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PNY 6800 Longevity

S

Sonicolone

n00b
Joined
Nov 28, 2004
Messages
6
Like many others, I also purchased a PNY 6800 from CUSA over the weekend for $199. The first one I bought exhibited obvious artifacts right out of the box, before unlokcing any pipes or overclocking it. I returned it that day and exchanged it for another one, which I have been able to successfly unlock all pipes on as well as overclock it decently. It seems to work fine.

I am however, squeamish about my experience with the first PNY card as well as the experience of others with this CUSA card deal (caps falling off etc.). If my card is now working properly should I be happy and let it go, or should I return it now while I can and get something from a more reliable company. What is the likelihood this card will fail in the near future? I would hate to have to deal with PNY on a warranty issue from what I have read. Any advise would be appreciated.
 
I worked in retail electronics for a number of years. General rule was always "If it works 30 days, it'll live out its warranty", at least for items that you used every day.

I have a feeling that the shipper CompUSA used with the PNY cards may not have been gentle in their efforts to get equipment to stores in time for sales. This along with PNY's packaging design may have contributed to the issues people have had with lost capacitors.

Whether it is that, or quality control, if you get a good card and it stays good through a week or two of 24/7 use (including some benchmarking/gaming stress), you should be good to go. I bought one of these cards too, and while I have not been able to unlock it to 16 pipelines, it has worked fine in every other way.
 
PNY pissed me off. don't buy from them. i don't kno if its packaging or how CUSA was moving the boxes with the vcard but this is pathetic. so many ppl with faulty cards with things falling off, artifacts or very poor OC(this part is from my opinion that the cards were crappy alrdy and pny and cusa planned to sell them for cheap). if i were u just stay away, no way this many ppl had problems especially on the same days they were sold and all from cusa?
 
shade said:
PNY pissed me off. don't buy from them. i don't kno if its packaging or how CUSA was moving the boxes with the vcard but this is pathetic. so many ppl with faulty cards with things falling off, artifacts or very poor OC(this part is from my opinion that the cards were crappy alrdy and pny and cusa planned to sell them for cheap). if i were u just stay away, no way this many ppl had problems especially on the same days they were sold and all from cusa?
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Do you even have one? Why are you even wasting people's time with your post? Oh lets all jump on the hate PNY bandwagon! I've had my GT for 2 months, OCed the whole time, no artifacts, no problems - just because a few cards are bad doesn't mean the company is. Why don't you go get an e-machines and stay off this board.
 
shade said:
PNY pissed me off. don't buy from them. i don't kno if its packaging or how CUSA was moving the boxes with the vcard but this is pathetic. so many ppl with faulty cards with things falling off, artifacts or very poor OC(this part is from my opinion that the cards were crappy alrdy and pny and cusa planned to sell them for cheap). if i were u just stay away, no way this many ppl had problems especially on the same days they were sold and all from cusa?
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Pissed you off how? Did you have a personal experience that was bad? Or did you just say "Oh, there's some people having problems, this sucks so I'm angry"? What a childish response. Add some unfounded accusations of "they probably sold crappy batches on purpose" and of poor overclocking, (which, by the way, you have no right to expect ANY overclocking considering that that is running a product beyond its own specs) and we now have a rather childish rant in a forum thread by someone who has no personal experience to back it up. Oh, and we have another childish statement that implies that "even if it's the product shipper's fault, PNY still sucks". Please take your trolling to another sandbox, this one's full. Oh, and learning to spell and use grammar would get you a lot more respect.

LoneWolf (whose PNY GF6800 is working just fine)
 
Mine works just fine, and it unlocked pipelines and shaders with no problem. I haven't overclocked it yet though.
 
LoneWolf said:
I worked in retail electronics for a number of years. General rule was always "If it works 30 days, it'll live out its warranty", at least for items that you used every day.

I have a feeling that the shipper CompUSA used with the PNY cards may not have been gentle in their efforts to get equipment to stores in time for sales. This along with PNY's packaging design may have contributed to the issues people have had with lost capacitors.

Whether it is that, or quality control, if you get a good card and it stays good through a week or two of 24/7 use (including some benchmarking/gaming stress), you should be good to go. I bought one of these cards too, and while I have not been able to unlock it to 16 pipelines, it has worked fine in every other way.
Click to expand...

I agree with LoneWolf. If the thing is working, and you stress it and it's still working, it should be good. My first one had a missing cap, i didn't even put it in. I got a good one, put it in, stressed it a bit and all was well. Then I went and unlocked the pipes, stressed it some more, no problems. Then I went for the OC. Got a mild one, but hey, I know at least at stock I should be good. I don't know who screwed so many of these cards up, but that doesn't mean everyone is going to be crap. Every company puts out some messed up product from time to time. All you can do is let them fix it. CompUSA fixed this for me, so I'm satisfied with my PNY.
 
first off. mine didn't work properly, artifacts right off the bat. the ocing part was just a speculation i had with this whole incident becuz i believe these cards were faulty and were sold on purpose this way. maybe they were rma'ed cards that they fixed or something. but definitely something went down here, something that was weird. i returned mine for another working one becuz they wouldn't give me back my money. even tho this one works, judging from all the ppl who bought a PNY 6800 NU at CUSA. how can u not be a bit mad and wonder wuts goin on... i mean its not like it was all from one store. it was all around the usa. also its one thing to judge by ur own experience but even if i didnt buy this card from CUSA, why should my opinion be any different? if this many ppl are having problems, should we ignore there experiences and not be more causious since PNY isn't the only comp. making these cards? i would assume it would be a better advice to give from judging thru not only mine but other ppls exp as well.
 
First off, PNY likely isn't even making the cards themselves. Many card manufacturers have someone making the cards for them. Note that the BFG 6800OC cards have the exact same color PCB as the PNY cards. The cards are the standard nVidia reference design, making it easy to outsource production.
U.S. law states that it is illegal to remanufacture or refurbish defective or used product and sell it as new. This would make your RMA'd resold cards theory a bad assumption. Companies caught doing this face heavy fines and penalties. You also admit that your part about overclocking was "just speculation". One shouldn't use speculation to make allegations against a vendor; one should use proof.
Finally, as everyone said, a number of companies have had an occasional batch of hardware that went out the door with problems. I could think of Antec, who has had one or two bad batches of power supplieds among the many good ones they've shipped, just one of many vendors who had an occasional problem. This doesn't make the company 100% bad. Everyone so far who has returned a defective card to CompUSA for exchange has gotten a replacement. Most people who have bitched about it are people who had one bad experience, and then didn't give PNY or CompUSA a chance to resolve it but rather returned the card and then yelled loudly that they got a lemon; after all people want everything right, and they want it right now. We don't give people even a chance to make good on their mistakes anymore. A good rule of retail is that people who have a bad experience are heard far more loudly than those who have a good one, so all it takes is 20 [H]ardOCPers with bad cards (out of thousands purchased on one day out of an entire year) and now the problem sounds like an epidemic.
I'm not here to say I love CompUSA as a vendor, or that PNY is a perfect company. I think your knee-jerk reaction is out of place though, and immature. Did you try a second PNY card, letting CompUSA try to remedy the situation for you, or did you just return the first one in disgust, vowing never again to buy their product?
 
I was worried about the same thing and almost returned mine for the BFG at BB deal.

But mine overclocked easily and seems solid. PNY has a year warranty and my credit card adds a year onto it so I feel that I'm covered for a card slightly over $200.

Just from browsing posts (here and other sites) I got the impression if you get a non banged up PNY card then it'll over clock decently. However, the BFG posts I read were from those that didn't get their cards to over clock well. Just my impression, I'm not saying PNY has better quality.
 
i understand wut ur saying, but right now since there in there "bad batch mode", i'd say stay away from PNY right now. i do admit, wut happened was kinda blown out of proportions but it just seemed like they caused it somehow, there the only company to promote $200 pny cards for sale. then suddenly alot of ppl got bad cards... i hope u understand where im gettin at.
 
mine is bad too, artifacting is rediculous. textures flashing all over the place, its like playing a light show, and EXTREMELY IRRITATING :)

hoping to take it back and get another one that hopefully works but we'll see i guess
 
mine is fine also

yes there are artifacts with 16 pipes enabled but did i buy 16 pipes? no

the problem is the packageing... right where that capasitor (looks like a resistor to me) is the plastic case curves closer to the card.
 
shade said:
i understand wut ur saying, but right now since there in there "bad batch mode", i'd say stay away from PNY right now. i do admit, wut happened was kinda blown out of proportions but it just seemed like they caused it somehow, there the only company to promote $200 pny cards for sale. then suddenly alot of ppl got bad cards... i hope u understand where im gettin at.
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Approximately four years ago, Best Buy was the only company touting Visiontek GeForce3 Ti 200 cards for $99 the day after Thanksgiving...$200 card, $50 off instantly, $50 mail in rebate (at the time, the GeForce3 Ti 500 was the top-end card). Same crowd of exultant people who managed to latch onto one (I got one and had it for a year and a half before selling it, still in good shape). There were a few people who got a flukey card back then as well, and they were the ones who screamed the loudest on the forums...by the way, Visiontek went under...and was reincarnated as BFG.

I hope you understand what I'M getting at. It's the day after Thanksgiving. Everybody has a door-buster special or two going. Best Buy had ATI Radeon 9600XT cards for $99 after rebate, not nearly as good of a deal, but a great deal for a low-end-of-mainstream card. Every vendor is in a rush to get their stuff shipped to them fast, at the last minute. If you've ever seen a UPS guy kick packages off a truck (and I have) you have a small glimpse of what can happen in the freight business, and if PNY had a flawed packaging design, that could explain it. There's a lot of possible reasons why this happened, but the people who have great experiences with their product are the ones you're least likely to hear. Why? Because people with problematic experiences are always louder, and people's ears are always more open to problems. Working in retail, I learned it time and time again...A customer with a good experience will tell five people. A customer with a bad one will tell twenty. It's absolutely right.

We don't really know that a lot of people had problems; we know that a number of [H]ardforum readers did. Maybe all those cards came from a specific PNY warehouse, or a specific region of CompUSA stores serviced by the same shipper. There's just too many details here without enough proof. My point is, shoot-from-the-hip opinions without facts do nobody any good.
 
Got my PNY 6800GT back in July and it just had to die right when HL2 comes out. Sad to say its in RMA land.
 
i paid for my PNY GT back in july and recieved it in august directly from PNY(shipped fromp parsippany Nj) and ive had nothing but good results. they even gave me a free beverage cooler :D
 
shade said:
PNY pissed me off. don't buy from them. i don't kno if its packaging or how CUSA was moving the boxes with the vcard but this is pathetic. so many ppl with faulty cards with things falling off, artifacts or very poor OC(this part is from my opinion that the cards were crappy alrdy and pny and cusa planned to sell them for cheap). if i were u just stay away, no way this many ppl had problems especially on the same days they were sold and all from cusa?
Click to expand...

Meh. Everyone puts out fucked up products once in a while. It just happens. Did you write off Intel after the PF bug or the F00F bug? Will you never touch a Ford because of the Pinto? Are you never going to go to a Jack In The Box again? Sun?

The true test is to see how well they handle things - are are defective cards going to to get replaced quickly & easily with good ones, or are you going to have to go through a month-long process to prove that you didn't ruin the card yourself (or, even worse, just make you eat it)? Are they going to publish a notice ("A number of these cards that came off production line #5 were bad, check yours")?
 
Thanks for all the replies and opinions. At the end of the day, while I am not a huge Compusa fan, they did replace my card in a courteous fashion and the new one really does appear to be working fine. I have played around with the card some more, stressed it, overclocked it, unlocked it etc. and well I got what I bargained for, perhaps even more since I was able to unlock all pipelines.

As of right now, I am going to roll the dice and keep the card. PNY does need to reflect on their quality control and packaging as too many cards were defective, yet companies do make mistakes and that doesn't mean that all of their products are bad. I don't believe that they intentionally sold defective cards, but that mishandling and packing was to blame for the loose caps. FYI I also tried to BFG 6800 OC card for awhile and was unable to unlock the pipes or overclock as much as the PNY. All and all I am scoring higher in 3dMark03 (10,100+) then the BFG card I paid $255 for at BB. The cooling system on the BFG card did appear to be more robust, but it was also quite abit louder. So at $199 - Im happy.
 
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