nVidia 8700/8800/9600/9800 chips are failing across the board

[WildEagle]

What The Inquirer is doing is milking their cash cow and worshipping the GOD of Money, Payola.

[Everlong18]

I find the Inquirer spouts a lot of crap. Don't know what to think when they publish stuff.

[WildEagle]

I'm smelling now, a load of bullcookies from The Inquirer.

[johngalt]

I've always been smelling a load of bullmalarky from the Inq. I cannot stand their sensationalism, but the worst part about it is that fanboys globally start Digging and Slashdotting articles as they come out, and the story gets picked up and repeated worldwide.

friggin Adrian Kingsley-Hughes features the same reference article, and yet in his last set of recommendations for video cards he recommended the GT280 cards as the best bet or high end cards.

Interestingly enough, my 8800GTS 512 KO Edition (G92) works flawlessly - it is just a bit dated, and I have the GTX260 installed now - cause I want to. I am adding a second (at least temporarily) in a few weeks, as soon as eVGA gets off their bum and approves my Step Up. The 280's price range is out of my limit - as is the QX9770 - but that processor *will* be mine - along with a DFI LAN party board and my pair of 260s (if the pair should survive the bank balance crunch) so I can really tweak and test.

FWIW (getting back on topic) ATI has made some *amazing* strides forward in getting out really really good cards in the mid-range market - but they are simply not as tweakable as nVidia. They need to learn more from their parents - AMD - and get back to the drawing board to make a GPU / CPU combination that is simply unsurpassable and release them simultaneously - that will put a dent in nVidia and Intel (for a small while).

Finally, ever noticed how many 'articles' were later debunked? And how many of them were spread mainly through people Digging and Slashdotting from the Inq?

It will surprise you.

[WildEagle]

I'm looking at within a few months of getting a Q6600 or Q6700 cpu for my board.

I'm starting to notice a lot of bullcookies out of the Inq lately.

I went back to ATI in April because of driver issues on Vista with the 640MB 8800GTS cards that I had, and a month before that I got the 975XBX2 because I had driver issues on Vista with that board. When I went back to ATI, at the time they were the only one that offered a dual videochip board, that didn't cost and arm and a leg, like the Nvidia 9800GX2 card.

Another thing I hated about Nvidia, was that to overclock their cards, you had to download the seperate NTune app, which is bulloney.

[johngalt]

Umm sorry, but that;'s not the only way.

nTune is about the worst POS I have ever tried to use - but you can easily (and with a lot less pain) OC using RivaTuner. You can even make the OC permanent using NiBiToR and editing a copy of a good BIOS for your Video card and then flashing your video card.

nTune was made to allow more for the temporary testing of OC - but it quickly gained fame with n00bs because they did not have to go into the BIOS to OC. The good thing is that with nTune it was applied at startup - meaning when you booted - so if an OC hosed yer system, boot into Safe mode and it boots default values - so makes testing a lot easier. If you edited the BIOS and it hosed your card, it was a lot harder to fix that when the card wold not allow you to see you machine anymore.

A lot of people are going to disagree with me, saying nTune has become more refined and whatnot - but I stand by my experiences - nTune sucks. I have never had stability problems without it and I always have stability problems with it (and that is even without setting any boot time optimizations).

This time round, when I installed Vista 64 (2 weekends ago after wiping because I thought I had infected myself with Vundo while testing Malwarebytes' AntiMalware, when in fact I had forgotten that I changed a BIOS setting and it was simply causing system instability) I left nTune off.

If I want to OC, I'll do it by BIOS or eVGA Precision utility or RivaTuner (the last two being basically the same).

[WildEagle]

I didn't know about those other methods of overclocking either.

The other thing for Nvidia that is the worst POS, is their Network Management tools, those things are so bad, that when installed those tools will conflict with every firewall and internet security package on the market. I found out about this on the Windows Live OneCare forums last fall. Why Nvidia puts out this junk software, and the NTune app is beyond me.

If I want to overclock my vidcard, I'll just fire up ATI Overdrive, right in the ATI Control Panel and start overclocking little by little, until I'm at the limit my card can reach, without burning it up. The 3870X2 was originally supposed to have a stock speed of about 675MHZ, but the cards started coming out stock clocked at 825MHZ. Then the pre overclocked editions came out this Spring, that take the clock speeds even higher.

[xguntherc]

ntune blows.. I used Rivatuner at first, and now I'm using eVGA's Precision. and I love it. I've never tried ntune after the first 2 times i loaded it and it crashed. lol, and couldn't see the entire program, ever. it was terrible. not sure why.

but ya the Inq. is a TERRIBLE place, and EVERYTHING. I mean everything you must take with a grain of salt. as others said, the last 2 years the number 1 selling and used GFX card by about 4 times was the 8800GT or GTS. it has not been failing hardly at all..

and john. I've seen more than one thread now where ur calling ur card the GT260... dont' forget the X there buddy

[skunksmash]

Ntune & Nvida control panel are truly crap!!

RT FTW...

you should never use software to OC your CPU & RAM
(if that's what your all talking about)
if you cannot use the bios ..leave it stock or there is a high probability you will brick your rig or at the very least you will be resetting CMOS 30 times a day.....lol

but for real time gaming any GPU OC is pointless ...
the only one i ever boost is the ram for higher bandwidth..
the only time the OC has any benefit is while number crunching

[xguntherc]

well OC'n my 260 from 576 to 700 Clock sure gave me a load more FPS.