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BFG Exiting Graphics Card Market
thsoundman writes news that BFG appears to be giving up on the graphics card side of its business. The company's chairman said in a statement:
"After eight years of providing innovative, high-quality graphics cards to the market, we regret to say that this category is no longer profitable for us, although we will continue to evaluate it going forward. We will continue to provide our award-winning power supplies and gaming systems, and are working on a few new products as well. I'd like to stress that we will continue to provide RMA support for our current graphics card warranty holders, as well as for all of our other products such as power supplies, PCs, and notebooks."
BFD
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Why would the Big Friendly Giant be making graphics cards in the first place? One would think that his hands would be too big to assemble the highly miniaturized components. Also, it's a pretty cut-throat industry, his remarkable friendliness wouldn't be too profitable.
... and then they built the supercollider.
BFG products are the few to be found at stores like Best Buy and other chains you can hop in a car and drive to. This lack of marketplace presence only makes the GPU less and less relevant to the normal PC owner.
BFG was one of many manufactures that made nVidia cards from their reference design. Often, they would improve on the design with a better HSF and higher quality RAM so the card could be overclocked out of the box.
Kinda sad to see them go. They've always provided good warranty support.
Life is not for the lazy.
Maybe it's because they all eventually crap out before the warranty does (or at least a very high percentage). Not just this vendor (BFG) but all of them. nVidia's chips may hold up, sometimes, but the fans fail and once the chip overheats....its toast. This problem even applies to ATI/AMD cards. Not to mention the power supply requirements of the higher end cards and it all adds up to more and more people being satisfied by 'acceptable' performance versus those who want to see insanely high frame rates. Vendors (such as BFG) who sell JUST the higher end cards of the currently released chip, are not selling as well as say XFS, or PNY that make a full range of cards. But even those vendors have turned to making more than just the video cards. Plus there are tons of 'unknown' brands available on places like NewEgg and such that you can find a decent card for $150 and not have to shell out $400 for the card and another 200 for a power supply that will properly power it. BFG was on one of the few who had lifetime warraties on their cards and upgrade options if you owned a previous card of an older chip.
I've nothing of importance to say, now go away before I taunt you with a second sig!
The difference is the warranty still applies if it breaks. they are *guaranteed* to work at those speeds, often because of a beefier / better cooling and better ram as a previous poster said. I'm using one in one of my machines, and it still works, which can't be said for one of my Sapphires (running at stock speeds).
Any other card *might* be able to run at higher speeds, *might* being the magic word.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
That's where you point out that you're using an install wizard.
And in those 5 minutes you could completely void your warranty on your $350 video card, or spend the extra $20 and keep it.
Since overclocking control (and sometimes even overvolting) is now built into the software drivers/control panel (with approved limits), you don't void your warranty by doing these sort of small overclocks.
If you re-program your BIOS or disable the overclock limit by using a third-party program, you might void your warranty. Since the chips have thermal shutdown built in, you really can't harm them by overclocking, so even some of that may be OK. Intel is an another example of a company that realized this and now offers overclocking of the CPU on Intel-brand motherboards.