GPU's: Tales of reliability and brand loyalty

[Sealpower]

Vaccuum clean those dusty fans every two or three months!

Bad advise mate, do not put a vacuum cleaner anywhere near the internal components of your PC. The air rushing past the plastic hoover nozzle is a perfect way to make static electricity and in turn is a great way to kill PC parts.

Use a cloth and wipe the fans clean or use compressed air but to be honest cleaning fans is a massive waste of time it has a very low real world effect on how well they work, unless you live in a hugely dusty environment.

A metallic nozzle with a wire connected to ground works splendid though

 

[veloper]

Vaccuum clean those dusty fans every two or three months!

Bad advise mate, do not put a vacuum cleaner anywhere near the internal components of your PC. The air rushing past the plastic hoover nozzle is a perfect way to make static electricity and in turn is a great way to kill PC parts.

Use a cloth and wipe the fans clean or use compressed air but to be honest cleaning fans is a massive waste of time it has a very low real world effect on how well they work, unless you live in a hugely dusty environment.

For my 4870 it makes the difference between a dusty heatsink and a GPU reaching 100 celcius on a full load, or a clean heatsink and a GPU at a mere 80 degrees.
Never had any problems with static electricity.

 

[Tom Waits' hat]

Never really have a preference, I tend to see stats over brand. So, most of the time, I tend switch between ATI and Nvidia over 2-3 years. But slightly leaning towards Nvidia because of the driver support.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

I've been running this GTX 295 for around 5 years now and have had zero problems with it. It's still running most games at max with a minimum fps of 45, most games 60 or higher.

Been thinking of upping to a card soon, but I'd like to get some extra RAM and an SSD first.

Never bought an ATI card, Nvidia's been treating me well so far.

 

[SinisterGehe]

I am loyal to ASUS and MSI products. Specially currently Geforce GTX 600+ series of cards.
I use 2 650 GTX SLI for my Cyclic rendering engine. GTX 660 for Display. (Work computer) My laptop has dual GTX 660 inside it (pleasure) and my home work computer has GTX 690 with GTX 660 as rendering device.

I am follower of Geforce because of the price power relation I can get with them. mainly because I get the straight from importer, cheaper than retail price. Also Geforce is vai cheaper than ATI here.

Also I like the Geforce chip's drivers and SLI options.

But I kinda have to go with what my company is able to get and what I am allowed to ask for. And since I can buy for personal use trough the company I go with what the current deal is. For the longest time it has been Geforce, ASUS, Intel and MSI products.

 

[JediMB]

I started out with a 3dfx Voodoo 2 card, back in 1997 or so.

Eventually I switched to ATI's Radeon 9800 Pro, although I had various issues with its OpenGL support and eventual death.

Since then I've mostly used NVIDIA cards (starting with the 6600 GT), and was especially impressed by the PhysX features when I played Mirror's Edge and Arkham Asylum. These cards haven't been without issues either, though, as a few of them have died or otherwise malfunctioned. (That said, my GTX 260 malfunctioning meant that I got a free upgrade to a GTX 460, so I'm not entirely unhappy about that.)

TressFX is making me curious about AMD/ATI cards again now, although I'm hoping that NVIDIA will start supporting something similar.

 

[RedLister]

2005-2006- Used an old PC running a GeForce FX5200. At the time i was running some pretty old games so it was ideal. Also the PC was a low bracket one which means most standard GPUs were simply too tall to fit it inside. (PC itself was an ex-office pc) While the card was low end and would struggle at the latest games (One girl i was seeing at the time would play sims2 on it and it could just about handle it on 800x600 resolution without any of the eye candy besides texture quality)It did what i wanted it to do.

2006-2009- Purchased a new computer it had the old AGP slot inside it due to it being a budget pc which i upgraded as i went along. Purchased a ATi x1650 pro. Sadly it never managed to run at it's full potential due to the budget processor(Celeron) being a bottleneck. Never blamed the card though since it wasn't the cards fault my processor was shit.

2009-2012- Used 2x GeForce 9500 GTs when i purchased a gaming rig which was in a sale. Ran all my games well but couldn't have anything fancy like AA or SSAO. In the Summer of 2012 one of the cards threw a wobbly and i had to remove it. It left my PC running only the one 9500GT. What was funny though was i was getting the game graphics performance then before the 2nd card blew meaning...the SLI wasn't even on properly for all that time...damn

Present day. After the SLI fiasco i ended up deciding to just buy a decent single card. Money is always tight for me. The best deal i saw was in a GeForce 650 GTX. I didn't need anything more powerful then that due to using windows XP 64bit at the time which is limited to Direct x9.0c anyway. (upgraded to windows 7 recently though) The card can handle every one of my games at max settings with very little struggle. My monitor is also getting on a bit and can only handle up to 1650x1080 anyway so might explain why my card plods along happily.

I tend to be leaning more on Nvidia cards it seems. But it is not all it seems! With the 5200FX i purchased in my town which is a nobody wasteland town with it's head up its own arse that card was pretty much all they had. While the 9500GTs were shiped with the pc i brought.
Only cards i had any say in was the 1650pro and my current card. Although due to using them so long if i needed a new card i would check the Nvidia range by habit then the ATi/AMD

 

[Tom Waits' hat]

2005-2006- Used an old PC running a GeForce FX5200.

I wish GPU manufacturer can figure out how to make GPU smaller. I do miss the good ol' FX5200 size.

 

[Sealpower]

I wish GPU manufacturer can figure out how to make GPU smaller. I do miss the good ol' FX5200 size.

Well, the low-end cards are still that size, but as for the better cards it'll be almost impossible from a pure thermodynamic standpoint since the more electrical components you stick together the hotter they'll become and modern graphics cards are basically 90% (volume) cooling.

That's part of the reason why the next generation of consoles will be relatively weak in the graphics department. There's no way you can transfer all that heat a modern high-end GPU generates without sticking it in a well ventilated computer-ish chassis and that's just not an attractive sight on the living room floor.

 

[Boris Goodenough]

That's part of the reason why the next generation of consoles will be relatively weak in the graphics department. There's no way you can transfer all that heat a modern high-end GPU generates without sticking it in a well ventilated computer-ish chassis and that's just not an attractive sight on the living room floor.

There are other interesting ways too cool high output electronics silently

>.>

 

[Sealpower]

There are other interesting ways too cool high output electronics silently >.>

Certainly, but I didn't mention them because my post was aiming for practical everyday use and/or mass production. For those applications the good old fashion fan cooled way is still the most reliable and cost efficient solution.

Boring I know, but that's how it is...