Quality & Longevity - AMD 7970 vs. Nvidia 680

[vollman1]

As far as qual;ity goes, do AMD and nVidia have manufacturing standards for the card manufacturers? Or is it a free for all?

 

[BallaTheFeared]

As far as qual;ity goes, do AMD and nVidia have manufacturing standards for the card manufacturers? Or is it a free for all?

Afaik reference is set in stone.

They can do custom cards/coolers but the coolers need to be better than the reference design I believe (at least that was my understanding with Nvidia products).

 

[Despoiler]

My own personal experience is that Nvidia card makers are garbage.

Gainward 4400Ti RMA'd 5 times until I got a working card. Bad memory all 5 times.
BFG 6600GT no issues
Evga 8800GTS Dead a week after 2 year warranty was up. Memory fried. No OCing. The 8800 series were particularly garbage. We had 4 people in our guild (not including me) all have their 8800s die within a month of each other.

Sapphire 5850 Still running
Sapphire 7970 No issues so far.

 

[Anarchist420]

Neither one is great although I heard that AMD uses sleeve bearing fans for their reference while nvidia uses ball bearing which gives nvidia an edge IMO. I wish nvidia didn't use an heatspreader because I've heard they use non-AC MX2 under the IHS in addition to using non-AC MX2 over it. Even though it's only the top, I still I remove the stock TIM from the top of the IHS, "purify" the surface of it, and put AC MX-2 on it.

I've always had good luck with eVGA's customer service, although I have always bought their cross shipping plan. My eVGA GTX560 Ti 2GB hasn't had any hardware problems, although I haven't gamed with it a whole lot and I have it undervolted and underclocked anyway. I have an Asus (reference) GTX 460 768 MB that I haven't used in 6 months or so, but I didn't sell it because the BIOS was write protected. I didn't have any issues with it other than that it doesn't display anything via DVI until Windows was booted into (which was why I tried to flash the BIOS)