Nvidia "opens can of whoop-ass" on itself

This article brings a big smile to my face, nVidia deserve a kick in the ass big time and anyone who says otherwise hasn't had much hardware, TNT onwards suck my balls.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument?docname=c01087277&dlc=en&lc=en&cc=us

The biggest problem was with NVIDIA northbridge chips in HP's AMD notebooks but Intel notebooks had problems too. HP released a BIOS update that ran the cooling fan constantly as a workaround. Before that the fan only turned on when the CPU got hot. This has been a very expensive headache for HP, which they've solved in the new dv5z line by switching to DAAMIT chipsets and GPUs.

As much as nvidia fanboi's will attack you for your fairly objective rant, they can't actually rebut what you've just said. Nvidia's arrogance comes back with a vencence, and to say the nvidia camp's products are surperior to ati's just shows how stupid they rally are. I laugh at this scenario. Month ago nvidia were saying how they'd crush ati into oblivion, it seems the antithesis is happening before our very eyes.

Cue anti Charlie-Nvidious rant in 5, 4, 3, 2,....

Man, can the Inquirer show their ATI fanboy attitude any more? Nvidia still rules. ATI has no single card that can touch the new 260 or GTX280. Nvidia will recover and continue to make excellent video cards. As far as Nvidia running Havoc my 8800GTS (3.0Ghz Core 2) just benched 212FPS on Halflife2, the Lost Coast at 1680 x 1050 with everything set high but no buffering. Looks sweet runs sweet. I will stay with single card solutions and my electric bill will thank me.

Unless NVidia comes out with another world beater real soon it's almost time for me to start rooting for them instead of ATI :)

Go the underdog!

Well we all know that saying Charlie doesnt like Nvidia is like saying the sun rises in the east, so...yeah. He did predict trouble, but he said that it will be because of poor yields for their 260 and/or 280 cards...(which we havent seen much evidence of as yet).

But, yeah...there's no telling the extent of trouble this could spell for graphzilla. Just think of it...your brand new 7 series chipset and your spankin new gtx280 which you paid like $700us for will *gasp* go up in smoke after a while. I guess that's where warranties come in, but who needs the stress? Folks hearing of this news might take in front and jump on the MAD bandwagon using this con as a main reason for the jump. Personally, i've gotta say that i wasnt planning to pelt out paper on any of their new cards, and this news sure doesnt help to reverse that stance.

But the speculation and the hate is clear and present in this article so I won't go about taking what Charlie says as gospel. We've just got to see what happens in time. I just hope that nvidia keeps up the competition because lets face it, the more intense amd/nv/intel fight, the better it is for us.

Where/when did Inq predict an nVidia product failure of this nature? You guys have been bashing nVidia at every possible turn and now something bad's happened and you're taking credit for a non-existent prediction? Invariably, people will fail at something, at some time. Obviously, if you call them a failure everyday your "prediction" will eventually prove to be correct. 

Bravo.

Hey guys (and fanbois)?

Yeah, I just read from other sites too that Nvidia is taking a pounding. Serves them right to be cocky about their GeForce 8 and 9 series the past couple of months.

~The Dude

You're very down on NV and no doubt they aren't beyond criticism. However, what puts me off buying ATI is still their drivers. I remember when Gabe Newell came out and said HL2 would run best on the ATI 9600, and I believed him. I bought one to replace the GeForce 4400 I (think I) had at the time, and the hardware may have been good, but the drivers were BROKEN beyond belief. Neverwinter Nights crashed persistently, Fifa was rendered as wireframes, and I had other issues too. If they couldn't make a working driver for what were A-list, million-selling titles that had already been on the market for many months, I figured I would stick with nVIdia, and I have ever since. NVIdia aren't perfect, but they've never stiffed me on a driver like that. I can expect my games to work, which when all's said and done is the only consideration for the end user. Handing over three figure sums for a piece of hardware only to find the software is broken is such an off-putting experience that many will never go back. I've kept an eye on ATI since and apparently there were similar issues with Oblivion (purple sky etc.). So when I replace my ageing SLI 7800 GTX setup, it will still be with green, not red.

so far everything on here with charlie name on it hasn't been true, so what makes this any different? sound more like a biased comment yet again. like do this guy work for ati?

Given Nvidia's blatant cockiness, the "chickens have come to roost", as we say in the American colonies. If Nvidia weren't so mean, this wouldn't be so much fun to spectate. Question is, is Intel next? They are back to being mean and evil again and have started slipping dates. They slipped Montyvina a few months, slipped 2P/4P Nuthalem servers 6 months, and where are the G45 motherboards?

...you're right. For example, I've been an Nvidia buyer and owned every high end card of every generation since the original GeForce, but today I returned my new GTX 280 for a shiny HD 4879 and pocketed the nearly 450 dollars change. I've swapped up Charlie. Nvidia has become too full of itself and doesn't appear to give a damn about the consumer or his wallet in this down economy and I'm sick of their crap. They've lost another dedicated buyer to ATI.

...and you know that means something coming from me.

the lack of journalistic integrity here. Is Charlie actually free to report to on any topic, or does the Inq employ an "Nvidia bashing beat writer"? Crap like this is why I just took the Inq out of my bookmarks and hope to never have to read this sort of skewed journalism again.

On a sidenote, I am not an Nvidia fanboi. I've used cards from both brands and loved both. When it comes time to upgrade, I buy whatever I believe to have the best price/performance ratio. But that doesn't mean that this sort of propaganda doesn't infuriate me.

Let the good times roll...

Was waiting for one of these, it has been a while :) 

So basically boo-hiss-boo to NV for supporting flailing games developers, trying new materials and putting new and innovative things into its drivers.

I will be buying a EVGA 280GTX very shortly, why? Because NV cards work (baring RMA failures) they always work, some of the great ATI cards I have had the displeasure of owning (7500 with 512M ram for instance) have been nothing but driver nightmares.

Ati cards are like London buses,
Big and red with really bad drivers.

LOL Charlie, u really hate the green team dont u?

I thought u were a gamer like me who only wants to c a better and cheaper product no matter which team its from

Ya i guess ur right when u say things like 100 points my ass, nvidia really has been arrogant lately, let em tank for a while, theyll get back in the game sooner or later and the ones who will profit most r us gamers


Charlie,
your rabid ATI fanaticism has already been made self-evident from your previous articles, but this article is so biassed and so far removed from actual reality that you've reached a new low.
Your comments such as 
"ATI is kicking Nvidia up and down the block" and "nvidia don't have anything close to a competitive line-up"
are laughable.

All you are really achieving is to prove your own ignorance and to make a laughing stock of your own credability as a reporter.

I was impressed by this article but Charlie is doing himself no favors in the way he puts things across. Loose the ATI Fanboyism as this tarnishes the article.

There's only one thing I don't see right now, and that is performance ATI/AMD GPUs for the laptops. Looking at random configurations, nVidia 8600M has the market totally cornered, and at low prices too. You can get a laptop with a 8600M GPU for less than $1000 here in Estonia, where prices are sure to be significantly higher than in the US or UK. There is nothing ATI has to put against it. Puma is cool, but it's still integrated graphics vs discrete.

Otherwise, a good article.

Espresso in one hand, reading this - today is going to be a good day.


Charlie - why do you seem to take such glee in Nividia's struggles and find possible future product charges "even funnier"

Are you not better than one of those AMD/INTEL/ATI/NVIDIA fanboys? It seems like you just have an axe to grind... mind you not the size of that Nick has against Apple, but still it seems odd you are taking delight in a company's struggles and delight in an issue that will impact a lot of consumers. 

For proof of this just visit hpnotebooksettlement.com. My HP Pavillion zd7000 series notebook bricked two weeks ago due to the nVidia GPU blowing. The problem apparently is not limited to just this series HP notebook, but 17 others as well! HP's solution is to replace the motherboard of each and every notebook series affected for free, going back up to four years (IE: noteboks VERY MUCH out of warranty) at no charge and replacing them with a new motherboard with an ATI chipset and CPU. Just got mine back -- sent in a P4 3.2Ghz laptop that was four years old and got back the laptop case but with a Centrino 2 Duo mothrboard! Talk about a nice and free upgrade! Thank you nVidia! =)

"we told you so"? Are you a journalist, or a little kid? You sound genuinely pleased that Nvidia is doomed (you believe). No matter which side one takes in the graphics card wars (I'm entirely neutral, I just buy whatever gets good reviews) a scene with only one major player is not good news for anybody. This article is the final straw for me. I've been looking to trim down my rss feeds, the Inq is officially the first casualty.

... my GeForce Go 7600 died the other week, barely 2 years and 1 month into its life-cycle. 

Of course, I wouldn't have to guess if Nvidia announced details about which of their products are effected. Don't you just love transparency?

Charlie, seriously, what is with all your pro AMD articles? It wouldn't be so bad if you were'nt so biased again Nvidia but the whole "tone" of this piece is like some American Jock out drinking with his buddies.

I think maybe sometimes you take your friendship with Chris Hook @ AMD a bit far, especially for a news site like the Inq.

Now add this bit of news:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/03/amd-radeon-hd-4870-x2-images-leaked-rumored-for-august-release/

Rumored amd hd4870x2

"We have begun discussions with our supply chain regarding reimbursement to us for some or all of the costs we have incurred and may incur in the future relating to the weak material set. We will also seek to access our insurance coverage. We continue to not see any abnormal failure rates in any systems using NVIDIA products other than certain notebook configurations. However, we are continuing to test and otherwise investigate other products. There can be no assurance that we will not discover defects in other MCP or GPU products."

So from your own link Nvidia is telling us they will seek restitution for any failures that MAY arise. The fact that they are heading this off before it even begins speaks volumes about customer service. They are fixing it up front and will do the battle FOR US to get THEIR money back rather than US fighting Nvidia to get our stuff fixed. That's what I call GREAT CUSTOMER SERVICE. You're knocking Nvidia for looking into their products BEFORE problems exist for the end user? Common sense tells you they should look at all products produced by X vendor using crap products for any lawsuit Nvidia needs to start to get their money back. Due diligence is required by them to get all their bills paid for. That's called great business sense!

I might also point out that there is NOTHING wrong with Nvidia's design or their products. Rather a crappy packaging made by an outfit who may have affected OTHER companies we don't know about yet. TSMC etc creates products for MANY tech companies including ATI/AMD. TheInq should be looking at why you still have a job writing for them. You're single handedly ruining this sites reputation and turning it into the register :( $200mil is not even a QUARTER of what NVDA makes in a year and they fully expect to charge the crappy part maker. Even if they ate the whole thing they'd still make 650Mil for the year...AMD/ATI lost what 4bil? Nvidia will price AMD to death in the graphics market (they've already said this) if needed. Nvidia's profit keeps growing while AMD's keeps dropping. Oops, I mean going FURTHER negative as they haven't made money in a few years. If nvidia lowers the 9800gtx+ to $200 AMD is screwed. ATI will take the performance crown shortly? Two GTX280's beat ANYTHING AMD can currently make (heck, two 260's can do that). Would I pay for them? NO, but Nvidia still has the crown and will for the next few years most likely.

By the way. Diablo runs on DX9 (that's XP) so why call DX10.1? Also a day later your own site shoots you down with "diablo3 will probably have DX11..."...ROFL. By the way DX9 and 10 already don't look much different (as extremetech has pointed out for all DX 10 capable games released they've tested (like a dozen or so) and sucks in performance anyway as Alex St. Johns (yep, directX creator) points out in extremetech interviews. It's a slow PIG he says. DX10 was only created to help performance not image quality, 10.1 the same for ATI hardware. Don't expect a DIFFERENT LOOKING game. It won't be. Don't expect ANY DX10.1 capable game to NOT run on DX10 hardware. It won't happen. All games will run on both. All they are is coded differently for each respective hardware maker (nvidia/ati). Show me a DX10.1 shot that's better than DX10.0. You can't. Quote from UBI Soft about DX10.1 assassins creed running faster "The performance gains seen by players who are currently playing Assassin's Creed with a DX10.1 graphics card are in large part due to the fact that our implementation removes a render pass during post-effect which is costly."

So it's fake performance increase then? http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3320&p=6
Even if not fake, microsoft and game devs came out on nvidia day to say openly you're not missing anything at DX10 as stated by anandtech. Also it tells me game devs fear Nvidia more than AMD. That's good for stockholders for sure :) Get over your nvidia hate and just report news not this opinionated crap. Nvidia will price AMD into oblivion until they Die Shrink the chip in another month or so (as you announced here) and then raise $$ margins/clockspeeds to cement their lead across the board for less money. GDDR5 will limit 4870 sales (and the X2 models) by AMD's own admission (again you said this) so when a customer is standing in the store no matter what he's heard he'll only be looking at nvidia boxes for high performance. Which do you buy when you only have ONE choice? Nvidia. No different than what you do when only Intel is on the shelf. When AMD had a better chip (A64) but couldn't produce enough Intel sold you a cpu no problem. 

PC sales up 12.1% globally but AMD only gained .7%. Hmmm, so Intel sold an extra 11.4% globally then eh? AMD's quarter looks bleaker by the minute. Nvidia had a record quarter last quarter (historically a BAD quarter for everyone in semi's). What did AMD have? Who's kicking who's butt here? Minus the charge Nvidia plans to recoup they will have ANOTHER great quarter this time. The 4850 has only been selling for a week, hardly enough to kill NVDA's quarter. Die shrink a month away or so means AMD only has one fair quarter (still a huge loss no doubt, but might sell a few more cards unless nvda price cuts again to kill the whole 4850 issue as 4870 is constrained already). Translation: Pull your head out.

...they finally came forward and said we got rough times ahead. Bet those NV fanboys are feeling bitter!

PhysX on CUDA still aint cheating!
;0)

I about fell out of my chair laughing at the title.

You sound like Sharikou. http://sharikou.blogspot.com/

For the love of god, just shut up.

don't read his articles. everyone knows that the inquirer employs but trolls and that charlie is teh worst of him. that's why teh inquirer is so freaking entertaining. thumbs up!

I was a 3Dfx fanboy, but had to move to nVidia after my Voodoo3 just could not hang and the Voodoo4/5/6 blew. I moved to a GF2 then GF4, but after loosing my GF4 (like many) I moved to a Radeon 9700Pro AIW and loved it. I also liked my x800XL. My last upgrade was to a GF 8800 GTX and this was because ATI was sucking last year. I am happy with this card, but this new ATI card does look nice. Let's see what things look like next year with Windows7,DX11, and Diablo3! :p

Charlie, please do not tell people things they do not like to hear.

You know how fat people do not like to be called fat!

Leave the poor Nvidians alone...they are having a bad enough time as it is without you treading on their fragile sensibilities.


P.S.

I love Nvidia.
*cries*

Half of the comments here are from people that work for Nvidia and they are beginning to wonder when their paycheck goes away.

I read the INQ because they tell the truth in all of its ugly glory. If you want your news with baby food go elsewhere - please. Many of the comments on this forum remind me of kids who close their eyes to hide and turn invisible. It wont happen, they say.

The INQ has been reporting systemic issues with NV which show themselves in many ways. NV is cracking and unless someone takes the helm of that ship, it will disappear quickly. 

The INQ will just as quickly pound Intel or AMD/ATI when they fail to act like a large corporation, losing jobs and stock holders equity - as they should. The only fanboi's I see are in the above comments. Wahhhh, make the bad stuff go away Daddy...I love Nvidia, sniff...

Keep telling it like it is Charlie and the rest of you watch and follow...

You've got the start of a good story but don't stop here. So NVIDIA has some unnamed mobile and MCP products with problems. Since TMSC probably fabricated them then what other chips did they make using the same process and would that include AMD? Start digging!

"ATI has no single card to match the GTX 260 and 280"
Huh what?......the HD4870 trounces the 260 in virtually every benchmark and game.
See:"Every reputable test site on the Internet for confirmation"
Really Regulas....no need to put the Green Goggles on...just accept it and move on...seriously.

This goes to the commenter's, nvidia and ati fan boys, honestly you both have the most closed minded attitude about computer hardware. ATI drivers being bad, that was years ago, ATI drivers are better than nvidia's now. as for Nvidia their products work and well, they had a good product in the 8 series but when you sit on the same product and try to make it work for over a year you deserve to take a hit. (AMD comes to mind with athlon64). So take an open mind and ACTUALLY read benchmarks from more than one site and read some articles from this week.

Speaking as an owner of a 790i Ultra motherboard, and 3x 8800GTS video cards I think nvidia deserves this little smack to their bottom line. My setup has been nothing but hassles to configure to acceptable performance levels and I hope this scares them in to doing their jobs correctly from now on.

I want to see them bounce back and do things correctly for a few years instead of doing things cheaply.

When I first started reading Inq I thought it was hocus pocus...
But for the most part everything that has been stated has come to be and usually backed up with facts and ends up being true. So, Charlie in defense of you..as we know ATI had the 2600 you bashed it also and we have some sick folks I've got the checklist below and remedies...

The Nvidia fanboism is more prevalant with some of these posts. 
Can you walk into best buy and get that 260 or 280 and that GTX+ right now? In your wet dream you can you can yield anything. 

Nivdia doesnt cheat! But we will benchmark our card and compare to AMD using our card as physics processor only with no graphics processing. WTF? No graphics! No DX10.1 and damn if I buy one more dual slot 280 I can get a higher score heat my home, show off my cards in a clear glass, put Nvidia RULEZ on my pc and pay 20 more bucks a month to the electric monthly. I'll give you the pullitzer award of the year if you fit this one. You really are dumb if you own this setup.

The 260 and 280 is the better product and Nvidia is wiping the floor and the king ooga booga!!! The DOW and NASDAQ don't agree with you and neither does the rest of the reviewers. Your a moron...bigger isnt always better. I think Ill take my Chevy Camaro and race a GT500KR fully loaded with every feature and say I won. Get it yet?

If you feel ATI drivers suck and you find an article on the web from Microsoft that reads 27 percent of vista failures due to nvidia drivers they must be wrong and Charlie is lying and Vista isn't really a microsoft product anymore and its all a conspiracy to trash NVidia because some website wrote about it also.

If your still hung up on your lust for a big chip and green shopping sacks maybe you should take your Nvidia card and sleep with it. At least then you may get some relief about that new feature you dreamed about being better than ATI's. The return will be amazing because when you've ruined it you'll still feel good about your purchase while waiting for another RMA exchange!

You really should check yourself in a hospital if any of these things have occured over the past 6 months and have applied to you. The only sIde effects from treatment could be suicide when the truth comes out and it sinks in. 





M2N32 WS PRO motherboard is in RMA. For those of you who dont know, the Nforce 590 chipset uses a Geforce 6100 chip with deactivated graphics as the southbridge. The problem was related to southbridge cooling and it got progressively worse. And to add insult to injury, the Nvidia Forceware software was so shitty that I had to uninstall it because it cached all outgoing packets in main memory even when supposedly disabled. I wonder how many 590 motherboards there are that are in RMA because of this manufacturing error? Nvidia should spend more money on QC in all areas.

Nice to see all the Nvidia employees on this site hacked off and beat up on Charlie. Their stocks just took a nose-dive and lost a 1/3 of their value today... 

Articles like this are for entertainment... 

Think of comedians and what makes them funny.... is their ability to BASH on anything/everything. :) 

Keep up the entertainment articles. ;-)

The minute i saw the news of this on another site i knew Charlie would be creaming his shorts to write the end of nvidia article and sure enough here it is in all it's biased glory. Now everyone should step back and take a more realistic look at this. Yah nvidia will take a $200 mil hit and yes there sales will be few $100 mil less than expected. However they are also making a but load of money and actually have some money on hand. If something like this happened to AMD it would put them out of business because they have no money to spare.

Could the nvidia fanboys be any more obvious in this list of comments? Sure, Charlie hates the green team, but the hate articles are great reads for me and many others. Who said they needed the professionalism of the New York Times, for example? Besides, everyone that bashes the Inq for every anti-nvidia piece of news that comes out will always claim that "i'm never coming back to this site, ever again" or "this is why i took Inq out of my bookmarks." Problem is, they're all still reading, still bitching, still trying to defend their side (read: nvidia), any time there's an article like this. If you don't think this site is up to your standards, don't make it your home page. If the Inquirer.net bashes Nvidia every week, stop saying "this is the worst trash Charlie has ever written, LOL grow up Charlie PWND."

Stop complaining if you're still reading articles on this site, you're killing my buzz.

The same rant about Nvidia again and subliminal hints that NV should be better off dead, eh?

Well, guess what Charlie, the reason why ATI has so competitive prices is because of the competition against Nvidia. As soon as Nvidia falls apart, ATI will rocket the prices sky high and will be nothing more than the company you hated before.

Does Nvidia need a lesson? Yes. Should it get destroyed because of this? No, and it surely won't because of one generation. But this is the first time Nvidia gets beaten since R300 althought nowhere nearly as bad as then yet.

Old Stock, made for LightWeight Useage & primarily XP useage, has to be Dumped for Good write$off. Chips are PhotoMechanically made at about Penny apiece & Dumping Barrel full for $ hundreds of Millions in saving is SMART. Good Bye Little Chippers.

Nvidia Makes TIGHT GPU & Above Average Chipset. One single line dedicated to Gaming, No redundancies.

Of course, FireGL in Nvidias OpenGL Platform is: where is it? Obviously OpenGl Won ULTIMAT. Gold,Silver & ultie. FABULOUS.

Next For Nvidia is Fully Stable Vista Ultimate Platform Designs, if ANYBODY Can NVIDIA Can.
TS drashek

Screw the fan boys of both sides and enjoy the price war! nVidia must gauge price down and consumer win. I am still going to get a shiny HD 48x0 card... That is if nVidia cannot bring some sub 250$ card that completely trashes both 49x0 series card in games but also in power use...

Peoples should be colour blind and buy what is best. 8800 Gt was best prior HD 4850... Currently HD 48x0 is best there is in price - performance ratio!

I find your lack of win disturbing.May the fail be with you Nvidia.

I'm glad I have an 8800GTX OC with great drivers and don't have to worry about newer cards for at least another year. By that time, hopefully Intel will have some sort of ingenious design up their sleeve for me to use.

As an ATI fan, even I must agree with other comments that ATI has not been 'kicking Nvidia up and down the block' and Nvidia still has the majority of the discrete market although that may change later this year or early next year at current rate.

One this is for sure, the Inquirer has been predicting there will be trouble at Nvidia (see links in article) and they were right.


...when will you learn. this is not the end of nvidia, not even close. your wild prophetic guesses on the state of the VGA market make me laugh (the 4870 will kill the GTX280?). $200 mil is hardly the killing blow to a multi-billion dollar company.

When I read your article in May, I felt that you were just bashing NVidia because you didn't like them. Regardless of your motives, I did think at the time that if you were actually right, it would be a great time to short the stock.

Too bad I didn't jump on that hunch. The stock has lost half it's value since then and I could have made a lot of money.

It's Charlie...
good articles...

And for the green, good times goes bad...

I have had ATI cards for years but dumped XP for ubuntu last year. ATIs linux drivers are improving but still lag way behind NVs. i just removed a good 1950 pro card and replaced it with a 8800 GT just so i can have a stable system.

I don't have time many days to read these articles in detail and skip around the webpage to see what "this" is linked to. Please write a few more words. Thanks.

My M2N32-SLI Deluxe also died on its southbridge because of its poor heat disipation, on sli with the extra fan it has and a very well ventiled case it went up to 75°C.

When it died I blamed the poor AX2 4600+ it had on it because it was hit once while switching cooler.

like i can see when charlie says something bad about nv when they do something wrong, but, even when nv is doing great m he never gives them credit, even when 8**** series was launch and destroy ati, he still never gave nv credit where it was deserved, he just out to try and get more ppl to hate nv. what a sad day to be a inq employee

Guess what, Charlie isn't going to fit into your neat, compartmented understanding where everyone has to be pro-this and conversely anti-that. Assuming he is pro-ATI from this article is a logical fallacy. 

I've been to this regularly to this site since the Athlon 64 was released and I don't recall any antipathy towards Nvidia that it did not earn. I observe the following actions by Nvidia that contribute to a change in attitude from writers:

- denying accommodation to participants that refuse to sign an NDA
- untruthful PR material (slides)
- hostility towards its AIB partners
- benchmark fiddling
- hostile market pricing
- sli exclusivity
- quad sli
- blacklisting the inquirer at PR events

and then there is stuff like http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36889/118/ from which we can determine a theme of arrogance in nvidia's behaviour.

And finally we arrive at the point where a customer has the choice of (in aud) a gtx280 at 739 dollars, or two hd4850 cards at 436 dollars which beat the 280 by 1.5k 06marks or 20-40fps across a suite of games (from guru3d)

So that's it, for the immediate future Nvidia cards are at risk of becoming a novelty review. Acknowledging that the attitude of Nvidia is partially responsible for this does not make one a fanboy.

It'll be great fun watching Nvidia try and use their cheque book to wriggle out of this hole.

I expect the Nvidia rumour/fud machine will go into overdrive trying to stay ahead of these problems.

Which ever way you look at it though, this is great news.


Only robots hold no bias - Charlie is allowed to be biased if there is a significant axe to grind. I'm a 8800 GTX owner after selling off a 8800GT that crashed at high res. I'm a happy NV owner but not a fanboy. For the August- October slew of games (Stalker: Clear Skies through to Far Cry 2), I'll hold out for the prices to slip and the best price/performance ratio wins. 
The only valid statement to make regarding the GPU market is that Nvidia consistently release top performing cards (9800 GX2, GTX280) but at exorbitant prices, especially in todays financial squeeze. ATI release lower rated performance wise but better value cards. As long as folk have money and want a GPU thats a phallic symbol, they'll buy green. And as long as they do, the green guys are financially viable. If harsher times hit, more people will probably wander over to the red side.
And for the record, quoting 3D Mark scores are meaningless when the human eye cannot differentiate between fps above a certain level.
Roll on the price war. Roll away the red and green fanboy rivalry.

karate.

I don't know if it's related but I had my old mobo's with nvidia's chipset and onboard 6100 graphic card which failed three time in two years (after three time replacement) and I already blame gigabyte for the faulty engineering, now I feel guilty blaming them and thought maybe the nvidia chipset is the whole problem...

should have trust my instinct and stick with ATI otherwise.

Charlie Demerjian is damn right about nvidia. I used to be an Nvidia fan boy for years afther they took over my beloved 3dfx. I like charlie and sylvie there there sarcasm and humor about failed products.
Nvidia used to be good but they just messed up when they decided to put chips in notebooks which breakdown afther a year or too of usage mostly just outside of warrenty. i can say that almost every nvidia card i ever had from the FX series breaks down afther about a year and half of usage. This is the main reason why i dont want nvidia anymore no matter if there faster or better then ATI. i never had those problems with ATI even if the card is 5-10 years old. And my main reason why im pissed at nvidia is that my notebook a amilo xa 1526 with a geforce go 7600 suffers from nvidia's graphic problem too. i paid €939 in 2007 and it just costed me recently another €110 to get it repaird because the graphics were broken they replaced the motherboard and the fan, but according to fujitsu siemens there site you have to do a bios upgrade to prevent the problem 1.1R is the version it turns your fan on to run at 100% constantly very annoying really a dust blower id say and this cant be healthy for your fan and your ears. so i called fujitsu to ask the guy if my new motherbord would suffer from this same problem within 1 year or so if i didnt do that bios upgrade. he assured me that it wouldent because this was a newer and better version of the board and that this board didnt need the bios upgrade from 1.1N to dustblower 1.1R so i took his word for it because that was all i could do. atleast i have a good return word if it breaks down under the same conditions again now. I think you should be able to expact your hardware which is this expansive should atleast be able to last 5 years under normal stress. this is why my new computer wont have an nvidia card in it no matter if nvidia has a better offering for 20 euro more. i hope Jen-Sun Huang will do something about the bad reputation his company is getting into and will atleast do something to improve the lifespan of his products rather then trying to have the biggest and most power hungry giant to beat 3d marks in reviews. otherwise many more manufacturers will move to ATI im affraid because i can understand how much money it costs them to repair all those notebooks and computers.