XFX is total crap...

[Cy6nUsX1]

I just looked at my XFX 6800GT, it looks like a perfectly good video card! I am going with that. If it looks good it must be good. Right? LOL
I will be installing it next week. Being in somewhat of a rush, I really didn't have much choice of manufacturer as the only available 6800GT PCI-E was this one. I got it from computerHQ.com on New Years night for $485 before they realized that they could jack $100 to the price!

FINGERS AND TOES CROSSED!!

 

[Cawchy87]

Originally posted by: jokho

-----WARNING READING BELOW MAY DISCOURAGE YOU FROM BUYING XFX CARDS--------------------
=================================================================


I have a story... just bought a XFX 6600gt card around 4 weeks ago... plugged it into my new Dell Dimension 4700...I was able to play Farcry but there was some shadow problems... it was like there was this black triangle wherever I go.. so I am assumming that this is shadow rendering done wrong. After 20 mins.. the entire machine powers off.. I could not start machine whatever i did. I then bought another ps thinking that PS must be faulty since I based my buying decision on reputable magazines and organizations... ( just look at the website and the magazines they have advertised saying how good the prod is.) I bought new 400w ps.. from even more reputable company. Told my wife to plug it while I look at machine interior... when she powered it on.... a flame suddenly came out of what I later determined to be the memory ( just like lighting a match ).. the flame quickly went away when the machine was powered down.

Returned card and got myself a Leadtek... plugged it to my machine and no problems to this day. In fairness Anandtech after 3 weeks did a 6600gt shootout.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2295

they rated leadtek as #1 editor's choice. XFX temp on the shootout was rated at 98 degrees or something like that. From my experience that was an understatement.

I was lucky.. my machine came out unscathed and all I had to pay was restocking fee.... RMA would have taken like weeks ( I left out the details of the fire ha ha ha).

I am not a Leadtek employee but just someone who had a very very bad experience.

LOL, you used a regular power supply on a dell? You caused the fire, not the video card. Dell mobo's require special PSU's.

 

[LTC8K6]

Newer Dells use standard power supplies.

 

[jokho]

I may have missed something here ... if i plugged the Leadtek 6600gt everything works fine.... Ive now had my leadtek for going 2 months and still no problems. How can we blame that on the PSU of Dell?

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: jokho

-----WARNING READING BELOW MAY DISCOURAGE YOU FROM BUYING XFX CARDS--------------------
=================================================================


I have a story... just bought a XFX 6600gt card around 4 weeks ago... plugged it into my new Dell Dimension 4700...I was able to play Farcry but there was some shadow problems... it was like there was this black triangle wherever I go.. so I am assumming that this is shadow rendering done wrong. After 20 mins.. the entire machine powers off.. I could not start machine whatever i did. I then bought another ps thinking that PS must be faulty since I based my buying decision on reputable magazines and organizations... ( just look at the website and the magazines they have advertised saying how good the prod is.) I bought new 400w ps.. from even more reputable company. Told my wife to plug it while I look at machine interior... when she powered it on.... a flame suddenly came out of what I later determined to be the memory ( just like lighting a match ).. the flame quickly went away when the machine was powered down.

Returned card and got myself a Leadtek... plugged it to my machine and no problems to this day. In fairness Anandtech after 3 weeks did a 6600gt shootout.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2295

they rated leadtek as #1 editor's choice. XFX temp on the shootout was rated at 98 degrees or something like that. From my experience that was an understatement.

I was lucky.. my machine came out unscathed and all I had to pay was restocking fee.... RMA would have taken like weeks ( I left out the details of the fire ha ha ha).

I am not a Leadtek employee but just someone who had a very very bad experience.

Jokho, how new are you at this thing called computing? As I am sure many people will tell you in here, Dell uses Proprietary Power Supplies for their systems. This means you cannot go to your local Best Buy and buy a PSU and not expect to have a little computer fire. You should have called Dell if you were having issues. My brother in law had a narrow escape. I caught him just when he was about to replace a bad PSU in his Dell with and Antec PSU. I yelled "SSSSSTTOOOOOOPPPPPP!!!!!" and he banged his head on the underside of his desk. After his pain went away and we laughed about it, I explained that he was just about to destroy his computer by putting in that Antec. I said he needed to get one through Dell for this make and model.

But do you see how things get started? Your video card may have something wrong with it, but it certainly was not the cause of your fire. You were. So, I would go back and delete your long post about this before to many more people see it. LOL.

 

[LTC8K6]

Dell has been using standard power supplies for a while now, afaik.

They used to have a different pinout, but that was a while ago. My current Dell has a standard ATX 12V PS in it.

 

[LTC8K6]

Dell went to the standard pinout sometime in 2002.

 

[jokho]

Nope..not new at this, as a matter of fact been doing this for quite sometime now. Been assembling all my units from Day 1. I will admit that this is the first Dell personal machine that I attempted to customize ( I handle 600++ dell gx150 and 260 in the office for crying out loud). My only mistake was buying Dell machine and customizing it expecting everything to work tip top. Your input does explain the flame and I thank you for it. This post has been here for quite sometime and I have not seen any post that explained my situation.

There was a good lesson learned here: If the dell newsgroups were any indication... I am not the only one trying to upgrade their dimension into a 6600gt machine experiencing problems then took the approach of changing PSU.

As an endnote: These newsgroups esp this topic is a venue to air out experiences with the product so that everyone can learn something from other people's experience. Whether they be praises or grievances... this was my experience, whether or not this or dell proprietary caused the fire our perceptions are purely speculative... and at this point is not really important...my machine is working fine and i can play my farcry and this was my experience. I hope many people see it and learn from it.

 

[VIAN]

Errr, the guy is just trying to do his job? His accent is different than yours because he's from another part of the world.

Like it or not, it's a global economy now, and you can't always deal with Cletus down the block.

I can appreciate frustration communicating with someone who is difficult to understand, but it's the way of it for many companies.

He's doing a terrible job. One of the most important things about Customer Service is communication and if they can't do that properly than they should be doing it at all.

I don't get it why people don't do their RMA with their retailer. That's where you got it from, and that's where it goes back to if it doesn't work.

Companies usually inform the buyer to try their service before returning it to the store.

I wasn't sticking up for a company, I was sticking up for a person doing his job after the OP made a fairly racist comment about his frustration with the guy's "Ingrish".

It's not racist, if that's the way he would say it. And the L sound isn't that difficult, freakin learn it.

Why should Pine have American workers only? They sell cards in other parts of the world too?

Good, then let the other parts of the world deal with THOSE parts and not ours.

This is like those Hispanic people that come over here and get a job and can only say the words on the menu.

A company should do what makes for a winning business plan. XFX just lost business on this thread(they did from me as well as many who have voiced that opinion) and no telling how many others due to poor US customer service. From a company standpoint that was a fairly bad mistake.
And you can't scream global economy on one hand while arguing its none of our business what the tech support makes on the other.

This thread has just placed XFX lower than PNY for me.

I was never too enthused about XFX cards anyway but after reading the testimonials in this thread I will definitely think twice about XFX.

I won't even think.

Good brands to me(no order):

eVGA
BFG
Leadtek

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: jokho
Nope..not new at this, as a matter of fact been doing this for quite sometime now. Been assembling all my units from Day 1. I will admit that this is the first Dell personal machine that I attempted to customize ( I handle 600++ dell gx150 and 260 in the office for crying out loud). My only mistake was buying Dell machine and customizing it expecting everything to work tip top. Your input does explain the flame and I thank you for it. This post has been here for quite sometime and I have not seen any post that explained my situation.

There was a good lesson learned here: If the dell newsgroups were any indication... I am not the only one trying to upgrade their dimension into a 6600gt machine experiencing problems then took the approach of changing PSU.

As an endnote: These newsgroups esp this topic is a venue to air out experiences with the product so that everyone can learn something from other people's experience. Whether they be praises or grievances... this was my experience, whether or not this or dell proprietary caused the fire our perceptions are purely speculative... and at this point is not really important...my machine is working fine and i can play my farcry and this was my experience. I hope many people see it and learn from it.

Have you tried a 6600GT bios update from XFX? Just a thought.

 

[Ben88]

My last two cards have been an Elsa Gladiac Geforce 2 GTS and a Leadtek Geforce 4 Ti4200. Both of those cards still work today the way they did when they were brand new. Actually I think the Elsa might have a little bit better build quality than the Leadtek, but they are both good.

 

[Cy6nUsX1]

Hmmm, my XFX 6800GT PCIE works great so far on the A8N-SLI Deluxe.

 

[ss284]

Originally posted by: Auric
Devil's advocate says: lifetime warranty is not your lifetime, but that of the company.

Agreed. I find it funny that Visiontek was hailed as such a great company (much in the same say BFG is) until they went bankrupt.

 

[Todorov]

wow i must tell my cousins not to buy any xfxs products

 

[perillo34]

I am sending back my excellent working 6800nu, with its pipes unlocked and ocing capabillities, based on one mans experience, thank you so much for your input, I almost kept the card a year, damn companies can never be perfect, I am switching to BFG asap, because I have heard people say good things about them,... well and bad, oh no I dont know what to do, is there any company out there in which no one has had a bad experience with.....

 

[Uglor]

i got an xfx 6800gt pci-e, and it works great.

 

[Todorov]

Originally posted by: perillo34
I am sending back my excellent working 6800nu, with its pipes unlocked and ocing capabillities, based on one mans experience, thank you so much for your input, I almost kept the card a year, damn companies can never be perfect, I am switching to BFG asap, because I have heard people say good things about them,... well and bad, oh no I dont know what to do, is there any company out there in which no one has had a bad experience with.....

Asus

 

[nick128]

I took down the number for the USA site and proceeded to call. Obviously it was a long-distance number, so I took the appropriate actions. However, I didn't know HOW long distance it really was. It turned out that the number on the USA site was for a Japanese phone number. After much frustration trying to figure out what the guy on the other end of the phone was saying in Ingrish, He gave me the phone number for the USA branch, which is what I wanted anyway

A) If you call a Japanese phone number you should expect the guy to be speaking Japanese.

B) If you couldn't understand him what makes you think he gave you the wrong number?

C) Your impatience is astoudning; that you couldn't find a 1800 number somewhere on the internet and dialed the first number you came to, or couldn't wait on an email response seems weird.

D) For those of you quick to condem a company for one bad experience, i've been in this game less than 10 years, and i can tell you if i stopped buying hardware from every manufacturer whose hardware crapped out and i got stiffed on, i would be screwed. I have been stuck with motherboards from Asus, graphics cards from Hercules, Gigabyte, eVGA, just to name a few examples. Those who've been around longer than me should know better. Those who have been around less tahn 2 systems, that's my advice to you.

For those who were quick to claim racisim, don't claim that. It wasn't racism, it was ignorance, which is much deeper, truer, and less open to influence. Racist people can be reformed. Ignorant people neither know nor care that there are better ways.

 

[orangat]

Originally posted by: Ben88
My last two cards have been an Elsa Gladiac Geforce 2 GTS and a Leadtek Geforce 4 Ti4200. Both of those cards still work today the way they did when they were brand new. Actually I think the Elsa might have a little bit better build quality than the Leadtek, but they are both good.

Elsa is very good - usually comes with better than reference heatsinks. And they used to have the reputation of putting out stable drivers. I'm not sure if they are still in business, IMO their stuff is made to last.

I had a creative labs gfx TNT2 which died because of heat - never overclocked. I'll never get another CL cos of that.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: orangat

Originally posted by: Ben88
My last two cards have been an Elsa Gladiac Geforce 2 GTS and a Leadtek Geforce 4 Ti4200. Both of those cards still work today the way they did when they were brand new. Actually I think the Elsa might have a little bit better build quality than the Leadtek, but they are both good.

Elsa is very good - usually comes with better than reference heatsinks. And they used to have the reputation of putting out stable drivers. I'm not sure if they are still in business, IMO their stuff is made to last.

I had a creative labs gfx TNT2 which died because of heat - never overclocked. I'll never get another CL cos of that.

I believe Elsa does still exsist, but no longer ships to the united states. Most of their business is in the EU.

 

[r55741]

sorry but i had the fan on my 5600 replaced by xfx I recieved the replacement fan 2 days after i called them.

but ok maybe i got lucky.

try calling bfg they'll sure take care of ya but they put you on hold for half hour! and they desconect you when there is too many calls!
that's right everyone has their downside. we are only hearing frome those who have had bad experiences cause happy customers don't say $hiat

 

[fzaba]

Indeed! Happy customers are less likely to post then customers who had bad experiences and want to stir up $hit on the net to make the company look bad - as if that really makes them feel better or gives a sense of accomplishment... believing they did good for the forum they visit or something... :roll:

ahem...
<-Happy XFX customer.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: fzaba
Indeed! Happy customers are less likely to post then customers who had bad experiences and want to stir up $hit on the net to make the company look bad - as if that really makes them feel better or gives a sense of accomplishment... believing they did good for the forum they visit or something... :roll:

ahem...
<-Happy XFX customer.

have you used their RMA system?

buying the card and lucking out and having it work does not constitute an experience with the company.

Thats like saying all pepsi products are great, because youve had RC Cola before and liked it.

 

[Cy6nUsX1]

I am running my XFX 6800GT at 375/1010 and score near 65,000 Aquamark on the A8N-SLI with 2x512 RAM, AMD64 3500+, stock OC other than the vid card.

My XFX has no issues and runs clean and clear. XFX even answered my email before I bought the card. I just wanted to see how long it took them to reply....1.5 days.

 

[Insomniak]

LeadTek and eVGA for me. ELSA was awesome, I was sad to see them go - and now that Gainward is leaving, there really is a void in the creme-de-la-creme area. Leadtek is good, BFG is good, eVGA is good, but no one is really standing a notch above everyone else like Gainward and ELSA did.

eVGA probably would be if they'd develop some non-reference heatsinks, but until they do...