Graphics PNY?

Hey guys,
I'm new around here so I'll introduce myself a bit. I'm Ana, I game once every 60 bizillion years, I do lots of other cool stuff (that no one cares about), I manage a small computer manufacturer (www.computer-port.com) and retail store, and... who knows what else, stuff I guess? Oh yea, I'm from NH, US, but Bit-Tech seems to be one of the absolute best places to get detailed reviews of hardware and since that's my job, I read the articles (almost every one but the game reviews).

Anyway, as the manager of a computer manufacturer hardware quality is a HUGE issue for me, our company uses only brand names from the absolute best in the field. Intel, Western Digital, Kingston, Thermaltake, NVIDIA, LG... blah blah blah... and for graphics we use PNY, which is NVIDIA's biggest manufacturer (and the only licensed Quadro manufacturer). Can anyone explain to my why PNY graphics never even show up on this site? They are absolutely, positively reliable, and they have cards that rival almost any competitor, including OCed versions. Is it because PNY doesn't send cards to Bit-Tech? Or because they aren't available overseas? At first I thought cards like the Quadro line weren't really the niche of Bit-Tech, like the Intel motherboards we use (which just aren't gaming boards, period) but we use them for stability and support reasons, but with PNY's GTX 280 cards and their history... I'm left wondering...

 

I don't see many in shops if i'm honest...

 

I don't think we see many in the shops over here, and very often it's just what the manufacturers send over to the BiT offices.

 

Man... what a shame... PNY probably thinks that since they're the biggest it's "below" them... marketing idiots. I might mention it to my rep though... some solid reviews would be nice.

 

I've heard bad things about their ram and usb devices, and when i do see there products they are a bit pricier, and it doesnt appeal to me, i would rather go for a longer warranty with another brand. Also, i saw a 8800 GT by PNY going for about 319.99 at bestbuy a few months back, which was outrageous because it was a week after i had just gotten my evga 8800 GT for 240 WITH tax.

 

To the OP: I realise you already like PNY, but eVGA are truly excellent cards, with brilliant warranty. If you sell to enthusiasts, they're a well-recognised name as being "premium enthusiast/gamer."

 

Don't forget, most of evga's higher end products also come with limited lifetime warranties, and i know all bfg stuff has lifetime warranties... i think

 

BFG and EVGA both have lifetime warranties and BFG will basically accept any card for RMA(at least in my experience). EVGA also allows aftermarket coolers under the terms of their warranty.

 

I can't really say about USB devices, I DO use an 8GB PNY USB stick currently, and it does get heavy use, and it is a bit fragile (too much plastic), but I am a SanDisk fan for most flash devices, it's a work USB stick and it does what it needs to do. As for RAM, in my experience they use TERRIBLE chips and PNY RAM is a waste of money.

We have carried both eVGA and BFG in the past, considering we deal with thousands of cards a year we find that both eVGA and BFG have a significantly higher failure rate, but this statistic is from almost 5 years ago, I would be interested to see how they stacked up, hence why I wondered why they never got reviewed. The warranty stuff is new to me though, you may have swayed me slightly in the direction of eVGA, unfortunately the fact does still stand that PNY are the sole manufacturers of Quadro FX, NVS, and Plex parts. While our sales are mostly (~30%) average home users and (~30%) businesses, I would say the market is evenly split between enthusiast and professional workstation, which means we still need Quadro cards and we do like to stay with a singular brand.
Please Bit-Tech powers that be... do a PNY review to sate my wondering!

 

Regarding that, how would Asus respond to a rma of a board that was watercooled that somehow was damaged, but not due to the liquid cooling, say the power connector shorted or something. Will they accept it even though you've removed the stock heat pipe system? Does it void the warranty (stupid question, but i honestly don't know)

 

I'm yet another which has never used any PNY products, also cannot remember seeing any reviews (well atleast not on sites I would trust).

As for BFG and eVGA well I have have good experience there, it's s critical to sell prodcust with solid a solid warranty especially bleding edge products. Interesting what you say about the failure rate on them though! I'm on my 4th eVGA 8800GTX, more than a little irritating that it needs to be replaced twice a year. On the flip side I send it to eVGA in Germany and have a new card within 1½ weeks!

Seems like this could be the start of a beautiful partnership between you and Bit-Tech, try pulling some string's to get BT a card or 10. Hey if they dont have the time to review them I sure do.

You could tell PNY that I'm planning a new MOD to be documented primarily at BT, if they give me a GPU I will be generous with advertising and with have their name lazer cut into the case!

 

PNY offer excellent value for money; the PNY cards I have used in the past have been fairly mediocre with regards to bundles and warranties, but have been priced much lower than the competition. I have an AGP 7800GS (bought when it first came out) which is still running fine (been used 10 hours a day, every day for a few years ), but then again I have an MSI GeForce 4 MX 4000 which has been used 24/7 for 3 years in my HTPC which is still chugging along just great so maybe I just treat hardware right.

Got a PNY USB memory stick (128MB ... oooooooold!) which is still working great. It was free with the 7800GS!

 

You could always email the staff to ask this question, our address' are here: http://www.bit-tech.net/about/

Fire one to me if you want to discuss it because there's a little story behind PNY We did feature them on the 9800 GTX launch article.

The problem with Nvidia is that there are over 20 partners in Europe - to cover everyone would not only be incredibly boring but repetitive. We do our absolute best to rotate people but generally it's whoever has a) the most interesting products or b) gets them too us the fastest so we can maximise the time testing (and driver debugging ) c) who actually approach us to work with us - it comes down to the quality of PR. BFG, Zotac, EVGA, Palit, Asus, MSI, Leadtek and Gigabyte all have excellent PR teams and understand our needs.

Obviously we want to maximise our coverage, but realistically if you have 10 people asking to look at your product we generally operate a first come first serve, unless we're on a specific brand rotation of the above ^^ to spread the love ^_^



EDIT: Actually, you're misinformed - Palit are the biggest partner to Nvidia Or technically PC Partner and Foxconn if we're talking manufacturing

 

i have a pny 8800gt, never had a problem with it, but then its only a sticker away from being an evga, bfg, gainward, whatever. crap all in the box apart from a vga-dvi converter and drivers but it was only £110 about 3 months ago

 

^yep I have an 8800GTS from them too. Second hand so I have no idea where it originally came from. The box is completely generic - it says it is an nVidia card but all the details are on a separate sticker. I have to say this made me think they must be a minor board partner trying to save money!

 

Does Foxconn make more then just the nVidia reference motherboards? Do they also produce the OEM cards that Dell and the like have or reference graphics cards?

As far as PC Partner, I've never actually seen a product by them unless they make nVidia reference cards/boards also.

 

PC Partner are the manufacturing side and run under several well know brands

Foxconn are also a huge manufacturing company - their commercial arm is actually very small in comparison. They're so big they have their own steel factory.

 

Abit even uses Foxconn PS2 mouse connectors

i had a Geforce 4 Ti4400 PNY card, amazing, only problem was that it died after 6 years of usage....... its RAM failed with green lines across the monitor. but 6 years is shockingly long.

if you are a computer manufacturer, any brand should do, why specifically choose PNY? why not get any odd OEM card? afterall, those extras are useless for a computer manufacturer.

 

This fits in with what I expected for a reason... it's practical and it works out fine, but for people like me, who want the comparison of the brand they are using on a regular basis just to keep from worrying, of course, that's PNY's responsibility to their customers to keep their information current on sites like this, a concern they apparently don't have.

By biggest manufacturer I was referencing the size of their product offering, in particular to graphics cards, no company can even compete with PNY's wide array of cards because no one else produces Quadro. Without Quadro they are still pretty good too. I'll send a message too, just because this seems like a fun story

1 and 1/2 weeks! When a processor or motherboard for us dies, it's replacement is in our store by noon tomorrow. For graphics cards, we overcome this by having a large stock, but for high end cards this is not possible. For a $600 graphics card as a manufacturer we would *expect* to see next day advanced replacement, like from Intel. Partner memberships are not easy to come by, we sell over a quarter million dollars in NVIDIA each year (Note: I'm not looking at the stat's, so I'm guessing on the low side, it could be as much as that a quarter, but I'm not sure stupid memory).

I'll see about PNY's involvement, they are notoriously un-enthusiastic about enthusiasts, their *primary* market is businesses and graphics work (workstation graphics, render farms, CUDA supercomputing) and mainstream (~8400GS to 9600GT)... we'll see. They take that sort of experience and apply it to their enthusiast line, which means when we sell an ultra high end cards we know they are built rock solid and have decent overhead room to push the envelope. Of course we don't OC or WC very often, but nothing's better than knowing when you tighten down the bolts everything beneath them is as close to failure proof as it can be!

Foxconn is big, I wasn't talking about MFG abilitys, but Foxconn makes stuff for EVERYONE! even Intel... and that's saying something.

Now I'll refrain from going off too much, but... wow... I can't believe that people think of computer manufacturers like that, all the big OEMs must have just demolished our name... when you're shopping for a car there are three categories you might fall into: budget, performance, and reliability. We don't cater to people in the budget category, sorry but if you're looking for something under $699 for a tower, buy a junk computer from Wal-mart and when it breaks in a year we promise to offer the same $699 deal we always did. We do cater to people who can't afford $699, when our workstations are out of date (2 years or so) we sell them off, but they aren't really our primary sales. Now when you go to buy a performance car, whether you buy an archaic Honda Civic and start a rebuild or buy a Porsche 911 GT2 it matters what is under the hood. When you buy a performance system for a budget, you want to know that what you get is rock solid and the best value for your dollar, that's why we are brand loyal, When you buy our cheapest tower, for $699 you're getting Kingston, Intel, Western Digital, LG, and In-Win, brands with R&D departments the size of companies in their own right, and I can't believe, that even Jim-bob Hickbillypants who knows nothing about computers but wants "a fast one" wouldn't insist on that level of service from their OEM, they sure do when they go to the hardware store! Then the last category, reliability. These are the people who buy power-train warranties and from a company with a reputation. Precisely because we use brand names our systems have run for years and years and years without failure. Two months ago we sold a computer to a lady who was replacing the SECOND computer we ever sold (11yrs ago) because it was *ahem*... slow... every day we get in systems from the big manufacturers with failed this and that because they used absolute junk in PREMIUM systems, just to save a few bucks. Yes, they are a hundred dollars beneath our price at times, but that really doesn't bother us. Like we always say to our customers, "go ahead, buy the *insert big box OEM here*... in two years time we will have earned our money back from the repairs on it", and we're very rarely wrong.
*shakes head* sorry for the rant, it's just my little thing against the big OEMs, to SOME credit, companies like HP are trying to rectify this by bringing the brand loyalty to the budget level, but they're coming out of a very bad time for their systems, who knows... they've still got a long way to catch up.

 

there really is nothing wrong with OEM products. it's like cars, when you buy a 911 GT2, whether the engine came from Japan or China doesn't matter, as long as the design are the same with same performance.

i understand as a small manufacturer going against the "big boys", i can see why you sometimes may feel disadvantaged by their competitive price offering.
because i personally never trust computer manufacturers with motherboard and RAM choices (in these cases, brand matters, there is no "Intel reference design"), i buy my own components. may be this is the same reason computer manufacturers ruining your industry.