Do you work for a computer company?

[doinmybestatlast]

I have to believe that this forum is composed mainly of hardware enthusiasts and hardware manufacturers. I believe that some products are panned by competitors and some are pimped by manufacturers.

Examples of my own purchases:
IBM Deathstar drives - remember when these came out they were pimped as the best?
Antec 430 - 'nuff said.
TT cases - designed for profit in mind.
Fortron PS - thanks!
Enermax PS - thanks!
Watercooling - thanks, with reservations.
AMD processors - thanks!
MSI/Asus/Abit MB - thanks!

I should say I bought all the above based on the reviews on this forum.

Now we have a post panning Fortron - probably the best price/performance PS during the past year. I have noting but good things to say about this PS. Also we have Dells at the office and we never have a PS problem.

Lots of posts panning and pimping Antec - what do you think?
Lots of posts panning and pimping TT - same.

Just want to add - do your homework. Don't believe everything you read here, especially Hot Forums!

 

[redhatlinux]

I don't work at any hardware or software company (other than my own) at the moment but I have in the past. (IBM and Amdahl, plus consulting at AMD). The Deathstars were made by Hitachi, as I recall even before IBM sold the business. Here's a point, ANY manufacturer can have problems. At Amdahl we re sold Fujitsu drives. We had a particular issue inside the HDA with the spontaineous growth of zinc in the form of a hair like strand, at the molecular level. This 'hair', would intermittantly touch a circuit and cause a temp error. We never found a specific batch of clamps, which were zinc plated which could cause the error. I know for a fact that IBM had problems with pvc coated wires causing problems inside the HDA.

Consumer level HDD's are so cheap these days I am surprised that they are reliable as they are. I will 'pimp' AMD all day long just because they are much more innovative than Intel. Lets face it, there simply would not be 64-bit desktop solutions or two processors in a single can without AMD. Intels solution of stitching two together, using the FSB for signal processor communications is primitive to say the least.

 

[theMan]

yeah, its really interesting on these forums to see some elite member recommending a certain mobo, and then the next day, a few more people are, and then by the next week, every single person on the forums is recommending that mobo to everyone that has a question about a build.

 

[Sunner]

I work at a private company, though I doubt anyone here would be the least bit interested in what we do

 

[FlyingPenguin]

I'd say half of us are just hobbists and the other half are IT people like myself.

When you're a hobbyist you don't see the "big picture". I think I have a far more realistic idea of the quality of products because I work on dozens of computers a week. I see a large assortment of different brands pass before me and if there's a consistenly defective product then I'll see a LOT of that product.

I don't represent anyone so I can be unbiased. I am a self employed IT Consultant. I don't do custom builds but I do a lot of parts replacement.

IBM did have a bad run of HDDs for a while there. What everyone seems to forget is that this has also happened to most other HDD maufacturers as well at one time or another. For instance I saw so many failures of Maxtor drives last year that I refused to buy them anymore. Whatever the problem was they seem to have fixed it, but I still prefer to buy from Seagate because they have a better warranty.

I have always liked Antec products - I only buy Antec cases for my self. I predominantly buy Antec PSUs for myself and my clients.

I had an Antec True 430 fail in my own workstation 3 months ago due to bad caps. However I'd still recommend Antec (although my latest favorite PSU is the Enermax NoiseTaker and that's what I installed in my rig and what I've been buying for client replacements lately - nice PSU for the price).


The REAL story behind the bad caps is that a major parts supplier that supplies caps to most manufacturers wound up using a defective batch of electrolytic chemical in their caps. They bought the chemical from someone else and they had no idea it was a bad batch (although they should have better quality control to catch that sort of thing so I still lay some of the blame on them).

EVERYONE in the industry wound up with these caps. They wound up in everything that uses electrolytic caps - mobos, PSUs, HDDs, cards, you name it. Probably also wound up in some non-computer gear (this cap supplier was a BIG vendor). It also seems a few other smaller caps manufactuers also bought the same defective electrolytic chemical.

This all happened around 2 - 3 years ago. It's taken this long for the bad electrolytic chemical to break down and out-gas. Those of us in the industry started to see bad caps in large profusion a year and a half ago. How long it takes for the chemical to break down depends on the number of hours they're used. Casual computer users who only use their computers 7 hours a week may never have a problem even if they do have bad caps. Those of us who are power users and leave our systems on 24/7 will see problems much sooner.

Everyone was affected. Epox and Abit cranked out a LOT of mobos with bad caps for a while. Whoever makes Dell's mobos (Intel I think) had a serious problem with bad caps for a few months. I was seeing Dells dying left and right for a while last year (most of my business clients own Dells).

The good companies caught the problem early. The bad companies were oblivious to the problem until it got way out of hand.

Although there are definately some bad Antec PSUs out there, there aren't all that many from checking the newsgroups (I did this a few weeks ago to get a feel for what problems I might have with customer systems). I feel pretty good that I mostly bought Antec for my clients the past few years. So far I have yet to see a single Antec PSU fail on a client system. My True 430 is the only one I've personally seen fail so far. I've seen plenty of other brand PSUs have problems. Whoever Dell buys their PSUs from had problems for a couple of months for instance - I had a rash of customers with PSU failures in Dells last year. Pretty much passed now.

Fortron makes some good PSUs and also have an excellent reputation. I've heard of no confirmed Fortron bad caps incidents, but I'm sure they also got burned like everyone else did and some defective lots of PSUs got out of the warehouse door before they got caught.

Bottom line is ANYTHING using electrolytic caps made 2 - 3 years ago can POTENTIALLY have bad caps. It's highly unlikely anything you'd buy new TODAY would have bad caps. The exception would be anything that's been sitting on the shelf a long time (beware buying PSUs or mobos on special from places that buy up lots of discontinued equipment for instance, or buying 2nd-hand components).

No reputable manufacturer is going to purposely make a PSU with defective caps in it. It's not cost effective if you have to replace them under warranty.

HOWEVER some disreputable manufacturers MIGHT still buy their capacitors from a disreputable parts supplier who still has a crate of suspect defective caps lying around he wants to unload for a good price. You can bet that the reputable manufacturers with reputations they care about will likely be scrutinizing the quality of their components a LOT more closely after this fiasco.

As always buyer beware. Buy from a reputable name-brand company. ANYONE can make the occasional defective unit and a reputable manufacturer will replace it under warranty.

 

[DaveSimmons]

and hardware manufacturers. I believe that some products are panned by competitors and some are pimped by manufacturers

I really doubt this.

Most of the pimping is either
(a) because the price/performance or quality is superior, such as P4 2.4C - 3.2C processors a couple of years ago and AMD A64 processors now.

(b) because the poster is a fanboy blinded by loyalty, such as most current pro-intel posters. There are special cases where intel is actually a better choice for a desktop CPU but most of these people post nonsense about intel CPUs being better at all tasks.

A lot of the old-timers will pimp certain brands / models, but over time their recommendations will change, switching brands and chip families. Most people were promoting Radeon 9800s over nvidia's 5xxx, and are now promoting nvidia where they beat radeon x-series.

There is often a consensus, but usually because that pick _is_ one of the best for the money, like Antec SLK3000-series cases for quiet cooling.

PS - no, I'm a software developer with no connection to the hardware industry or any review site.

 

[GamerExpress]

I am a computer consultant for a private tech company, I do see your point though. I have noticed quite a bit of marketing on other forums out there. I am not too sure about this place yet.

 

[bendixG15]

I would say that a lot of prople here have little experience with products.

So when they see 3 or 4 posts praising a certain item,
they jump on the bandwagon with the attitude that it has to be good.

Same thing happens in reverse when something gets panned real bad.
"Oh Win98 just SUCKS" cause 4 guys said so in this tread.

I chalk it up to the learning curve that we all have to go thru.
Nothing sinister about it

 

[Ike0069]

Well I work at an electrical power plant as the plant chemist, so I guess that means I'm just a HW enthusiast.

I like to pimp AMD no matter the situation becuase I like the "little guy" when he's kicking the "big guys" butt.
Other than that, my brand recommendations tend to change fairly regularly with the exception of PSU's. I pesonally like Enermax for price/performance and the Fortron Blue storm for price/looks.

 

[Oyeve]

I pimped NEXT over 10 years ago.

 

[Pr0d1gy]

All I know is I have an Antec 550w TruePower II and it is a rock that overvolts by .04-.05 on my Corsair Xperts.

 

[piasabird]

I work for a Community College and have worked with servers and mainframes. We buy all IBM Desktops all the time. Basically IBM is pretty dependable. We have our mainframe on an IBM Dual PIII X-Server using emulation. We liked it so we purchased new IBM Servers for our new database system.

I wouldnt buy IBM for gaming, but they are dependable. We do carry a blanket insurance policy on all of our PC's once the warranty/parts warranty runs out.

We have some Noisy Dell Servers also but they tend to be more troublesome.

 

[Aquila76]

I'm an IT guy, but I currently work for a legal firm. I worked for a faxserver company in the past, as well as a wireless telecom SW company, if that counts (didn't think so).

I try to make recommendations based solely on my experiences with a product. If called to, I will make them based on a select group of knowledgeable people (friends, co-workers, members here, etc.). I am the anti-fanboi when it comes to brands. Although I'm not very fond of Fujitsu. 60% of my workload at my last job was RMA'ing or repairing busted Fujitsu laptops for any and every conceivable reason: HDD, dead mobo, half dead screen, keys, etc. If I ever make a recommendation for a laptop, it will NOT be Fush!tsu.

 

[designit]

I started that Fortron thread and my intention was not panning.
I saw a poster(no need to mention names), bashing Antec and promoting Fortron.
And another posting Antec's bad caps. Since I just bought Antec 6 months ago I was concerned, decided to search the net for this problem and see what good PSU's are out there. To my surprise I found numerous good reviews on Antec and the cap problems on almost all PSU's. But this problem was removed by almost all reputable companies. I also found out Fortron having bad caps but nowhere I found anything about them remedy this problem. I also found out that Fortron has been using 85c caps instead of 105c as before. I posted the thread to make people aware of this, and balance things out.
I am sorry if I offended anyone using Fortron, but by no means I am a representative of any product.