[rizE]

yeah i skimmed across the bottom part until i read it again

[|Erasmus|]

Originally Posted by Hydroid

Massive rant.

Personal experience is well and good, but there's no rational basis beyond that for NVIDIA > AMD. That said, you're an idiot if you don't go and look around for what experiences people have talked about, and if your usage patterns match those of people who've had problems, maybe stay away from that brand. I've not had a single issue in the several years I've had ATI cards. As I said, my current one has barely been switched off in ~18 months (closer to 2 years now i think) and it's even been overclocked. And it's played more than just sc2 in that time.

If we're all going to get our panties in a twist about brands we personally don't like, I'd be telling people to never touch Western Digital hard drives with a 10 foot pole. And pretty much all my close friends in real life agree completely. For some reason we all have had terrible terrible luck with that brand. Hard drives failing in under a week, being replaced multiple times, etc. etc. But I generally don't because it's not like it's a truly horrible product if so many knowledgeable people recommend it. It's just that I have had bad luck in the past.

Quick Comments

NOM:

WD are pretty bad

[Maynarde]

Originally Posted by |Erasmus|

If we're all going to get our panties in a twist about brands we personally don't like, I'd be telling people to never touch Western Digital hard drives with a 10 foot pole. And pretty much all my close friends in real life agree completely. For some reason we all have had terrible terrible luck with that brand. Hard drives failing in under a week, being replaced multiple times, etc. etc. But I generally don't because it's not like it's a truly horrible product if so many knowledgeable people recommend it. It's just that I have had bad luck in the past.

I recommend staying the hell away from Acer products. This is based off my experience of everything I've ever bought from them, and that friends have owned, being horrible and not living for very long and having terrible customer service.

Quick Comments

	syfChadMann:
	NOM:

[|Erasmus|]

Originally Posted by Maynarde

I recommend staying the hell away from Acer products. This is based off my experience of everything I've ever bought from them, and that friends have owned, being horrible and not living for very long and having terrible customer service.

My point being there is somebody out there with a bad experience for every brand... Noone should buy any product because someone had a bad experience with the brand.

[mGGDrGooSe]

Re: the Radeon vs Nvidia debate, all I can say is that I have had both and never had a problem with either (actually, post XP I've never had a hardware problem fullstop. I still have old 10GB HDD and 8x CD drives that work fine). I've put the Radeon there atm because it's the best value for money in current stock. But if I'm waiting for the new Kepler cards to come out, then I'll likely get a 570 assuming they come down in price.

[breadfan]

Originally Posted by Maynarde

I recommend staying the hell away from Acer products. This is based off my experience of everything I've ever bought from them, and that friends have owned, being horrible and not living for very long and having terrible customer service.

When did you have these experiences?

In the case of Acer I'll add my own experience. When I first started out in IT, one of my first jobs was to deploy some number of Acer PCs (6 or 7 thousand) to TAFE campuses across SE Qld. The outright failure rate was something like 20% on PCs, and a similar number of monitors coming out of the box with dead pixel clusters. We also had to implement a check that HDDs were plugged into the right SATA controller, because so many were coming from factory plugged into port 4 instead of port 0. Bear in mind the same freight company was used for every site, so it's not certain it's an Acer thing, but they once were pretty shocking. So in Maynarde's case, if it was 6-7 years ago, that's probably very typical.

Given that this was a number of years ago now, I would be prepared to give Acer another try, because in technology terms that was so many generations ago, it's like choosing not to go overseas because wooden planes don't feel safe.

[Hydroid]

Originally Posted by |Erasmus|

Cut

Sure there may be no rational backing for the bias, but it's a bias I have from the past 10 years of taking note of the experiences of those I know and meet. Spanning from America, to South Africa and Australia and multiple distributors, that I have encountered more problematic ATI/AMD cards than NVIDIA ones. My own nvidia cards have not been perfect, I had problems with drivers from a couple of releases ago that kept crashing on the desktop and recovering.

I'm not ranting or getting riled up and foaming at the mouth over this. A request for feedback was given out to the community and I've given my recommendation. Otherwise I don't go out of my way to badmouth AMD. If asked, I give an honest and open opinion, but otherwise I keep it to myself. AMD aren't "bad" but I certainly see them as carrying a higher risk factor on the investment than Nvidia.

I do disagree with your point about whether or not somebody should avoid a product just because of a bad experience. When your own hard earned money is at stake you would be a fool to not take problems into consideration. If bad experiences occur frequently enough it should count as a reflection on that company's product. However, in this case, OP has had good experiences with both sides and so it doesn't matter what any of our experiences might indicate as his own personal experience outweighs ours. It's just how things work. I wouldn't fault you for recommending the world never buys another Western Digital drive. I've never had an issue with them although I've heard things like that, but I've also never had issues with Seagate drives despite hearing the exact model that is currently in my PC supposedly had a fatal flaw that could prevent it from spinning up on boot. Yet, I recently got rid of a 4GB Seagate IDE drive only due to lack of capacity that was over 14 years old which I stripped out of the first PC my family ever owned. We bought it 2nd hand so I don't even know how much longer that drive had been in use before we got it.

Bottom line, take advice with a grain of salt, including reviews because everyone has a bias and in the end your personal experience always carries 10x the weight of someone else's whether it's a valid way to make choices or not. And people don't change from their preferences even if another product is better, unless there are pain points for them with what they currently use.

[nirvAnA]

In before sheepy

Quick Comments

TCPLemminks:

Tell him to post in my thread

[Gibber]

I see some answers here saying that you should wait to upgrade because such and such is around the corner blah blah blah. I know that sounds pretty logical, it actually isn't.

The reason I say this is because in nearly every instance I could say that exact above every time someone comes my way with a new computer build I could say you should wait.

Well you shouldn't, because in my experience there isn't a right or a wrong time to buy with computers because the simple fact of the matter is that its out of date before it even gets the retailer. So just buy what you want when you want it, because I'm sure as hell that the system you listed will do everything that you demand of it. Everything.

[mGGDrGooSe]

Originally Posted by Gibber

I see some answers here saying that you should wait to upgrade because such and such is around the corner blah blah blah. I know that sounds pretty logical, it actually isn't.

The reason I say this is because in nearly every instance I could say that exact above. Every time someone comes my way with a new computer build I could say you should wait.

Well you shouldn't, because In my experience there isn't a right or a wrong time to buy with computers because the simple fact of the matter is that its out of date before it even gets the retailer. So just buy what you want when you want it, because I'm sure as hell that the system you listed will do everything that you demand of it. Everything.

Agreed 100%. When Ivy brdige comes out, the Sandy bridge systems wont go down by more than maybe $50 for CPU and probably not much if anything for Mboard. However, I'm hoping that when the Keplar cards come the 560 Ti will come down to $200 (Ideally I'd like the 570 to come down to around $250 but i dont think will happen for a few months). This is why I generally only upgrade when the computer stops doing what I need it to do. In this case it's another's computer that has stopped doing it and I want an upgrade so I can pass this computer on. Basically there is a 50/50 chance of me getting something tomorrow, otherwise I'll wait for the 560/570s to come down in price.

[NOM]

Don't really need a sound card. I have a similar board and it has a built in hd sound card in it. Sounds amazing. most other built in sound cards are poo though.

[Asrathiel]

So we going computer shopping tomorrow or not??

[Scope_IV]

[QUOTE=|Erasmus|;79151]Way to just BM a prefectly good brand (that does in fact offer better value for money in terms of performance) with no justification.

Sorry I didn't link benchmarks or talk about how terrible the drivers are. http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

ATI releases new 7000 range. Still loses to 580. LoL.

[Hydroid]

Originally Posted by Scope_IV

ATI releases new 7000 range. Still loses to 580. LoL.

That's not a very good example. From my understanding they wanted those to become their new mid-high range. Not be the next fastest GPU on the market.

[Scope_IV]

^But still put a more expensive price tag onto it?

[mGGDrGooSe]

Parts have been purchased. Build is in progress. CPU coolers are the most fiddly damn thing ever.

[TCPLemminks]

GL Mate^^
Didn't Nvidia release a driver update that killed their graphics cards a while back?

Also are Western Digitals that bad? Cause I have this one in my current build

[Asrathiel]

Originally Posted by Drgoose

CPU coolers are the most fiddly damn thing ever.

And motherboard screws?










Sorry

[Antel0pe]

lol, nvidia makes high end graphics card, but AMD's graphics card have the better bang for buck. (at least in the hd6XXX and the HD5XXX)
AMD doesn't aim to be the best performance card IMO, they aim to be the best Value:Performance card.

[Hydroid]

Originally Posted by TCPLemminks

Didn't Nvidia release a driver update that killed their graphics cards a while back?

Yep, they did. Although it was an isolated set of cases with a specific model of cards (can't remember which one) but it caused the fan to stop working and the card would burn itself out. I don't remember it killing too many cards, but it definitely happened.