BFG Completely Liquidating, no more RMAs accepted. Project Manager blames Fermi

lightp2 said:
pardon me if this perhaps sound a bit offensive to some,

based on the feedback so far, maybe it is obvious :

"Job number one" for any electronic retail/distribution/manufacturing operation in US

1. Have a sensible and resilient Warranty Policy plus efficient and verifiable Operation
Click to expand...

Lifetime warranty is essentially dead
 
chinesepiratefood said:
In my opinion, there will be a new company formed out of this - smaller, and will work hard to build up their reputation ala early BFG.
Click to expand...

well not formed from bfg, galaxy is a up and comming company. They seem to be expanding their warrenty and have been getting their name out there, I know im considering them as my next video card since they anounced they are covering watercooling now.
 
I am really getting a kick out of the few people in here who keep spouting off rhetoric about how having a lifetime warranty is a death sentence, blah blah blah.

Puhleeze. There are plenty of companies that offer a lifetime warranty on their products and are quite profitable...and I'm not just talking PC peripherals or even electronics. It's called having the balls to back your QUALITY product.
 
Blue Falcon said:
I am really getting a kick out of the few people in here who keep spouting off rhetoric about how having a lifetime warranty is a death sentence, blah blah blah.

Puhleeze. There are plenty of companies that offer a lifetime warranty on their products and are quite profitable...and I'm not just talking PC peripherals or even electronics. It's called having the balls to back your QUALITY product.
Click to expand...
I have a hard time believing you don't understand the difference though between enthusiast PC components and say, cars, peripherals, or other components.

I worked for a sunglass company, and we offered a lifetime warranty. We had people send in sunglasses they ran over with their car. Did we cover those? Of course not, because their negligence caused the problem, not our manufacturing.

If you overvolt or modify a video card and it dies, it's not a manufacturer's defect. But unlike with sunglasses that have been run over with a car, or most other products where negligence is obvious, it can be very, very difficult to tell if someone was abusing their products or not. A cursory glance over these forums will show you that plenty of people are willing to RMA products they ran outside of the coverage of the warranty and then broke, and now expect the manufacturer to replace.

That is why a lifetime warranty on PC components is not the same thing as with other industries.
 
night_2004 said:
Here's to hoping that the community keeps track of the scumbags behind the failure of BFG so we know if they ever try to start up again under another name (and avoid them).
Click to expand...
So if you fuck up your personal finances, and have to declare bankruptcy, you should never again be extended credit for the rest of your life?
 
I have heard of old television that lasted 20+ years. Seventies-simple calculators perfectly fine, 30+plus years old cars, many more.

It does appear most of the products try to stay within some specified specification (how easily known I do not know). They generally do not cover reasonable use and wear. For example, the car need to go for periodic maintenance that you need to pay

We also have some products that have super extended usage duration. Example like space technologies. You can also notice the price premium is EXTREMELY high because once online it is basically lifetime warranty. And you know they have very very precise specification. Recent SSD thread in storage forum also arguing about stuff that are out of warranty with views from many angles.

So for product category that frequently being encouraged to go overspec, overclock, overuse, over-everything, it appears based on reasonable practicality the price premium needs to be much higher. Else you then need to adapt the strategy by what some claim "1st party buyer from authorized reseller only"

I do not lie to you. I wish to enjoy Lifetime warranty as well because I have lost unreasonable money due to many failed IT products(yep bumpgate). It is just that few offer such warranty locally.
 
Last edited:
jonnyGURU said:
Umm... Best Buy has been a BFG customer from day one. And allocation of cards depends on allocation of GPU's. BFG, or any company for that matter, isn't going to choose to have less supply than demand. Problem is, AIB partners don't really know what the GPU allocation is going to be until Nvidia is ready to ship, and by that time you've already got your orders in from Best Buy and need to build and ship ASAFP.

Having Best Buy as a customer can be blessing and a curse. It's good that they can forecast as far out as they do, but if you make a commitment to them you HAVE TO fulfill it. If you're late or can't fill an order, they penalize you monetarily. To avoid these penalties, it wasn't unusual for BFG to send an entire allocation to a Best Buy, and there have been times where product was shipped directly to stores, as opposed to distribution centers, and via air freight to avoid being late and getting penalized.

But yeah... I can't argue with too much of the rest of what you're saying. Lifetime warranty was abused. BFG didn't keep a good track of customers and what serial numbers those customers should've had so every Tom, Dick and Harry would RMA a card just to get a newer card. I've always been used to working at places where everyone was armed with a scan gun and every serial number was scanned before a product went from room to room or out the door. This just wasn't done at BFG.
Click to expand...

Umm, I remember working for a small PC vendor that was selling BFG's cards long before Best Buy even heard of BFG. The local, for me at the time, BB didn't have BFG cards until late in the 6 series. I remember laughing because we'd get the BB geeks in the store asking who they (BFG) were. I remember the day BB started carrying their cards and my discussion with my (then) former boss b*tching about how he didn't get cards on launch day, unlike the previous couple of gens, but somehow BB managed to. I also remember that on the day it happened was when that builder considered switching cards. The last straw was when they stopped warrantying the cards in systems*. On that day, they swtiched to XFX and eVGA.

*They bought them "retail", not OEM, so they should have had the full warranty. In fact the only "OEM" stuff they ever got from BFG was the 6800 Ultras that Nvidia / BFG had been unable to get the new boxes delivered before launch day. They shipped to select vendors in an "OEM" box with a sticker on it. They were still full retail cards, however.
 
Inglix_the_Mad said:
Umm, I remember working for a small PC vendor that was selling BFG's cards long before Best Buy even heard of BFG. The local, for me at the time, BB didn't have BFG cards until late in the 6 series.
Click to expand...

You're remembering incorrectly.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2002/09/16/bfg_technologies/

What is really amazing here is that we were told that Best Buy and CompUSA have both already given BFG Tech verbal commitments to sell their VidCard brand.
Click to expand...

Kyle wrote that in September 2002 before BFG even had a graphics card to sell. Visiontek's body wasn't even cold yet when that was posted. :p
 
Inglix_the_Mad said:
The last straw was when they stopped warrantying the cards in systems*.

*They bought them "retail", not OEM, so they should have had the full warranty.
Click to expand...

And they didn't stop warrantying cards in systems. They needed the person that bought the card to register. The person that bought the card was the system builder. So it wouldn't be up to your customer to warranty the graphics card. The customer bought the card from the system builder and should've sent the card back to the system builder to have it warrantied.

This is a flawed system and is something else BFG didn't do correctly. You should always have an OEM program in place for system builders. Separate part numbers and serial number system with serial numbers that have some sort of prefix or suffix that tracks the card back to a particular system builder... but the only difference between a BFG OEM card, a retail card and an e-tail card was the price on the OUTSIDE of the box. And again, since BFG didn't keep track of serial numbers, if the customer didn't register their product and the box was long gone, who knows where that card came from. Again, BFG failing on several levels.
 
Boy I hope my BFG GTX 260 doesn't fail. LOL. I just bought one over the summer and I was thinking of using it for PhysX and now thinking of using it in my parents' computer as their new video card.
 
jonnyGURU said:
... Lifetime warranty was abused. BFG didn't keep a good track of customers and what serial numbers those customers should've had so every Tom, Dick and Harry would RMA a card just to get a newer card. I've always been used to working at places where everyone was armed with a scan gun and every serial number was scanned before a product went from room to room or out the door. This just wasn't done at BFG.
Click to expand...

Sounds like BFG is at fault for its early demise. Too much warranty fraud during the past 3 months? Otherwise it could have service RMA and warranty for a few more months.
 
qdemn7 said:
So if you fuck up your personal finances, and have to declare bankruptcy, you should never again be extended credit for the rest of your life?
Click to expand...

I wouldn't expect anyone to want to give you a loan in those circumstances, just like any echo of BFG shouldn't hope to retain any of the old customer base for this kind of screw up.

Vote with the wallet :).
 
Well I'm sad to see them go. I've bought a few older cards, and bought 3 GTX 275s in the past year and a bit. Honestly, I've never used their warranty service once. I think it's the few abusers that ruin it for normal users like myself...
 
georgexi said:
BFG still means Big Fucking Gun to me :)
Click to expand...
vnjexz.png


:D
 
jonnyGURU said:
Well.. apparently there's going to be a lot of he said, she said so I'm starting to think even the employees (the ones that don't have the offices with windows) don't even really know what really happened at the end. Nvidia's going to say one thing, BFG people are going to say another... Bottom line is what Kyle said, "BFG killed BFG". If you think about it, even if Nvidia was a total douche to BFG, it's BFG that put BFG in the position of relying completely on Nvidia for their core business. Kudos to XFX for diversifying with ATI and kudos to Evga for diversifying with a strong breathe of motherboard products. BFG? So much potential was flushed down the toilet.

In effigy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moufhy35mo0
Click to expand...

I love how that took 2 flushes to go down.
RIP BFG.

I think some people are right about the life time warranties. None of the big time world wide MFGs(i.e Asus, MSI, Gigabyte) offer them, even though they are probably in a better position to honor them. Wasn't it mostly these NA companies that did this and mostly only for NA? Seemed like a gimmick to get buyers and stand out from the crowd.
 
Blue Falcon said:
I am really getting a kick out of the few people in here who keep spouting off rhetoric about how having a lifetime warranty is a death sentence, blah blah blah.

Puhleeze. There are plenty of companies that offer a lifetime warranty on their products and are quite profitable...and I'm not just talking PC peripherals or even electronics. It's called having the balls to back your QUALITY product.
Click to expand...

Are you trolling here? You cannot be serious. Do you work in this business?
 
Dosobye said:
I love how that took 2 flushes to go down.
RIP BFG.

I think some people are right about the life time warranties. None of the big time world wide MFGs(i.e Asus, MSI, Gigabyte) offer them, even though they are probably in a better position to honor them. Wasn't it mostly these NA companies that did this and mostly only for NA? Seemed like a gimmick to get buyers and stand out from the crowd.
Click to expand...

I think in a large degree it works and it drives many customers toward EVGA and XFX to give them marketshare they would not otherwise have if customers are presented options by much bigger companies like ASUS.

As for how sustainable the practice it, probably depends on volume and demand for graphics card being consistent enough to guarantee repeat business. If you hit on a lull like in the past two years and then your main supplier can't allocate you new chips, it hurts you big time if you are a smaller company like BFG because you can't just absorb the losses so easily as you are always operating on thin margins.

EVGA still has the lifetime warranty lineup but you get charged a $20 premium for the ARs versus the TRs (2-3 year warranty). That sort of operates like the product protection plans hucked by big box stores but even those are usually only for 1-2 years instead of lifetime.
 
I'm curious, for those in the know, where did BFG have it's cards manufactured? Did they just recieve allocations of reference cards from the same facilities as other AIBs? Did they share production with another company?
 
Good old BFG, still have two 7800 GTX 512s that still work that are about five years old, with lifetime warranties, not!

Yeah I with they had gotten into make ATI cards to improve their business, hate to see them go under.
 
Hmmm, their website looks normal but if you try to buy something you get this:

Thank you for visiting! We are currently experiencing some technical difficulties with our store.

We should be back online to serve you as soon as we can.

Thank you for your patience!
Click to expand...

I'd say they're experiencing some techinal difficulties.
 
I find it funny: BFG blames going under on Fermi.
Galaxy has SEVEN custom designs using Fermi cores. You can't tell me it's not profitable.
 
Zurginator said:
I find it funny: BFG blames going under on Fermi.
Galaxy has SEVEN custom designs using Fermi cores. You can't tell me it's not profitable.
Click to expand...

No, jonnyGURU has mentioned, already, that his wording was poor, and that was not the intent of his statement. The thread title was just Spair-Flair's own thing, based on his interpretation of that statement.
 
jeremyshaw said:
No, jonnyGURU has mentioned, already, that his wording was poor, and that was not the intent of his statement. The thread title was just Spair-Flair's own thing, based on his interpretation of that statement.
Click to expand...

And I asked for mods to retract and remove that portion (Project Manager Blames Fermi) from the title.
 
Well, even if they don't blame them, you can't tell me you haven't heard hundreds of people bickering about how 'Fermi isn't profitable' and 'Fermi is killing companies' in the case of both BFG and XFX.

In the case of XFX, I think Nvidia pulled the plug on them for jumping to ATI. XFX may say it was their choice, but I really don't think it was. Not that I care, I will NEVER buy an XFX product again.

Anyways, this kinda sucks for those with BFG cards. I will be surprised if we don't see some lawsuits popping up... though it's pointless as BFG no longer has anything to sue for.
 
Rizen said:
I have a hard time believing you don't understand the difference though between enthusiast PC components and say, cars, peripherals, or other components.

I worked for a sunglass company, and we offered a lifetime warranty. We had people send in sunglasses they ran over with their car. Did we cover those? Of course not, because their negligence caused the problem, not our manufacturing.

If you overvolt or modify a video card and it dies, it's not a manufacturer's defect. But unlike with sunglasses that have been run over with a car, or most other products where negligence is obvious, it can be very, very difficult to tell if someone was abusing their products or not. A cursory glance over these forums will show you that plenty of people are willing to RMA products they ran outside of the coverage of the warranty and then broke, and now expect the manufacturer to replace.

That is why a lifetime warranty on PC components is not the same thing as with other industries.
Click to expand...

+1

There ain't no free lunch.

In fact, I support EVGA's efforts to charge extra for lifetime warranty. Why? Because I don't abuse my cards and would like to pay less and get less (of course I'd like to pay less and get MORE, but let's be realistic here), whereas those who do plan to abuse their cards should pay extra for the lifetime warranty. This is similar to buying an appliance, having the salesperson ask if you want an extended warranty or not. You can say yes or no. The company satisfies both the cheapskates and the people who insist on getting extended warranties.

I don't want to hijack this thread too much, and I know it's not just the lifetime warranty thing that brought down BFG, but if EVGA's efforts to price-distinguish among customers helps keep the company alive, we all benefit.
 
and based on the updated feedback,

here you see the potential issue plain in sight.

For a product category well-known to have market-wide overspec usage, especially in the premium segments, with the knowledge in advance, multiple years, and difficulty in correct tracking of parts for warranty operation, and the fact that products are usually pushing on the bleeding edge of technology, (a lot of potential expensive products replacement implies need for balance operation). Operating under this scenario perhaps mean you need heightened rate to offset the issue if they never got properly addressed, and it may indirectly impact other issues.

If a new venture is ever formed again, maybe need to put heavy emphasis reviewing this operational aspect
 
Zurginator said:
Well, even if they don't blame them, you can't tell me you haven't heard hundreds of people bickering about how 'Fermi isn't profitable' and 'Fermi is killing companies' in the case of both BFG and XFX.

In the case of XFX, I think Nvidia pulled the plug on them for jumping to ATI. XFX may say it was their choice, but I really don't think it was. Not that I care, I will NEVER buy an XFX product again.

Anyways, this kinda sucks for those with BFG cards. I will be surprised if we don't see some lawsuits popping up... though it's pointless as BFG no longer has anything to sue for.
Click to expand...

Nvidia's introduction of the GF100 series required that a lot of lower end cards be bundled with them, this caused a hell of a lot of dissension in the ranks. (nobody wanted a lot of this crap, some of was of course good products like the 9800GTX rebadges but a lot of it was junk stuff). And the first round of products hardly flew off the shelves. look at the intro price of the 470GTX, and what did galaxy have them for last week? BFG problems were of course their own and I am not excusing them but Nvidia surely didn't help them out here. Only now with the advent of the GF104 (probably what Fermi should have been if nvidia had not been aiming at the moon) do the partners have something to brag about.

Of course your right the only money that will be made in court will be by the lawyers.
 
jonnyGURU said:
In effigy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moufhy35mo0
Click to expand...

LOLOLOLOL!!! So that's what you two were up to that one day.

Inglix_the_Mad said:
The first one, BFG didn't (while eVGA did) protect itself really against people abusing the lifetime warranty. You would see people selling the cards on eBay, praising the warranty, while it was meant for the original purchaser only.
Click to expand...

Heh, a friend of mine (years ago before I started working for BFG) used to buy broken/cheap BFG cards off eBay for the sole purpose of RMAing them. He did about a half dozen cards.

Spare-Flair said:
I'm curious, for those in the know, where did BFG have it's cards manufactured? Did they just recieve allocations of reference cards from the same facilities as other AIBs? Did they share production with another company?
Click to expand...

Depended on the card. Higher end reference cards always came from Flextronics/Foxconn
just like any other AIB. Lower end cards came from various CEMs in China just like any other AIB (who don't have their own factory).
 
Sooo :http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=982

It had been rumored that BFG was looking to AMD to continue to be a presence in the graphics card market, and here is proof that they almost pulled off that partnership.

A Chinese reader who is closely associated with a manufacturing company in China sent a couple interesting pictures as well as a short description of the business agreement that BFG had pursued with this company. Apparently this manufacturer would procure the parts, assemble the cards, package and ship the products under BFG’s name. BFG would have little to do with the business other than producing the specifications of the cards and marketing the final products. Several models of the cards were designed, components were bought, and cards started to be manufactured.
Click to expand...
 
blastingcap said:
Why? Because I don't abuse my cards and would like to pay less and get less (of course I'd like to pay less and get MORE, but let's be realistic here), whereas those who do plan to abuse their cards should pay extra for the lifetime warranty.
Click to expand...

I don't think it's fair to say only those that plan to abuse their cards should buy the lifetime warranty. I agree it makes sense to offer a cheaper version; I just disagree on who should buy the one with the lifetime warranty. I've had many videocards fail on me, and I didn't abuse them, heck I don't even overclock videocards (no problem overclocking processors, but videocards having normal temperatures of 70C+ for ATI or 90C+ for nVidia just freaks me out too much to consider overclocking in addition to that). Yet, I had one nVidia card after another fail on me a few years ago. Had a 7900GTX fail on me in one computer, a 7950GX fail in another computer, multiple notebooks with nVidia GPUs just started turning off randomly. I honestly would not buy an nVidia card at all if no manufacturer offered a lifetime warranty, yet because of the lifetime warranty of EVGA I've been considering selling my 5870 and going with 2 460s.

I'm normally the type to skip on any extended warranty, but with videocards (especially nVidia based ones) I'd recommend everybody spend the extra $20-30 for a lifetime warranty. I'd definitely not say that lifetime warranties are only for those that plan to abuse their cards.
 
I am willing to bet that Nvidia played a large factor in why BFG died.........having stories of AIB being forced to buy old tech can't be good for the company that makes boards wanting to use the newest tech....
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
I am willing to bet that Nvidia played a large factor in why BFG died.........having stories of AIB being forced to buy old tech can't be good for the company that makes boards wanting to use the newest tech....
Click to expand...

Unless Nvidia shut them out, I don't see that being the case. Galaxy and EVGA are both doing quite well selling Nvidia cards.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top