Off brand video cards

[wpshooter]

Is there any real quality difference between video cards that are actually manufacturered by the chipset maker and those that are manufacturered by another company that is just using the chipset of another company ?

For instance, is a Sapphire/ATI Radeon 9200 AGP 128mb card (which can be purchased for about $40) as good as an ATI Radeon 9200 AGP 128mb card which is actually MANUFACTURERED/BUILT BY ATI (which can be purchased for about $130) ?

Or is this just another instance of the old saying that you get what you pay for ???

Thanks.

 

[Peter]

Sapphire are making the ATI-branded cards. So much for quality Seriously, ATI have pretty stringent quality controls even with 3rd-party cards.

This is more a question of variety - you will find that 3rd party cards offer configurations that ATI themselves don't - other port setups, faster or slower core and RAM operation, different cooling solutions, varying software and hardware bundles, etc. etc.

 

[wpshooter]

Then why the fairly significant price difference, in what seems to me to be basically a card with the same feature set ?

 

[wpshooter]

bump

 

[CraigRT]

Originally posted by: wpshooter
Then why the fairly significant price difference, in what seems to me to be basically a card with the same feature set ?

I think that is a price updating error... One is not worth almost $100 more.. that card is not even worth anywhere near $100 in total! I bought a Chaintech 7800GT, unlike most people who buy BFG, EVGA.. (I had eVGA, they are great) and my Chaintech works absolutely perfect... I can't see any quality differences.. Esp. since it uses reference design. it's probably made by eVGA or nV directly, who knows! anyways, no worries.

 

[Kogan]

Originally posted by: wpshooter
For instance, is a Sapphire/ATI Radeon 9200 AGP 128mb card (which can be purchased for about $40) as good as an ATI Radeon 9200 AGP 128mb card which is actually MANUFACTURERED/BUILT BY ATI (which can be purchased for about $130) ?

They're the same basic cards. As long as they have the same clock speeds and memory interfaces (which they probably do), they won't be any different in benchmarks.

The only real reason a person would choose one brand over another and pay a premium for it is because a better warranty is being offered, or the person may feel comfortable with a certain brand.

ATI isn't a very good video card retailer - it seems they mainly focus on gpu/chipset/etc production and R&D (research and development). It may cost them quite a bit of money to produce that 9200 card which hasn't been mass-produced for a long time, while sapphire may have a large backstock of those cards that they're trying to clear out. It may just not make sense for ATI to sell the card at a competive price since it's most likely not going to be profitable for them (or as profitable as they want it to be).

And of course since ATI knows they're the best ATI-card producing company, they advertise as such (built by ati logos), and charge a premium for it.

It's sort of like comparing a corvette to a ferrari. They're about equal in performance, but why does the ferrari cost 10 times as much? They charge a premium for their brand and people gladly pay it. (yeah, that example is a little extreme)

 

[Steve]

When I temped at VisionTek last year, I learned that BBAs, Sapphires, and VTek cards were all made in the same factory. The lowest bidder in a given run was who would actually build them, could be one of those three or even another party (I did see a Celestica-made card). Around the time I left Sapphire had made a batch of our 9600s (maybe Pros?) that had a huge crappy fan on them that kept dying. Anything sent to us for repair, we'd install a stock ATI fan and they were good to go.