Unknown_K wrote:

Some companies will go out of their way to help customers, and some will forget they even made something a few years ago let alone support it.
You can't even get drivers for Linksys PCI network cards on their site (probably have to thank Cisco and Belkin for that).

BFG made decent cards with a lifetime warranty... so much for that.

It's actually the opposite. They have driver for PCI cards based on Cisco stuff but they don't host drivers for the RA-Link based cards. I had to download the chipset drivers from RALink for my WMP54G rev 4.1 PCI Wifi card last night when I installed it in my HTPC.

Yeah, which sucks because I have several dead BFG cards that could use an RMA. Sucks BFG died in 2010 due to retarded business decisions.

If this works I'm going to try to RMA a dead 8800GTX from EVGA I have.

How ironic, they went out of business because of their warrantys

Jade Falcon wrote:

How ironic, they went out of business because of their warrantys

I thought they went out of business due to poor marketing and a bunch of major PR disasters?

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Jade Falcon wrote:

How ironic, they went out of business because of their warrantys

I thought they went out of business due to poor marketing and a bunch of major PR disasters?

I don't recall anything like that. From what I recall they had a lot of people sending in cards to get new ones and went broke.
Now diamond owns them. The folks at BFG now make diamond's non reference cards if I recall right.

Official reason BFG exited graphics cards is due to profitability:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFG_Technologies

But if you visit hardware forums in the late 2000s timeframe, you see a bunch of a$shats abusing their RMA system.

dexvx wrote:

Official reason BFG exited graphics cards is due to profitability:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFG_Technologies

But if you visit hardware forums in the late 2000s timeframe, you see a bunch of a$shats abusing their RMA system.

Yeah I recall alot of people abusing the RMAs

I had a dead GTX 670 replaced with a GTX 970, was only just within warranty though and that was the retailers doing. I imagine MSI would've fobbed me off.

Will be interesting to see what they sent you, if anything.

Jade Falcon wrote:

dexvx wrote:

Official reason BFG exited graphics cards is due to profitability:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFG_Technologies

But if you visit hardware forums in the late 2000s timeframe, you see a bunch of a$shats abusing their RMA system.

Yeah I recall alot of people abusing the RMAs

These people should be ashamed of themselves. Let me guess...these are also the people who (in general) like to complain (or just nag) a lot as well 😵
It's people like these that will make the world stop spinning, so to say.
But then again, I wonder why BFG apparently wasn't expecting such a thing to happen in the first place? If they exited the graphics card market due to profitability, I suppose they really had no other option (except maybe to keep going and accept continuous financial losses).

Yeah, true owner-lifetime warranties can be sustainable with prices many fold the normal rate given a well tuned return+failure rate model. An example is high end North Face gear, which you really can return 30 years later due to workmanship / design flaws as opposed to wear and tear (I did this myself once: bought a $600 NF jacket in '91 and replaced it in '16 for seam delaminating and zipper failure.. I doubt I'll wear this new one out!)

BFG's letter indicates their model assumed the backing manufacturer would replace failed components for free indefinitely despite BFG clearly not having a supplier contract in place to guarantee it. Without that contract, BFG's pricing should have costed-in these replacements indefinitely, and thus their price per card would have risen substantially.

They tried to shift the blame to their supplier but it was their own fault in the end.

Their model might have under-estimated the percent of buyers filing returns, perhaps assuming that technical obsolescence would mean people deprecate their GPU's every 18 months and don't even care about returning them (because the gaming experience for the latest and greatest games would be poor regardless). But we see here.. this guy returning an 11 year-old card, although he's surely the exception.

None the less, their model should have included an outlier multiple covering the small percent of buyers who will attempt to replace their card every X years for the rest of their lives.

With these models, you start with conservative assumptions and then feed in actual stats which then adjust your next round of pricing such that the business is sustainable. Sounds like BFG didn't do anything of the sort.

A little off-topic, but the clothing/putdoor gear company LL Bean is famous for a lifetime warranty on its merchandise. Unscrupulous people buy their items in thrift shops and return them for cash. There's a really interesting episode of the podcast This American Life where a former employee who processed these returns described what kind of people do this.

Bean's policy is basically to ask you if you believed you got your money's worth over the life of the product, thereby forcing you to say that you did not get your $30 dollars' worth out of a 20 yo shirt. Bean would give you the cash equivalent no matter what, but you had to basically lie about your experience.

On the other hand, lifetime warranties are something the manufacturers put on themselves for a marketing push. It should be tested once in a while.

firage wrote:

On the other hand, lifetime warranties are something the manufacturers put on themselves for a marketing push. It should be tested once in a while.

IMO if you make decent quality parts and don't skimp on caps, etc you don't have as much of an issue. Lower failure rate = lower return rate. My card failed, I'm RMA'ing it which is reasonable. I fail to see how this is RMA abuse. I paid for a card with lifetime warranty. I should get precisely that. This isn't some scheme to trade in a S10 dollar card and get a brand new one. This is a scheme to trade in a S10 dollar card and get back the same card model in working order.

Quite a few multi billion dollar companies will not even admit there is a manufacturing problem until a class action lawsuit is filed.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away video card companies manufactured their own cards and had techs on staff that reworked defects in house. If you just design the board and have them made elsewhere you don't have the techs around to fix broken boards nor the parts to fix them. I would expect turn around (company gets board back, sends it to a tech company to fix when they get around to it and send it back) will be a while if parts can be found.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

firage wrote:

On the other hand, lifetime warranties are something the manufacturers put on themselves for a marketing push. It should be tested once in a while.

IMO if you make decent quality parts and don't skimp on caps, etc you don't have as much of an issue.

Wile I agree with you fully, there is one thing you may be missing.

Make something idiot proof and a better idiot will be made.

In other words, dumb people will do dumb stuff, just look at the shear number of motherboards on ebay with bent LGA pins.

Jade Falcon wrote:

Wile I agree with you fully, there is one thing you may be missing. […]
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TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

firage wrote:

On the other hand, lifetime warranties are something the manufacturers put on themselves for a marketing push. It should be tested once in a while.

IMO if you make decent quality parts and don't skimp on caps, etc you don't have as much of an issue.

Wile I agree with you fully, there is one thing you may be missing.

Make something idiot proof and a better idiot will be made.

In other words, dumb people will do dumb stuff, just look at the shear number of motherboards on ebay with bent LGA pins.

Yeah, I've inserted CPUs into 775 with the machine vertical before and had no issues. Idk how careless you need to be to mess up LGA arrays.