Just picked up a Visiontek Geforce3 for $349 at Best Buy. Unfortunately I ran into a few quality issues:
Problem 1 - The card comes with aluminum heatsinks epoxied to the memory chips, and when I opened the box I found that one of the heatsinks had fallen off. So I reattached it by spreading a little thermal grease on the chips and pressing the heatsink on. It's not a real strong bond, more like the bond you get when you put a drinking glass onto a wet glass table - I can slide the heatsink around with little effort, but it takes more effort to pull it off the chips. Since the heatsink is on the underside of the card, I'm a little concerned that this bond won't be strong enough and the heatsink might fall off. So a few questions for all you experts - does anyone have any experience with attaching a heatsink this way? Should I be worried that it might fall off? And will the heatsink be as effective as it would if it were epoxied on? Lastly, anyone know what type of epoxy I should use if I want a stronger bond?
Problem 2 - The little tab where the card is screwed to the case is out of whack, so I cannot line up the screw hole on the tab with the one on the case without forcing the card out of the AGP slot. I've installed a lot of cards and have never seen such poor alignment. I guess it's not a big deal, but I will have to bend the tab just to screw the card in.
I was too psyched about fianlly having my card to consider returning it. It seems to work ok, and gives a nice speed boost over my old Voodoo5, but I'm a little concerned about these quality issues. Anybody else seen problems like this?
Steve
Problem 1 - The card comes with aluminum heatsinks epoxied to the memory chips, and when I opened the box I found that one of the heatsinks had fallen off. So I reattached it by spreading a little thermal grease on the chips and pressing the heatsink on. It's not a real strong bond, more like the bond you get when you put a drinking glass onto a wet glass table - I can slide the heatsink around with little effort, but it takes more effort to pull it off the chips. Since the heatsink is on the underside of the card, I'm a little concerned that this bond won't be strong enough and the heatsink might fall off. So a few questions for all you experts - does anyone have any experience with attaching a heatsink this way? Should I be worried that it might fall off? And will the heatsink be as effective as it would if it were epoxied on? Lastly, anyone know what type of epoxy I should use if I want a stronger bond?
Problem 2 - The little tab where the card is screwed to the case is out of whack, so I cannot line up the screw hole on the tab with the one on the case without forcing the card out of the AGP slot. I've installed a lot of cards and have never seen such poor alignment. I guess it's not a big deal, but I will have to bend the tab just to screw the card in.
I was too psyched about fianlly having my card to consider returning it. It seems to work ok, and gives a nice speed boost over my old Voodoo5, but I'm a little concerned about these quality issues. Anybody else seen problems like this?
Steve