| Forum Home | ||||
| Press F1 | ||||
| Thread ID: 44733 | 2004-04-28 09:22:00 | Dishonest marketing of video cards | tutaekuri (410) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 232711 | 2004-04-28 09:22:00 | What do you think about the marketing of video cards and the representation of the performance of the many different flavours of video cards nowadays? I am all for choice but think its downright dishonest that a card can be advertised as, say, a 9600 pro but not mention that it has underclocked GPU/memory! I recently bought a 9600pro made by GeCube and chose the budget edition because I didn't want VIVO or extras and couldn't afford the etreme version. I wasn't expecting the card to have ram faster than the ATI reference design (600MHz) but was not expecting it to run at only (400MHz)!! The card does not perform as a standard 9600 pro but is now only marginally faster than a standard 9600. Let me make it clear that neither the manufacturer nor the retailer (an otherwise reputable NZ online retailer) makes any mention in their advertising that the card contains memory slower than the ATI reference design standard. Surely, manufacturers and retailers have an obligation to outline important differences in the products they are selling? Isn't the customer entitled to know what they are getting when they buy a card? I put these questions to the retailer but he replied that he was certain he had not misrepresented the card at all. Incidentally, many other NZ sites sell the same card without mentioning the memory speed. What do you think? |
tutaekuri (410) | ||
| 232712 | 2004-04-28 22:47:00 | Spent the last half an hour reading articles and from everything i read.....All 9600pro cards have a default clock speed of 400mhz,the extreme versions are 480mhz,maybe your getting confused with the 9600xt? | metla (154) | ||
| 232713 | 2004-04-29 08:41:00 | That's not the norm according to what I've read and not according to the ATI standard. See here: www.ati.com Which pages were you looking at? |
tutaekuri (410) | ||
| 232714 | 2004-04-29 08:53:00 | hmmm,interesting. The articles i were looking at were reviews of the cards,and in the 4 or 5 that i read all stated they started with a clockspeed of 400, But that ATI page you linked certainly states otherwise. |
metla (154) | ||
| 232715 | 2004-04-29 09:03:00 | Yeah I bought a Radeon 9600xt recently and was comparing the gigabyte version to other manufacturers, gecube included. I looked at the gecube one specifically as it was on the short-list and on their site, they had about 5 different models of the same card, all with various degrees of performance due to overclocking. I thought that was pretty dodgy and stayed away from buying gecube and bought the Gigabyte! Then this week I found a review on 9600 cards on anandtech.com and found that the Gigabyte 9600xt outperforms the other brands for the 9600xt, including asus, so I'm glad I made a good choice. |
PoWa (203) | ||
| 232716 | 2004-04-29 09:05:00 | meh....The following won't be anymore helpful,Perhaps they are refering to chipset clockspeed and ram clockspeed,Ill fire up an ATI i have tommorow and see what speeds the clocks set at. Memory Speed 325MHz DDR (650MHz Effective) RAMDAC 2x 400MHz 10-bit DACs And from another article The ATI Radeon 9600 Pro uses 128mb of Samsung memory on this card that is rated at 600 mhz. We found this out by looking up the model number off of Samsung's website. ATI has the memory clocked at 600MHz from the factory, then from hardoc we see that ATI’s decision to utilize a .13u process for this core allowed their engineers to reach some impressive clock frequencies. In the case of the 9600 Pro, the core comes stock at a 400MHz frequency. This is well above the 9500 Pro’s stock frequency of 277MHz, a fact which should help level the playing field with regards to performance comparisons between the two. Even the “vanilla” 9600 benefits from a healthy 325MHz core frequency to provide additional performance. |
metla (154) | ||
| 232717 | 2004-04-29 09:05:00 | I ordered a 9600 Pro 256 MB, and I got a 9600 Pro 256MB EZ. This means a) slower chipset b) crapper board, I paid a good $320 for it too, and the geforce 5600 absolutely smashed it up at $250. I feel like I've been duped, and so I agree. |
Growly (6) | ||
| 232718 | 2004-04-29 09:06:00 | Then hardoc follow up with this. Moving to the memory modules, we find the specific memory of choice on the reference card to be from Samsung. Referencing the model off of Samsung's website, we find that these modules are rated for a maximum operating frequency of 350 MHz (700 MHz DDR). Given the default memory speed of 600MHz |
metla (154) | ||
| 232719 | 2004-04-29 09:11:00 | Linkage? What's the exact card that you have? not the xt, se, ee/ One of these? www.gecube.com |
Curious George (3535) | ||
| 232720 | 2004-04-29 09:23:00 | This is the GeCube page for the 9600pro: www.gecube.com.tw Retailers in NZ have been copying the page verbatim and using it to advertise the card on their sites. The retailer told me that 'they just print what the manufacturer provides them' and therefore its not their problem. |
tutaekuri (410) | ||
| 1 2 | |||||