People selling their 7970s?

[JAG87]

Not quite.....how's the build quality of the 680 vs. the 7970? That must factor into the discussion of which one is the better choice for each individual person. If speed is your only concern, sure, the 680 is the only choice. If longevity is also a factor, then it's not quite so clear cut, is it?

Actually it's quite clear. EVGA has the best warranty and support in the business. Name me one other card company that has anything even close to their warranty. After 3 years the card is so devalued both price and performance wise, so who cares if a "better" built card lasts you 10 years. Goody for you.

 

[DeeJayeS]

Actually it's quite clear. EVGA has the best warranty and support in the business. Name me one other card company that has anything even close to their warranty. After 3 years the card is so devalued both price and performance wise, so who cares if a "better" built card lasts you 10 years. Goody for you.

MSI and ASUS both have 3 year warranties that are transferable to new owners and I find their cooling solutions superior to EVGAs (DirectCU and Twin Frozr ftw).

There's no doubt that EVGA's support is excellent.

 

[Meghan54]

I can't remember the last time a card died on me. That said, I would prefer a better quality build. Has anyone ever put together something that shows better longevity for certain cards/boards based on chip or manufacturer? Considering the relatively short life of video cards...

Relatively short life is a relative concept, don't you think? While we enthusiasts tend to run through hardware like water through our fingers, the vast majority of users don't. I just sold a 4870 after years of using it and it was still working perfectly. I don't think the people that have had to reflow their 8800's can say the same thing......and, yes, I know two different gens. and such. It's just that I've rarely if ever heard of ATi/AMD cards having build quality issues while Nvidia cards over the years have had numerous issues. Seems Nvidia just goes for speed over everything else. To wit:

570s had the issue. Never heard of a 480 popping vrms as well as 580s. Maybe you just pushed them too hard.

I had 480s on water and they were fine at 900 core and 1.2v

I don't think you can really compare longevity of cards under water to the majority of users. Water cooling is still a very niche segment of even the enthusiast population, so I tend to discount water cooling results completely. What counts is how the cards come, air cooled.....and in that arena, Nvidia has had its problems. 470's had problems, reflow problems with the 8800 series, the mobile gpus failing, and the list goes on. Again, I don't remember a list like that from the AMD/Ati side.

 

[Meghan54]

Actually it's quite clear. EVGA has the best warranty and support in the business. Name me one other card company that has anything even close to their warranty. After 3 years the card is so devalued both price and performance wise, so who cares if a "better" built card lasts you 10 years. Goody for you.

Again, what's a warranty got to do with how a product is built? And I really discount the "in 3 years the card's worthless" argument. Worthless how? Maybe for cutting edge games, but that again is only applicable to the enthusiasts that insist upon being cutting edge. I look on the various F/S sections of various forums and see video cards older than 3 years for sale routinely, and they're quite viable for more mundane uses. They're still vastly superior, for instance, than any built in gpu today. So longevity does matter to some and is a viable consideration when buying.


Heck, you only have to browse some of the other video card threads here and see people wondering if the 7970/680 will last them 5 years like their previous card has.


And since you bring up EVGA's warranty, I wonder why EVGA's version of the GTX 680 is a -KR part and not an -AR part, a part that would have a lifetime warranty? Makes one wonder. Oh, and the -KR part can have its warranty extended to 10 years if one chooses to pay the price. But I wonder why this card fails to have an -AR suffix affixed to it like so many other EVGA cards have.

 

[JAG87]

Again, what's a warranty got to do with how a product is built? And I really discount the "in 3 years the card's worthless" argument. Worthless how? Maybe for cutting edge games, but that again is only applicable to the enthusiasts that insist upon being cutting edge. I look on the various F/S sections of various forums and see video cards older than 3 years for sale routinely, and they're quite viable for more mundane uses. They're still vastly superior, for instance, than any built in gpu today. So longevity does matter to some and is a viable consideration when buying.


Heck, you only have to browse some of the other video card threads here and see people wondering if the 7970/680 will last them 5 years like their previous card has.


And since you bring up EVGA's warranty, I wonder why EVGA's version of the GTX 680 is a -KR part and not an -AR part, a part that would have a lifetime warranty? Makes one wonder. Oh, and the -KR part can have its warranty extended to 10 years if one chooses to pay the price. But I wonder why this card fails to have an -AR suffix affixed to it like so many other EVGA cards have.

What viable mundane use? Who in their right mind would buy a 4 year old top of the line card that uses more power and makes more noise vs. a 2 year old mid-range card or current low end that performs exactly the same at 1/2 of the power and noise?

Who the hell keeps their video cards 5 years? Not an enthusiast that's for sure.

The reason why it's a -KR part is because there will be no more -AR parts. Lifetime warranty has been replaced in favor of registration-free transferable warranty and free cross shipping. It has nothing to do with the card itself.

 

[formulav8]

AMD has no need to lower prices. NVidia only had a handful to sell anyways it seems. They mainly wanted to be able to say: "See, we're not behind by 6-7 months this time. We got the so-called Crown back on our heads."

Newegg is completely out of 680 cards. Will be VERY interested to see how fast stock comes back and how much. That will really tell....

Yeah this is a blah post but I don't care. 😛

 

[wand3r3r]

Actually it's quite clear. EVGA has the best warranty and support in the business. Name me one other card company that has anything even close to their warranty. After 3 years the card is so devalued both price and performance wise, so who cares if a "better" built card lasts you 10 years. Goody for you.

You may want to recheck the warranty policies. If you don't register with EVGA, MSI and Asus are about equal with EVGA (both have *slight* differences).

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2225815

EVGA does have the best warranty, but it's nearly a tie between the 3.

 

[djnsmith7]

I am actually thinking about selling 1 or 2 of mine, but it has nothing to do with the 680.

 

[JAG87]

You may want to recheck the warranty policies. If you don't register with EVGA, MSI and Asus are about equal with EVGA (both have *slight* differences).

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2225815

EVGA does have the best warranty, but it's nearly a tie between the 3.

You know what matters to me when my card breaks down? Two words: TURN AROUND

EVGA cross ships from California. I don't think you can get a replacement any faster than that.

 

[wand3r3r]

You know what matters to me when my card breaks down? Two words: TURN AROUND

EVGA cross ships from California. I don't think you can get a replacement any faster than that.

Yes, that's true, and it's certainly a nice advantage.

EVGA improvements over Asus / MSI
Cross shipping
Lifetime warranty with registration.

The rest of the criteria, Warranty transferable, Overclocking supported, etc. are close enough that I consider them a tie.

 

[5150Joker]

I'm surprised people still bother upgrading desktop video cards unless they're running triple high resolution displays. I've got an Alienware M18x notebook w/580M SLi (cut down desktop 560 Ti) and it plays every game I throw at it with max settings. A 7970 or 680 blow away the performance I get and with most games being console ports, its way overkill.

 

[amenx]

Relatively short life is a relative concept, don't you think? While we enthusiasts tend to run through hardware like water through our fingers, the vast majority of users don't. I just sold a 4870 after years of using it and it was still working perfectly. I don't think the people that have had to reflow their 8800's can say the same thing......and, yes, I know two different gens. and such. It's just that I've rarely if ever heard of ATi/AMD cards having build quality issues while Nvidia cards over the years have had numerous issues. Seems Nvidia just goes for speed over everything else. To wit:

Still have a 8800gts 640mb in another machine thats running well for 5 years now, and used almost every day by family members. The 8800 series were sold in such huge quantities simply because they had no competition for 2 years. Thats probably the reason we may hear of some 'failures'.

2011 Stats taken from a large French e-tailer on GPU return rates:

http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-5/components-returns-rates.html

 

[skipsneeky2]

I'm surprised people still bother upgrading desktop video cards unless they're running triple high resolution displays. I've got an Alienware M18x notebook w/580M SLi (cut down desktop 560 Ti) and it plays every game I throw at it with max settings. A 7970 or 680 blow away the performance I get and with most games being console ports, its way overkill.

Reason i upgraded to a 7970 from a single 2gb gtx560 was cause my motherboard would have needed to be replaced,my psu and the cost of another gtx560 with the mobo and psu would have cost nearly as much as the 7970 anyways.

BF3 seems to like having a highly overclocked gtx580 or better to really run at full ultra settings with 2x msaa at 1080p...the 7970 gracefully does this with a mild overclock with 60fps+ average which i knew before purchase.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

AMD has no need to lower prices. NVidia only had a handful to sell anyways it seems. They mainly wanted to be able to say: "See, we're not behind by 6-7 months this time. We got the so-called Crown back on our heads."

Newegg is completely out of 680 cards. Will be VERY interested to see how fast stock comes back and how much. That will really tell....

Yeah this is a blah post but I don't care. 😛

What's really interesting about that is the 7970 sold out here in the states right away, but pretty much everywhere else reported still having stock due to it's high price. The 680 came out and of course sold out, but retailers in the states have 7970 inventory and it's been in stock for awhile now...

I wonder if after the initial sales they've died down a bit?

 

[formulav8]

Yeah the 7970 release sold out quicky just like the 680. But the 7970 stock was replenished fairly quick as well. I'd like to see how long it takes for the 680s to become somewhat 'plentiful'. That could really show how much of a release it really was. Anands review mentioned that nvidia told them that the supplys are somewhat 'scarce'. Just how low will be answered by how long it takes for the 680 stock to build up I guess. Not really a big deal to me since I can't buy $500-$550 anyways, but i'm sure there are still quite a few people out there that want's one but can not find one to buy.

 

[3DVagabond]

That review is messed up. They don't state the clocks of the OC'ed 7970, and the "OCed' 7970 is slower than the stock card on some of the graphs

Not wanting to drag the topic off to the side, but that should make the O/C invalid. It's not typical results. There's a reason the card is performing slower. Instability, of some sort. Possibly pushed the RAM too far and error correction kicked in? Who knows for sure, but I wouldn't use the findings in this review to represent any kind of "typical" performance.

I've seen some reviews now that are only showing ~10% avg. increase in performance on O/C'd 7970's. This is even with 1200MHz+ O'C's. Seems like scaling was much better than this before. Maybe it's faulty O/C's? Maybe there are different game settings being used that aren't as favorable for the 7970's? I'd say, if you already own a 7970, there's no compelling reason to get a 680? I think that if you sat someone down to game without knowing which card they were using, they wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

 

[chloros]

Sold my 7970 and went with the 680. Back to stable drivers.

 

[peonyu]

That's crazy, that's the first I've heard of a 480 dying due to vrms, reference 570 was commonplace for awhile, haven't heard much on the 580 either though.

The 570s were popping at over 900 core over stock voltage if I remember right.

And that would be one of the differences between AMD and Nvidia until now, AMD has had a hardlock on wattage for a long time.


5xxx series was TDP capped across the board, while 4 series from Nvidia, well not so much.

Overclocking was one of the big reasons to go Nvidia over AMD these last few generations, neither 5xxx nor 6xxx really overclocked well on avg, while the Nvidia counter-parts showed excellent overclocking, some cards more so than others.

The 570 I had popped at 910 mhz, with .25v over stock. Some companies had made some extra $$ by adding more VRMs to their 570's than reference...The 480/580 are definitely stronger cards but VRMs are still their weak spot, AMD does deserve some credit for over engineering in that department. They usually have more VRMs than are needed even for a heavily overclocked unit.

 

[BoFox]

Sold my 7970 and went with the 680. Back to stable drivers.

Was it really that bad? Which games or other issues? Just wondering, TIA..

BTW, I never really had problems with my 9800Pro, X800XT, X1900XTX, HD 3850, HD 4870 1GB, and more Radeon cards.. the driver problems were never bad enough to make me give them up...

 

[SolMiester]

Again, what's a warranty got to do with how a product is built? And I really discount the "in 3 years the card's worthless" argument. Worthless how? Maybe for cutting edge games, but that again is only applicable to the enthusiasts that insist upon being cutting edge. I look on the various F/S sections of various forums and see video cards older than 3 years for sale routinely, and they're quite viable for more mundane uses. They're still vastly superior, for instance, than any built in gpu today. So longevity does matter to some and is a viable consideration when buying.


Heck, you only have to browse some of the other video card threads here and see people wondering if the 7970/680 will last them 5 years like their previous card has.


And since you bring up EVGA's warranty, I wonder why EVGA's version of the GTX 680 is a -KR part and not an -AR part, a part that would have a lifetime warranty? Makes one wonder. Oh, and the -KR part can have its warranty extended to 10 years if one chooses to pay the price. But I wonder why this card fails to have an -AR suffix affixed to it like so many other EVGA cards have.

Check out some card stats for failure....AMD isnt doing as well as NV...sorry.
http://alienbabeltech.com/abt/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=24543

- PNY 1.2% (against 1.1%)
- ASUS 1.3% (against 0.9%)
- Zotac 1.4%
- Sapphire 1.5% (against 1.8%)
- Club 3D 1.6% (against 2.2%)
- Gainward 1.6% (against 1.5%)
- Gigabyte 2.5% (against 1.7%)
- MSI 2.9% (against 1.7%)
- XFX 3.0% (against 2.4%)

ASUS and PNY swap places here as a result of the higher ASUS returns rate. Zotac has entered the classification in a respectable position, while Sapphire and Club 3D have both improved their scores. The rates for Gigabyte on the other hand, and above all MSI, are up a good deal and XFX is still in last place with an even worse average than before. Overall the numbers are acceptable, but three models have returns rates of at least 5%:

- 7.0%: Gigabyte GV-R587UD-1GD
- 7.0%: XFX ATI Radeon HD 5870
- 5.0%: ASUS EAH5870/2DIS/1GD5/V2

The three models are all based on the Radeon HD 5870! Here are the stats by GPU:

- Radeon HD 5770: 2.0%
- Radeon HD 5830: 2.5%
- Radeon HD 5850: 5.5%
- Radeon HD 5870: 5.0%
- Radeon HD 5970: 10.9%
- GeForce GTS 250: 1.6%
- GeForce GTX 460: 2.4%
- GeForce GTX 465: 3.4%
- GeForce GTX 470: 4.7%
- GeForce GTX 480: 3.0%

This confirms the Radeon HD 5870’s poor showing. The Radeon HD 5850 also does badly. Six months ago, the two solutions were at 3.2-3.4%! The Radeon HD 5970 is a very fragile card as is often the case with bi-GPU cards. None of the NVIDIA solutions are over 5% and the GeForce GTX 480 has a rate of just 3%, which is a very good score for a high end card.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

AMD does deserve some credit

For hard capping the TDP limit? Meh, I'd rather have the option to risk my hardware on big clocks than to be limited like we are now with the 680.

AMD didn't do anything special, they simply limited your max OC potential through a driver controlled TDP cap not unlike what we see with the 680, except Nvidia is trying to get everything they can out of their limit, while AMD hard capped it and didn't change clocks based on actual TDP.


That's my take on it anyways.

 

[skipsneeky2]

Sold my 7970 and went with the 680. Back to stable drivers.

I am starting to think about doing this too.

I have not gamed all day nor put any sort of 3d load on my card,but i was sitting around googling stuff,when i heard my fan ramp up,so i check and see my card right up at 96cel 😵,fan at 25%,vddc sitting at 1.158...thats higher then a game load voltage,and i had booted up the machine this morning.

Why it decided to do that is beyond me,my machine stays on quite often so luckily i was in the room to catch it doing this,i even ramped up the fan to 100% dropped it to 60cel,dropped the speed down to 25% and watched it hit 80cel in less then a few mins,no game or app running,idle gpu usage.😵

 

[Stuka87]

I am starting to think about doing this too.

I have not gamed all day nor put any sort of 3d load on my card,but i was sitting around googling stuff,when i heard my fan ramp up,so i check and see my card right up at 96cel 😵,fan at 25%,vddc sitting at 1.158...thats higher then a game load voltage,and i had booted up the machine this morning.

Why it decided to do that is beyond me,my machine stays on quite often so luckily i was in the room to catch it doing this,i even ramped up the fan to 100% dropped it to 60cel,dropped the speed down to 25% and watched it hit 80cel in less then a few mins,no game or app running,idle gpu usage.😵

What brand is your card out of curiosity? I have not had a single issue with mine. What you describe doesnt really sound like a driver issue. Sounds more like a hardware issue.

 

[dust]

Check out some card stats for failure....AMD isnt doing as well as NV...sorry.
snip

And yet, we have another winner for the next six months:

http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-8/components-returns-rates.html

Graphics Cards:
- 5.3%: Gigabyte GV-N470SO-13I
- 5.2%: ASUS EAH5870/2DIS/1GD5/V2
- 3.4%: PNY GeForce GT 220 1 GB
- 3.4%: Sapphire VAPOR-X HD 5870 1 GB
- 3.4%: Club 3D 8400 GS 512 MB Passive

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Wrong thread/section/derailing/everything wrong...

But uh, this is pretty epic..

SSDs:
- 6.7%: OCZ Agility 2 120 GB
- 3.7%: OCZ Agility 2 60 GB
- 3.6%: OCZ Agility 2 40 GB
- 3.5%: OCZ Agility 2 90 GB
- 3.5%: OCZ Vertex 2 240 GB