GamersNexus exposes EXPLODING Gigabyte PSUs and Gigabyte Manipulating the Truth | Tries to Disparage GamersNexus

[StDragon]

That's what you call an expensive firecracker! At least there was some flame to show for it.

 

Spoiler

/sarcasm

 

[Fasterthannothing]

Where have you guys been under a rock? Their the most garbage company ever to buy hardware from. They've been this way since at least a decade since I started working on computers.

[Kisai]

39 minutes ago, The89Lunder said:

 

 

Besides the hate train against gigabyte at the moment, are their motherboards and GPU's really that bad?

I have both at the moment (brand new I might add), and they have been nothing but perfect so far.

I am at my second Gigabyte GPU btw. both flawless.

 

I had a P45 board self-destruct, the "quad bios" kept flashing itself every time it failed to boot one day and then somehow killed all of them. I had to go back to the P35 board (also GB.)

 

At this point I'm pretty much sticking to AsRock or ASUS, as everything I've ever bought from them has lasted beyond it's life expectancy (7+ years), if Asus ever stops being good, I'll probably have to hold my nose and buy Dell systems with extended warranty.

[Moonzy]

48 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

Isn't low quality or leaking thermal pads an issue with most RTX 30 series cards?  Also not as bad as some cards lately that came with the thermal pad stickers still on it, I don't recall what AIB did that though.

I've had cards from MSI, Asus and EVGA that had leaky thermal pads, it looks gross aesthetically but never affected how the card worked.

Honestly if you want to boycott a company for lower quality products or garbage support then you'd have to avoid a lot of them, especially with the RTX 30 series and the AMD RX 5000 and RX 6000 series because i've seen so many stories of companies refusing to accept an RMA.

I own several GPU and so far only gigabyte leaks oil, and not just one model at this point

 

EVGA uses decent pads on the ftw3 3080

 

I only repadded these GPUs so no comment on other GPU, but the gigabyte ones (2 of them so far) leak oil all over my motherboard and stuffs, disgusting

[leadeater]

7 hours ago, BuckGup said:

That's insane and it follows the same trend of how Gigabyte is with their server lineup. They are shit all around. From hardware to support

Good to know my assumption is correct, because I'd never try Gigabyte servers everrrrrr

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

Like it kinda sucks how many brands on the "do not buy" list for ultimately crappy things the company did in response to delivering lemons.

- MSI - GPU catching fire, cheating benchmarks

- EVGA - GPU, PSU catching fire

- Gigabyte - GPU, PSU, MB catching fire

You should take EVGA off the list then, because when they do have problems they fix them asap. Also practically zero of the brands "we know" actually make the PSU's so what matters at all is what they do about problems because they are not making them.

[Quackers101]

21 minutes ago, leadeater said:

You should take EVGA off the list then, because when they do have problems the fix them asap. Also practically zero of the brands "we know" actually make the PSU's so what matters at all is what they do about problems because they are not making them.

which is why I find it all a bit dodgy, like a trend to get out "their" PSUs than quality products.

[leadeater]

13 minutes ago, Quackers101 said:

which is why I find it all a bit dodgy, like a trend to get out "their" PSUs than quality products.

The issue when it comes to PSU's is they are a high voltage device and as such there is a lot of regulations, very strict ones, that differ across the world so it's extremely expensive to design and manufacture them and quite honestly it is better that only a few actually do this. There is nothing at all wrong with partnering with a company and creating a branded product based on their portfolio of products, with or without some customization, because I can assure you that if all these "gamer" brands actually tried to get in to manufacturing of PSU's it would be many times worse than this issue right now.

 

There is absolutely something to be said about leaving things to the professionals/experts, Gigabyte/EVGA/NZXT etc etc are not when it comes to PSU's.

 

It's not like the majority of any electronic device is actually made by the brand label on it, most having no more involvement than organizing distribution. PC parts like GPUs and motherboards are some of the few with actual involvement and manufacturing from the brand label on it, or significant amount of in house design.

[Quackers101]

21 minutes ago, leadeater said:

The issue when it comes to PSU's is they are a high voltage device and as such there is a lot of regulations, very strict ones, that differ across the world so it's extremely expensive to design and manufacture them and quite honestly it is better that only a few actually do this. There is nothing at all wrong with partnering with a company and creating a branded product based on their portfolio of products, with or without some customization, because I can assure you that if all these "gamer" brands actually tried to get in to manufacturing of PSU's it would be many times worse than this issue right now.

 

It's not like the majority of any electronic device is actually made by the brand label on it, most having no more involvement than organizing distribution. PC parts like GPUs and motherboards are some of the few with actual involvement and manufacturing from the brand label on it, or significant amount of in house design.

sure, but they could also promote bad designs. like you say, one needs some experience with it to understand common faults or could be dangers in a PSU, with the part if they were to make their own. but as talked about first here, that if they are going to sell PSUs under their branding, its good if they at least know what a PSU would need or work, and getting the right deals. Instead of selling bad ones to everyone, unsure what DELL etc are doing for this.

Edited August 17, 2021 by Quackers101

[Kisai]

36 minutes ago, leadeater said:

You should take EVGA off the list then, because when they do have problems they fix them asap. Also practically zero of the brands "we know" actually make the PSU's so what matters at all is what they do about problems because they are not making them.

Honestly, the only reason EVGA is on the list "right now" is because of the 3090 FTW thing and that game that was making cards blow up. It's MSI and GB that keep finding themselves back on the list.

 

Here's the thing, nearly -all- my negative experiences with computer hardware , in order:

 

1. External hard drive (chassis) - every single one fails eventually. The longest lasting one so far are the WD models, and as point of care, I always buy two at a time, because It will be inevitable I will need to recover one. It's nearly always the power supply.

 

2. GPU's - I used to always buy the ATI, and later AMD video cards, but it seems like they would never last longer than 2 years.  This I attributed to buying the lowend models (eg models ending in 50 rather than 70), but then I got the nVidia GTX 760 and that lasted well past the point any previous GPU did until I got the ASUS RTX 1080. I couldn't even tell you who made any of the GPU's before the 1080, because I had been buying them based on price up until that point. The GTX 760 was given to me in a trade for repairing a system.

 

3. Motherboards - Gigabyte got on the blacklist and then stayed there, and I was cautious about buying GB parts after that. While I hadn't looked at the PSU's (My preference is Seasonic), that cautiousness was warranted when looking at GPU's.

 

After that, CPU's and RAM I've never encountered failures, or the parts were readily RMA'd with no customer service issues at all.

 

Now, will EVGA stay on the list? Probably until the nVidia 40xxx series, and it then gets a re-evaluation. The 30xx I'm not going to touch from pretty much anyone.

 

PSU's yes I'm aware of how manufacturers just rebadge things, but that's the same with RAM. If you put your name on it, you are putting your brand's good (or bad) image on it. It's like if a celebrity's was to endorse a soft drink that was later found to burn holes in your stomach, and the celebrity never drank it other than for the promo. 

 

The problem with all these asian brands based out of taiwan, is that they really do not have a global support presence outside their home country. If you need good support, you're best bet is unfortunately Dell, HP or Apple, and you will be paying that in extended warranty taxes. If you're tech-savvy enough to make good purchasing decisions, then even if you buy parts from msi or gigabyte, you know better than to pick their worst products.

 

 

[Blademaster91]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

I won't buy a Gigabyte product after the failed MB back on the C2D system I have (but no longer use)

 

Like it kinda sucks how many brands on the "do not buy" list for ultimately crappy things the company did in response to delivering lemons.

- MSI - GPU catching fire, cheating benchmarks

- EVGA - GPU, PSU catching fire

- Gigabyte - GPU, PSU, MB catching fire

 

And these aren't even "old" reports. Just type "gigabyte catches fire" in your favorite search engine.

 

At least ASUS's worst problem is it's customer service. They have some reports of laptops catching fire (including one person's death from it), and in my own experience, while the laptops are nice, they're engineered in ways that can easily catch fire.

 

I haven't heard of any MSI, Asus, or gigabyte laptop catching fire, but if you look enough you could probably find a report of a laptop or motherboard failing resulting in a fire.

MSI is on my crap to avoid list because of their bad support, MSI tried to bribe a reviewer into making a positive review on a gaming laptop, and their products seem overpriced for the features compared to other brands, and have too much flashy gamer stuff and RGB.

EVGA, the only serious issue I know of from that company is their GTX 10 series cards not having a correct thermal pad layout, that was fixed quickly and everyone was offered an RMA, or a thermal pad kit to fix the problem. EVGA is one the brands I would pick first for graphics cards. EVGA PSU's are decent, but some of their units have the fan set too high.

Gigabyte, I would only trust them for motherboards, and graphics cards, their monitors are good, but I prefer LG or Dell monitors.

Asus products are decent, but their support is terrible, although I would still buy an Asus laptop over a Dell, as Dell seems to have declined a lot in quality and support.

[Kisai]

6 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

I haven't heard of any MSI, Asus, or gigabyte laptop catching fire, but if you look enough you could probably find a report of a laptop or motherboard failing resulting in a fire.

 

With laptops, it's usually the charger (cable) that is responsible for fires, or the battery exploding in thinner models. However if you've seen how the ASUS zephyrus laptops are designed, the entire underside of the laptop is exposed when the monitor is open. This means that all it takes to catch fire is for something on the desk to slide inside it and short something. Yes, low-risk, but not as low risk as typical vents.

 

Like just from experience, I would -never- buy a 13" laptop from anyone (not even Apple,) because the batteries they put in them always swell and the compact space means they either warp the chassis or catch fire when the bulge in the battery comes in contact with the laptop PCB. We never used to have this problem in pre-2016 laptops because the laptops were not "thin-and-light" and had enough space for the batteries, or the batteries could be easily removed.

 

It's a but funny actually, I've seen more "shielding" in battery compartments in newer laptops than before. Likewise batteries with "metal armor" on the laptop pcb-facing side.

 

Anyway to drag this back to topic. 

 

I really really wish that countries customer protection laws REQUIRED the recall of all products (or parts of products, such as chargers or cables) if the product does not perform as advertised by two independent arms-length-apart tests, even if the tests are not by UL. Of course the problem is that Amazon et al, get all this stuff from overseas, and the overseas manufacturer isn't required to have the products certified domestically.

 

[Mark Kaine]

50 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Honestly, the only reason EVGA is on the list "right now" is because of the 3090 FTW thing and that game that was making cards blow up. It's MSI and GB that keep finding themselves back on the list.

honestly, if you have a do not buy list thats constantly changing its not only kinda useless, its also not really a do not buy list…

 

 

[StDragon]

43 minutes ago, Kisai said:

3. Motherboards - Gigabyte got on the blacklist and then stayed there, and I was cautious about buying GB parts after that. While I hadn't looked at the PSU's (My preference is Seasonic), that cautiousness was warranted when looking at GPU's.

Gigabyte makes a quality MB. The problem is lack of technical support and BIOS updates stop after only a few years it seems. And after the PSU fiasco, I'm done with them for sure.

ASRock is on my "love list". MBs constructed every bit as good as Gigabyte, great performance, good support, and frequent BIOS updates.

 

47 minutes ago, Kisai said:

If you need good support, you're best bet is unfortunately Dell, HP or Apple, and you will be paying that in extended warranty taxes.

Regarding Dell support; that's only true if you have "Pro Support" and "Pro Support PLUS". Support staff is typically routed directly to Round Rock Texas. "Basic Warranty" calls get routed to India where they read from a script and don't care if you already did basic troubleshooting; they make you go through it over the phone again.

[leadeater]

57 minutes ago, Quackers101 said:

sure, but they could also promote bad designs. like you say, one needs some experience with it to understand common faults or could be dangers in a PSU, with the part if they were to make their own. but as talked about first here, that if they are going to sell PSUs under their branding, its good if they at least know what a PSU would need or work, and getting the right deals. Instead of selling bad ones to everyone, unsure what DELL etc are doing for this.

A company like Gigabyte isn't really going to know though, every product should be safe and functional to it's specification from the get go so we can put aside anything like that (regardless of cost). When product fails in this regard, which will happen, it's the responsibility of the company who sold it to deal with it appropriately, not the one who made it. So in this instance it's on Gigabyte to recall such a product and work with the manufacturer to fix the underlying issue or replace entirely with a different product and push on their end for rebate for this faulty product as it's not Gigabytes fault in the first place.

 

Ultimately it's on Gigabyte to recoup it's cost for the recall from the manufacturer because they were supplied with a faulty product so it shouldn't cost Gigabyte money either. Why it becomes an issue is not all costs can be recovered and you are also putting strain on the relationship with the company that is supposed to be making your product which may mean you end up paying higher prices resulting in being less completive on the market.

 

It's good that you bring up Dell, because their PSUs are actually very good and very reliable. They may not be well designed for use-cases outside of the original product design like adding a high power GPU because the PSU is a multi rail design so can only supply 200W on any single 12V rail but that doesn't actually make the PSU bad or dangerous. Dell/HP/Lenovo PSU's are actually overall really good and high quality, just proprietary and unable to be repurposed which I will say is 100% better than exploding.

[leadeater]

57 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Honestly, the only reason EVGA is on the list "right now" is because of the 3090 FTW thing and that game that was making cards blow up. It's MSI and GB that keep finding themselves back on the list.

But why? They literally replaced them all before full confirmation of the underlying issue was even identified. Soon as it was started to be reported every owner was immediately eligible for a replacement. Literally cannot ask for better than this.

[StDragon]

5 minutes ago, leadeater said:

But why? They literally replaced them all before full confirmation of the underlying issue was even identified. Soon as it was started to be reported every owner was immediately eligible for a replacement. Literally cannot ask for better than this.

I'm torn on this. On one hand, yes, EVGA's response is fantastic. No fear of being left holding the bag for a product fault of their doing. My next card might be EVGA.

However.... for such a premium product tier, I would expect there to be some overbuilt engineering here. A 3090 shouldn't have failed like that. Under no circumstances should software pop a card from load. Get warm and throttle back, sure, they can't control thermals in a case. But electrical? WTF? That's some slacking off in the EE department if you ask me.

Which brings me back to why I might instead just stick with Nvidia FE cards. They just work, reliably, even if they're not the best performers.

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, StDragon said:

However.... for such a premium product tier, I would expect there to be some overbuilt engineering here. A 3090 shouldn't have failed like that. Under no circumstances should software pop a card from load. Get warm and throttle back, sure, they can't control thermals in a case. But electrical? WTF? That's some slacking off in the EE department if you ask me.

Personally I'd say it has a lot to do with removing a lot of restrictions so it can be OC'd as much as possible. That's the problem with making cards with huge amounts of capability for high currents and high voltages, get it wrong and it's not entirely safe for your more every day person with less exotic demands and cooling.

 

Should really leave that sort of thing to the Kingpin cards tbh, it's nice to have overbuilt VRMs etc but maybe don't also allow for much higher current and voltages that really are not fully able to be used with the stock cooler . It's not something you can just limit off with a VBIOS either, to some degree sure but not where it counts.

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

44 minutes ago, leadeater said:

But why? They literally replaced them all before full confirmation of the underlying issue was even identified. Soon as it was started to be reported every owner was immediately eligible for a replacement. Literally cannot ask for better than this.

 

I've seen some of them recieve the same 0.1 revision of the 3090 that failed on the evga forums. Of course having support that fast is great. But that support does not extend outside of the west unfortunately. 

 

Still I'd buy evga cards if I were in the US right now.

[Kisai]

48 minutes ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

 

I've seen some of them recieve the same 0.1 revision of the 3090 that failed on the evga forums. Of course having support that fast is great. But that support does not extend outside of the west unfortunately. 

 

Still I'd buy evga cards if I were in the US right now.

This is basically the point.

 

We know -NOW- about the problem, and this would only discourage me from buying the 3090, but at the point it was reported, I had written off the 30xx series from everyone other than the FE models. 

 

[Mark Kaine]

The sad part is nothing will come out of this, just like with NZXT "lit" cases… people  still buy NZXT left and right, despite the products being poor quality, and i think over a decade ongoing issues with "NZXT CAM".

People will keep buying Gigabyte (and Gigabyte knows)

 

[ravenshrike]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

despite the products being poor quality

But.. The problem is not the NZXT cases or AIOs. It's the other crap. Indeed, if the case in question had not come with a riser and you were expected to source your own there never would have been any recall issue. This was a case of a company stepping outside their wheelhouse and then acting like assholes when they got burned. 

[Icarus_Radio]

Gamers Nexus makes 6 videos on NZXT H1's riser. I am wondering how many videos will he make on Gigabyte's crappy PSU.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XIKOSrQdQ0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjUscSRLwks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnDWxiFvUtE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79ZMI6MDgmw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9PlibqsBWg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY4mBkB3CDw

[atxcyclist]

You'd think companies in the tech sector, and especially retail consumer products, would know that they cannot get away with such a blatant disregard for their customers. Also, companies should know not to bullshit Gamer's Nexus, Linus Media Group, JayzTwoCents, and others; Mountains of negative publicity is all they'll find.

[GDRRiley]

8 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

aorus monitors.

if they can't manage to slap their name on something someone else built I don't trust them
(monitors are 99% someone else)
now IDK who the OEM for these PSUs are

 

another brand, another one to add to the blacklist