When it comes to Intel based boards and Nvidia products, i always try and go for EVGA. As they always have the best looking as well as best support then any other brand.

BUT, i also take price into account, as sometimes i find cards from other known reliable brands for cheaper, and i usually cave into that.

rgt53

Apart from the customer support/ forums the main diffence I see between EVGA and Zotac is that EVGA allows you to change the heatsink and keep your waranty, zotac dont (to my knowlage)

Zotac has there own Unreferenced Card Design..so to my knowledge they want people to buy that design
(proprietary design = money making)
(Zotac doesn't have a lifetime on that tho)

Only sparkle has a lifetime on the unreferenced design

jeffreylellis

EVGA has to stop this! There are to many hacks out their in the PC enthusiast world that do not know what they are doing!
 
Also, if the card's thermal solution/heatsink was design properly the first time, then there would be no reason to tamper with it, unless the person is a hardcore enthusiast who likes to water-cool there system.

That is exactly why we buy Evga!  If you want to water cool, you can.  If you want to do something else "creative", you can.  Just put it all back together again without physical damage and you're golden with the warranty.  Evga supports it's "enthusiasts" and encourages them to experiment with their hardware with the likes of evga overclocking applications like precision and eleet. 

Evga would not be the largest nvidia retailer if it modeled itself after the other more "restrictive" nvidia vendors.  Most of us do know what we are doing, and evga knows this.  If the numbers showed some other experience, then evga would have changed its policy long ago.  In other words, if their policy was losing money, they'd change their policy right quick!

And I don't understand what you mean by the heatsink design....maybe you should take that up with Nvidia and not Evga

lspeakman

I have 2 GTX460's in SLI, a Zotac 1GB and EVGA 1GB, they are the exact same reference boards.


I am using MSI to overclock.

Exactly....the only thing that differentiates the two are what happens after the purchase.

See lots of misinformation here. I have a pair of Zotec GTX 275 AMPS running in my son's computer with ZERO problems. I got them at a close out price that is too low to mention here (see cart for price)Yes eVGA has the best support and customer service, yes the Zotec forums sux and from what I've heard customer service depends on which rep you get, but when it comes to a really low price, it's time to roll the dice and take a chance. As I said I think they are good cards and appear well made and when you  read the forums over there not a  whole lot of complaints. I'm usually my own problem solver and don't rely too much on customer service or the forums when something isn't right, and if you can say the same, and you like the price...go for it.

It's all about community and customer support.

Congrats Chris.....I wish I had a Fry's close to me.

JoeZipp

A great price ? Double performance ? A 30 day get out of jail free if it fails (most cards do in the first few weeks) Good choice...no Fry's out here either

Joezipp, Is that a real speedtest.net download speed?

chrisdglong

Eh, maybe I spoke too soon. Once again, I am becoming disappointed with Nvidia's SLI and 3d Vision. I always seem to fall for their tricks. I figured the new drivers would help... nope. Still low GPU usage and performance issues. Oh well, back to Fry's.

Uhh what just happened?

What's the rest of your system specs chrisdglong?

clock speeds?

chrisdglong

I've been over this a million times and even started a couple threads a while back. My CPU is not a bottleneck. I can play SP perfectly with 90% GPU usage on both cards 100% of the time. I can play any other CPU dependent game with perfect performance as well. Vantage also shows huge performance gains between one card and two. Nvidia needs to better optimize their drivers for this game.

BFBC2 is a $..! game its unpatchable
Unless you want to spend 8 days trying to repair a broken engine go for it

Nvidia can't do poo about BFBC2 since it's an ATI game it was optimized for ATI and old fudgedragoons like 6000 and 7000 Nvidia

If you don't believe me go look at the four matrices code for every single render code

http://forums.electronica...ow-about-modtools.html

http://forums.electronica...ocesses-packaging.html


This game is basically unpatchable to allow an improvement on the DX11 Nvidia platform
It's what happens when you release a card to late to test with!

chrisdglong

Well, that does make perfect sense seronx. Maybe I will hold out for the 30 days. I mean, this game will be old news sooner or later anyway. Can't pass up a good deal because of BC2 MP right?

Ya, The important part is Nvidia giving $1 mil or was it $100 mil to help Develop Crysis 2 for the Nvidia platform

I know for sure two 480GTXs can run Crysis 2 and there is alot of simulation games out there that love to use SLi and 3D Nvidia
and certain 480GTXs have 1.4a mini hdmi so if you have a 3d blu-ray reader for pc and a 3d tv with glasses you can run Stereoscopic 3d TV style lol

JoeZipp

Q56_Monster

JoeZipp

A great price ? Double performance ? A 30 day get out of jail free if it fails (most cards do in the first few weeks) Good choice...no Fry's out here either

Joezipp, Is that a real speedtest.net download speed?

Yes it is....but TOS states I can't tell you how I did it.
 
And Chris...keep the card a few days and try it on some other games.

DOCSIS 3.0
or the new DSL
Multiple download channels allowed you to do that

I estimate if you had a 4 channel download you had 70mbps per channel if you have the new beta edition with 8 channels you would have 35mbps... seeing as its also comcast you might actually be beta testing or testing the new Hyper download thing for 25-30 seconds that gives you those mbps boosts
---------------
OP: but don't give up that 480GTX op its amazing
----------------

4 channels 20mbps each its only compatible to other places with docsis 3.0
and for the guy who asked wait for the new modems with 8 channel downstreams that use broadcom processors clocked at 1GHz everything out on the market right now that is docsis 3 use cheap ARM 624 MHz processors
(LA being the closest)
---------------
OP: save up money for more stuff and eventually maybe you can get the 980X or the 990X which is the 3.46-3.53 edition
and sorry for hijacking

BFBC2 requires at least 12-16 cores to actually run like any other game