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Bad brands now good

O

orangat

Golden Member
There are some companies which used to be bottom of the barrel pickings but have turned into

enthusiast quality brands. I submit 3 names for discussion :-

OCZ --- Yep. This might surprise many but it was disreputable online vendor not so long ago which routinely sold ddr memory modules (as recent as the pc2700) and other products which couldn't run as rated, packing of positive comments/reviews, re-marking cpus/cards, running fake review websites, etc

Now, its a complete 180deg turnaround and is the best rehabilitated name in the biz, OCZ is mentioned as a good to top quality manufacturer and always enjoys excellent reviews and recommendations.

ECS --- A label under the big oem manufacturer PCChips. I'm sure PCChips products have to meet some sort of standard for their oem customers but they are not averse to producing crapware now and then for a higher profit margin. Some of the shenanigans include the fake chipset scam and fake cache/coast chips during the 486/pentium days, fake Intel chipsets, soldered on and overclocked AMD cpu mbs were sold under models names like AMD PRo, Athlon Pro or Duron Pro. The PCChips lottery page has information on PCChips pseudonyms when the brand got too notorious.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that ECS has turned into a top brand but ECS now has an enthusiast line which touts overclocking capabilities with some good reviews and the basic models are considered good bang/buck. A US office with native English speakers also goes a long way in customer support.

XFX --- A company under the Pine Tech group. I remember seeing Pine video cards a long time back. The brand used to be associated with poor build quality and unreliability. Customer service for support/rmas was difficult to get hold of.

After the x800/68xx and into the 78xx period, XFX is selling an overclocked enthusiast 7800 card, double lifetime warranty, revamped website (I think), US support office. Opening a local office imo is always a good idea and both ECS/XFX gained alot from it.
 
Yup.

DFI -- Used to be another bottom-feeder pacific-rim mobo manufacturer. Now they're the enthusiast cream-of-the-crop.

Jetway -- Much the same story, but their latest NF4 mobo is innovative and very enthusiast-friendly.

You can find many that went the other way, too.
 
can you name a few?
- thanks in advance for the info/warning
Click to expand...

Antec PSU's used to be a sure thing, now they're not so much anymore. Dell used to be much better than they are. Same with Gateway. Sony's quality has gone downhill. IBM used to make good hard drives until the Deathstar ones. Maxtor went through a really bad period as well.

And outside of computers, I can think of Tim Hortons, whose coffee used to be fresh but is now invariably old, they used to throw it out after it had been sitting on the hotplate for 15 minutes, now they just leave it until someone buys it, so if you are the first guy in 30 minutes to buy coffee, you're getting coffee that's been sitting on the hotplate for 30 minutes. Tastes like people put cigarettes out in it. And their donuts are poor now too.

Often times, companies at the top of their fields will get lazy and complacent, let their standards slip.
 
so wouldn't this basically be a cycle? the good companies today will start flaking in their quality and the ones at the bottom will revive themselves as the top consumers in a few years? sounds like most things doesn't it? i mean with the cycle
 
Originally posted by: ValuedCustomer
Originally posted by: Fresh Daemon
You can find many that went the other way, too.
Click to expand...
can you name a few?
Click to expand...

In my opinion Abit and ASUS have gone the other way, at least some. They aren't bottom feeders now, but they have 'used' their reputation to the point that I don't trust them as much as I did when they were the king (~Pentium days for ASUS, ~P2/3 days for Abit)


I can attest to the problems with OCZ. Originally they had pretty bad customer service. I was involved with them in a customer service episode that lasted months. Eventually they did me (mostly) right, but it took a while. More recently, they pretty much set the standard for customer service... of course you pay more for OCZ now than you did in the past too (when compared with other brands).
 
Originally posted by: Fresh Daemon
can you name a few?
- thanks in advance for the info/warning
Click to expand...

Antec PSU's used to be a sure thing, now they're not so much anymore. Dell used to be much better than they are. Same with Gateway. Sony's quality has gone downhill. IBM used to make good hard drives until the Deathstar ones. Maxtor went through a really bad period as well.
........
Click to expand...

Maxtor had a very very rough time in the mid 90s. Hyundai really helped to turn the company around and sold their share in 2000 I think. Maxtor drives were slower and unreliable during their bad times and looked shoddy as well. Now the diamondmax8,9 is probably a little behind the competition but the dmax10 is probably even.

IBM used to make the best drives year after year for at least a decade until the deathstar. What blows my mind is that people are so eager to forgive Maxtor and OCZ but totally dismiss Hitachi drives as unreliable.
 
wasn't western digital kinda bad back in the day? i heard their drives were unreliable and broke down sooner than others
 
Originally posted by: alimoalem
wasn't western digital kinda bad back in the day? i heard their drives were unreliable and broke down sooner than others
Click to expand...

WD had a great pedigree. They made very good drives on par with IBM and seagate back in the day.

The first gen raptors were unreliable. Failure rates shot up around the reduced warranty period. Seagates also had high failure rates just before and during this time.
 
WD had a bad model in the 1.6GB drives. I think it was the 3 platter 1.6GB drive. I remember I had one that went bad and there were a bunch of people on storagereview.com at the time who had problems with the same model. They replaced it with the 2 platter version (next gen) which was fine for me.

All of the storage mfrs. have had problem drives at some point in their history, though the deathstar was the most prominent and widely publicized that I know of.
 
so basically what happened to the deathstar is similar to mcdonald and "supersize me"? the most popular company gets criticized the most?
 
Originally posted by: alimoalem
so basically what happened to the deathstar is similar to mcdonald and "supersize me"? the most popular company gets criticized the most?
Click to expand...

no, the fact that everyone's HDD was in the grave within an unacceptable amount of time was what did it. It doubly worse when you're typically the best in the biz and turn right around with the worst product. I think IBM's failure with the deathstars really shot WDs sales up ('cause people were still leery of Maxtor, and seagate has always been middle-of-the-road, IMO)
 
just wondering, could the length of the warranty the manufacturer gives reflect the reliability/quality of the product? cause i think Seagate has a longer warranty than other brands (don't quote me on that) so does it mean it's more reliable?
 
Originally posted by: alimoalem
so basically what happened to the deathstar is similar to mcdonald and "supersize me"? the most popular company gets criticized the most?
Click to expand...

No. The deathstar models were probably the worst harddrives ever and it really stuck into the minds of consumers.

Originally posted by: alimoalem
just wondering, could the length of the warranty the manufacturer gives reflect the reliability/quality of the product? cause i think Seagate has a longer warranty than other brands (don't quote me on that) so does it mean it's more reliable?
Click to expand...

Not always. In Seagates case, it is more of a conciliatory gesture after the warranty slashing episode starting in the 2002 and a anecdotal rise in failure rates around the same time which made the move doubly unpopular. Other manufacturers made the same gesture and bumped up warranties.
In Samsungs case however, they did not follow the rest of the crowd and cut down to 1yr warranty in '02 but stuck to their standard warranty and still sold reliable drives.
 
i can't believe that everyone has forgotten AMD. Before the Athlon XP's, AMD chips were always a cheap (but inferior) alternative to Pentiums. With the AthlonXP, AMD basically equaled Intel, and then with the Athlon64, AMD finally offered a better CPU than the Intel equivalent.

RoD
 
Samsung - My first memory of a the Samsung name was on a microwave oven at K-Mart. It was a beer can with a glass door, but now Samsung produces some top quality video produsts. Their HDTVs and monitors perform very well and are always highly rated. I'm not sure when they started making hard drives but I now own 3 and have never been more satisfied with a HD. They are solidly built, run quiet, cool and perform very well overall.
 
Originally posted by: rod
i can't believe that everyone has forgotten AMD. Before the Athlon XP's, AMD chips were always a cheap (but inferior) alternative to Pentiums. With the AthlonXP, AMD basically equaled Intel, and then with the Athlon64, AMD finally offered a better CPU than the Intel equivalent.

RoD
Click to expand...


Yep! The K5 models were bottom feeders with with only a slightly better FPU than Cyrix.
 
Yeah, AMD didn't really have a good product until the original Athlon. Until then, they were basically saying, "Sure, it sucks compared to Pentium/PII/486, but it's cheaper!"

I remember when the Athlon first came out, and all the reviewers were amazed that AMD could actually make something better than Intel.

Talking of hard drives, anyone else remember Conner? Those things were in everything in the early 90's. They were crap, and then they disappeared.

And speaking of another good company that lost it: 3Dfx. The original Voodoo and Voodoo2 cards were great, but the Voodoo3/4/5 series was late to market, over-priced and under-performed. That gave nVidia their opportunity.
 
I quite liked the K5 and had the K5 PR133 when most enthusiasts prefered the Cyrix M1. The M1 had big heat issues, incompatibility issues, unstable with 75/83 bus speeds and the fpu was even worse than the K5.

Connor was in the same boat as Maxtor, behind on new technology in the 90s, and performance of their drives got relatively worse and worse compared to other manufacturers and as time went on even looked shoddy. Maxtor got bailed out by Hyundai and made a huge turnaround but Conner died.
 
Originally posted by: Corporate Thug
ECS is now a good company?
Click to expand...
They aren't total crap and I actually used an ECS (755-A2) board in my Dad's PC and it's been more stable than his old Asus A7N8X Deluxe\XP 2200+ combo.
 
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