RIP OFF - misbadged geforce4 card

[zybch]

Greetings all,
a couple of days ago I ordered a computer system for a client of mine that included a Gf2-mx400 video card (not great I know, but fine for office apps and the occasional game of quake 3). After installing windows xp, the computer would randomly freeze. I switched over every component one at a time with no luck, finally switched the vid card over and everything worked fine. Stuck it back in and it started freezing again.
'Hmmm', said I, I wonder if its getting a bit too hot with that crappy thin heatsink. I located a larger one which would still fit the card and removed its default one and cleared off the thermal goop so I could use some nice arctic silver and my own heatsink.

Well after the goop had been removed I was more than a little surprised to see that the chip was actually a Gf2-mx200 , even though a sticker on the card said mx400 and etched as part of the PCB (the card itself) was a gf2-mx400 logo.

Has anyone come across this sort of thing before? Surely the minor cost difference between a mx200 and mx400 chip would be practically invisible to a video card manufacturer, so why on earth did I get sold an under specified yet over clocked card?

Could it have been a stuff-up at the plant? someone reached into the wrong chip bin when the card was being assembled, or something like that?

By the way, the card's brand was Orange. I contacted them and upon seeing the scan I took of the card claimed it wasn't one of theirs as the logo was different.

[Terminator]

Tell the company they are full of sh-t and demand your money back. If memory serves me right the MX200 has a 64 bit internal bus as opposed to a 128bit bus on the MX400's. The performance between to 2 is quite dramatic. They give you any hassle then report them for misbadging their products. I know personally of a company that were badging their overclocked CPU computers that were caught and closed down.

T

:t

[NDD]

Sux :(
Never heard of them anyway, are they known in where you live ?

[zybch]

The first thing that Orange said was "how on earth did you get hold of one of our cards in Australia, we don't sell them there".
I can only assume that the importer who supplies my supplier bought a nice big batch of them in china or somewhere.

I sold an identical card to another customer a few weeks back, but he wants me to install it for him this comming week. I'll check to see if its a 400 or a 200.
If its a 200 I'll be a very annoyed little boy.

I'm going to keep trying to track down the real manufacturers of the card and try to get a couple of nice shiny geforce4 ti cards out of them or I'll threaten to go to nVidia and let them know how their chips are being overclocked and misrepresented.

Terminator, I think the card you are thinking about might be the TnT2's. The m64 was useless (but cheap) with a 64bit bus, the full blown tnt2 had a 128bit bus.

[Terminator]

You might be right about the TNT's but here is the spec on the different MX2's :-


GeForce2 MX 400

Memory Interface: 64/128-bit SDR, 64-bit DDR
Texels per Second:800 Million
Memory Bandwidth:2.7GB/s

GeForce2 MX 200

Memory Interface:64-bit SDR
Texels per Second:700 Million
Memory Bandwidth:1.3GB/s


Info from http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=geforce2mx


As you can see the MX2 200 only had 64 bit SDR as opposed to the MX400 with 128bit. If you benchmark the 2 cards you will see a dramatic difference in performance.

Go after them big time, these kind of people make me sick.

:p


T

[NDD]

Terminator is 100% correct. MX200 = 64bit memory bus :(

[zybch]

There you go, I stand corrected. I thought the only diff was clock speed, but I'm probably thinking of the Geforce4 range of cards.

[Terry Finch]

I bought a gf2 mx400 from D.V.Century that when i removed the
HS, said mx200. I tried to exchange it, but got the runaround.
it doesn't have a brand name, but looks identical to the Apollo
Joytech.

[zybch]

This kind of thing really sucks!
When I bought my 1st 486 board and chip there was a little sticker covering the heatsink saying 'void if removed'. I promptly removed it and found that my shiny new 33MHz chip was actually a 25MHz part, overclocked. This little modification was done where I bought the board/chip, but in the case of video cards it has to be done at the manufacturing factory and has to be done deliberatley.

I've tried writing to nVidia but they don't seem to want to know about it, I guess they see their responsibility ending with the sale of the chips they manufacture and won't do anything about it unless they are swamped by lots of bad press and emails from pi$$ed off customers.
One of the big problems is that theyre are lots of small companies that make geforce cards, just by cloning the reference design from the chip producers then they can stick on whatever chip they want and sell them for a nice profit. Especially when a chip is reaching the end of its life like the GF2 chip, it becomes common knowledge that chip X will operate like chip Y is overclocked by Z amount and will not be detectable to the customer, especially if the little 'brag' message that you get from the video card when you turn your PC on is disabled or only displayed for 1/2 a second and you can't see it because you screen can't warm up that fast!

[Terry Finch]

Yea,I agree. but mines not even overclocked. it's running at
143/143.

[gjimene2]

aw hell man, it sucks what they did to you. You know you can get the for breech of contract since they didn't keep up to their end :)

[zybch]

I was thinking more like fraud, as they are fraudulently misrepresenting their products.
The problem is that I can't track down the manufacturer, and even if I could, how do I go about it from there.
The only thing I have to go on is the 'orange' logo on a sticker on the card. I've contacted the only company called Orange that has anything to do with computer gear and they say that its not one of theirs (and the logos aren't the same anyway).

[Met-AL]

Try looking up the FCC number. Here is the website: http://www.fcc.gov/oet/fccid/

I hope you get what you deserve. This kind of **** is what makes Intel and AMD lock their chips.


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