro, the one demo Doom3, that card is not good. The frame rate is not stable, range from 30 to 120 in a CS:S map. Sure if you average it, it is like 75fps, but in reality, too much hicups. So far, I have GeForce 7900 and 8800, both performs at steady frame rate. This is why I am still leaning toward nVidia card. 

BTW Detroit Muscle, just to make your point clear, you are depending nVidia by trashing ATI right?

magicalclick said:

Sucks to be you. I am using GeforeForce 8800GT on my desktop. Still alive (reminds me of Portal song). I prefer nVidia over ATI. I had 9700pro or 7900pro, the one demo Doom3, that card is not good. The frame rate is not stable, range from 30 to 120 in a CS:S map. Sure if you average it, it is like 75fps, but in reality, too much hicups. So far, I have GeForce 7900 and 8800, both performs at steady frame rate. This is why I am still leaning toward nVidia card. 

BTW Detroit Muscle, just to make your point clear, you are depending nVidia by trashing ATI right?

I would like to note, I'm sure people have had a similar experience with their ATI cards dying...

intelman said:

magicalclick said:

*snip*

I would like to note, I'm sure people have had a similar experience with their ATI cards dying...

I honestly think I just had bad luck with nVidia. My only beef with them is their early Vista drivers. I was an early Vista adopter and beta tester...and nVidia drivers drove me nuts, especially their nForce and SATA drivers...

My ATI machine was much happier. I would say that situation is remedied, they had some weird issues though....

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20070804/nvidia-driver-fix-quicktime/

It's me! I'm boycotting nvidia for many years!

Eah... Unfortunately my company gave me laptop with nvidia graphics...
But NO nvidia on my personal hardware! Never ever!

I've got passively cooled Ti4200 that was in 24/7 use for 4 years and still works.

Then I went with 8800 GT and got driver resets, some BSODs, daily. Until reinserting the card... no bsods or driver resets in ~half year now. In this light while the die/packaging may be weaker than ATI, I would also look into the contact to the PCI-E slot. I did some experiments that proved without a doubt that the there is far greater chance for poor card<>motherboard contact than legacy PCI slots. I suspect that because PCI-E is meant to be hot-swap capable they lowered the slot (fact) and my guess is there may be other some factor adjusted as well to loosen it up - it used to be that you had to apply some force to put cards into the pci/agp slots, now with PCI-E it pretty much swims into place...

BlackTiger said:

intelman said:

*snip*

It's me! I'm boycotting nvidia for many years!

Eah... Unfortunately my company gave me laptop with nvidia graphics...
But NO nvidia on my personal hardware! Never ever!

Why is it important to us to have a side? ATI or Nvidia! Open Source v Closed Source. Linux v Windows. Xbox v Playstation. Mac v PC. Oracle v SQL Server. Intel v AMD , Google v Microsoft, etc.

 

Personally, I find it all just a bit silly especially when there are far more important things to get passionate about. I forever wondered why people aren't embarrassed when they dream up these rivalries or worse still follow them.

 

I know its human nature to want to be a member of something and have a sense of belonging but us Geek types do tend to do it more than anyone else. Don’t see top athletes going to the same kinds of extremes, they chose what will help them perform better, sure they have elegances but there is a sense of an over-riding need to be better and have some professional pride, so can switch and try products from different vendors. This is a hard lesson for us to learn in IT yet we must learn it, brand loyalty in IT is the industry’s largest red-herring and we must stop being slaves to it if we want to genuinely be better at what we do.

 

I believe we must make vendors produce better quality products at a cheaper price, vendor loyalty prevents this from happening we get locked in. We should infact boycott vendors that aren’t interoperable. Adherence to standards is another matter, as some standards are good others bad and therefore must be driven far more by the community, but this is another subject I could witter on about.

 

Interoperable can very much helped by standards but are infact better still with just simple agreement. I think it’s high time we were all abit clever and started to drive our vendors to what we want. Lets face it Channel 9 has done that to Microsoft.

 

So buy that Nvidia card and if it busts demand they fix it. People power!

 

Sabot said:

BlackTiger said:

*snip*

Why is it important to us to have a side? ATI or Nvidia! Open Source v Closed Source. Linux v Windows. Xbox v Playstation. Mac v PC. Oracle v SQL Server. Intel v AMD , Google v Microsoft, etc.

 

Personally, I find it all just a bit silly especially when there are far more important things to get passionate about. I forever wondered why people aren't embarrassed when they dream up these rivalries or worse still follow them.

 

I know its human nature to want to be a member of something and have a sense of belonging but us Geek types do tend to do it more than anyone else. Don’t see top athletes going to the same kinds of extremes, they chose what will help them perform better, sure they have elegances but there is a sense of an over-riding need to be better and have some professional pride, so can switch and try products from different vendors. This is a hard lesson for us to learn in IT yet we must learn it, brand loyalty in IT is the industry’s largest red-herring and we must stop being slaves to it if we want to genuinely be better at what we do.

 

I believe we must make vendors produce better quality products at a cheaper price, vendor loyalty prevents this from happening we get locked in. We should infact boycott vendors that aren’t interoperable. Adherence to standards is another matter, as some standards are good others bad and therefore must be driven far more by the community, but this is another subject I could witter on about.

 

Interoperable can very much helped by standards but are infact better still with just simple agreement. I think it’s high time we were all abit clever and started to drive our vendors to what we want. Lets face it Channel 9 has done that to Microsoft.

 

So buy that Nvidia card and if it busts demand they fix it. People power!

 

While I agree with you that people take these partisan attitudes to ridiculous extremes, you can't say that it's a purely geek phenomenon - see sports fans for the ultimate in meaningless rivarly. You pick a team, usually early on in your life, and then become a staunch supporter for no good reason. It's what people do, for some reason.

Yggdrasil said:

Sabot said:

*snip*

While I agree with you that people take these partisan attitudes to ridiculous extremes, you can't say that it's a purely geek phenomenon - see sports fans for the ultimate in meaningless rivarly. You pick a team, usually early on in your life, and then become a staunch supporter for no good reason. It's what people do, for some reason.

Not me. I side with whichever team is currently winning.

On topic, I've had no problems with NVIDIA cards to date so I wouldn't be switching to AMD unless there was a notable price-performance advantage.

Yggdrasil said:

Sabot said:

*snip*

While I agree with you that people take these partisan attitudes to ridiculous extremes, you can't say that it's a purely geek phenomenon - see sports fans for the ultimate in meaningless rivarly. You pick a team, usually early on in your life, and then become a staunch supporter for no good reason. It's what people do, for some reason.

Ok you got me there, Sports Fans are perhaps the worst ... but are we that far off?

tfraser said:

Yggdrasil said:

*snip*

Not me. I side with whichever team is currently winning.

On topic, I've had no problems with NVIDIA cards to date so I wouldn't be switching to AMD unless there was a notable price-performance advantage.

I've been avoiding nVidia lately, for 2 reasons.

1) Drivers aren't as stable as ATI's.

2) Lack of support.  I have to disable one of the cores on my dual core CPU because nVidia don't support the nForce 3 chipset on Windows Vista, I can have the second core only if I lose all video hardware acceleration.  My old £1400 Tablet PC is forced you to use beta drivers because nVidia won't support the GeForce 5200.

It's not so much that they're not supporting these chipsets and GPUs, its the fact that throughout 2006, they said they were going to support them on Windows Vista.  Then at the Windows Vista launch they went quiet, until forced a few months later to admit they were going to abandon them.  Up until that time the nForce 3 chipsets were being sold as Vista compatible...

Sabot said:

Yggdrasil said:

*snip*

Ok you got me there, Sports Fans are perhaps the worst ... but are we that far off?

We're better in the sense that fashions can shift - an nVidia fanatic might switch to ATI after a few years of bad products. Football fans, in Israel at least, seem to take an even greater delight in cursing their team for losing than they do in cheering for a win. In many cases you're born into a team and stick with it to the bitter end.

Detroit Muscle said:

A ton of people are really **** off because of the high Xbox 360 failure rate, especially RROD. If your  Xbox360 has not failed yet then  there is no fix, just hope it fails before your warranty expires - in any case, problem will show up until way after 3 yr warranty runs out. Microsoft is also #1 in trashing Vista reputation because of crappy UI design. Any thoughts on this?

Don't really have any kind of problem with the UI of Vista.