Why are PNY cards so much cheaper? Are they worth it?

[Princess Luna]

I don't know about the foreigner market on this regard, here in Brazil we don't have Amazon, eBay, Newegg etc all those commonly known retailers by most of you, we have local ones; Kabum, Pichau, Mercado Libre and so on.

 

Now going through pricing on those I have realized that more often than not you find PNY GTX 1080 Ti cards going for about if not even cheaper than "high end" aftermarket GTX 1080's such as the ROG Strix, EVGA FTW and so on.

 

For instance:

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

So for someone who wants purely performance, the most possible frames per second on highest possible settings regardless of cooler noise or aesthetics/RGB etc etc raw performance only, the PNY is obviously the best choice no? Or is there a catch in here? What am I not following?

 

Is PNY like the PowerColor of nVidia and should be avoided regardless?

[Jurrunio]

PNY should be a nice brand. It's one of the first to make custom graphics cards out of reference designs. The reason why it's not as famous as brands like Asus is because it started out as a memory/storage producer and stayed within that market for quite some time. The name is also related to their memory business.

[Herman Mcpootis]

we have a similar situation as yours, our local shops+distributors sell Palit and Zotac GPUs much lower than asus/MSI/gigabyte ones too(with some exceptions) 

[Morgan MLGman]

PNY/Palit/Gainward etc are just lower-tier brands selling GPUs that are usually inferior to their MSI/EVGA counterparts, I personally would prefer to gather a bit more money and buy a better model. They most likely have worse cooling (hotter, louder, made from cheaper materials) and worse customer service as they're usually also smaller companies.

 

BUT, if you're on a very tight budget, I'd say go for it (just not the blower-style though, they all suck regardless of the manufacturer )

[Princess Luna]

2 minutes ago, herman mcpootis said:

Zotac

I like Zotac, I had a GTX 560ti for several years from them that always worked flawlessly, even managed to re-sell it after years of usage and from what I know it keeps strong by today, but I have never touch a PNY Card before, in fact I never touched any thing from PNY at all, at these prices it feels a no brainer especially to me who never cared about aesthetics or noise but I didn't want a card that could potentially perform worse than a FE... even though even FE cards the PNY ones are considerable cheaper than MSi/EVGA ones.

[Princess Luna]

Just now, Morgan MLGman said:

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The thing is Morgan we're not talking about a small price difference, it is a huge difference worth of a couple hundred dollars, as you can a 1080ti PNY is going for already cheaper than a "great" aftermarket 1080, if we were going to consider the same ROG Strix 1080ti instead than the price difference is huge, like enough to get a 16gbs DDR4 ram kit difference at least.

 

I already said that noise doesn't matter I was never a freak about it besides the only time the card will be noisy is during gameplay which is when either the TV has a loud volume or I have a headset on an ways, looks also doesn't matter as I only care how good my games look on screen and to the metal under my desk, I just want the card not to throttle or limit the GPU in any way...

[Tiwaz]

they are good, they probably have not as high overclocking headroom in terms of power limit and cooling, if you arent a heavy overclocker and dont care about nosie too much, go for it

[raphidy]

I think the difference is in the cooler and design. Dell use PNY branded graphics card in their OEM solution. Double check which has the better warranty, that can be a huge deal after purchase.

[Brett_Bst]

I would say see if there are any reviews online for the pny cards. I have looked at some reviews on the 1080ti by pny and they seem good, the internal parts used might only affect the amount it can be overclocked so as long as it has a warrentry I would probley by one

[Morgan MLGman]

20 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

The thing is Morgan we're not talking about a small price difference, it is a huge difference worth of a couple hundred dollars, as you can a 1080ti PNY is going for already cheaper than a "great" aftermarket 1080, if we were going to consider the same ROG Strix 1080ti instead than the price difference is huge, like enough to get a 16gbs DDR4 ram kit difference at least.

 

I already said that noise doesn't matter I was never a freak about it besides the only time the card will be noisy is during gameplay which is when either the TV has a loud volume or I have a headset on an ways, looks also doesn't matter as I only care how good my games look on screen and to the metal under my desk, I just want the card not to throttle or limit the GPU in any way...

If the difference is significant then sure, it's definitely worth it I suggest you look for reviews of the specific card you want to buy and choose the one with the best cooler & warranty period. I personally had a Palit GTX 260 reference (which started artifacting) and it was loud, but that was to be expected from a blower-style design, and a Gainward GTX 660 2GB Golden Sample which was actually pretty good, quiet and cool despite having only one fan on it Palit and Gainward are the same company from what I've read some time ago.

[Sakkura]

44 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

I don't know about the foreigner market on this regard, here in Brazil we don't have Amazon, eBay, Newegg etc all those commonly known retailers by most of you, we have local ones; Kabum, Pichau, Mercado Libre and so on.

 

Now going through pricing on those I have realized that more often than not you find PNY GTX 1080 Ti cards going for about if not even cheaper than "high end" aftermarket GTX 1080's such as the ROG Strix, EVGA FTW and so on.

 

For instance:

  Reveal hidden contents

  Reveal hidden contents

 

So for someone who wants purely performance, the most possible frames per second on highest possible settings regardless of cooler noise or aesthetics/RGB etc etc raw performance only, the PNY is obviously the best choice no? Or is there a catch in here? What am I not following?

 

Is PNY like the PowerColor of nVidia and should be avoided regardless?

In your example, the PNY card has a blower cooler and the Asus card has a cooler with 3 axial fans. The latter should run much cooler and quieter, so that's where the money goes.

 

But if you compare a PNY card with a blower cooler to an Asus (or MSI, or EVGA, or Gigabyte etc) card with a blower cooler, they'll be on par.

23 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

PNY/Palit/Gainward etc are just lower-tier brands selling GPUs that are usually inferior to their MSI/EVGA counterparts, I personally would prefer to gather a bit more money and buy a better model. They most likely have worse cooling (hotter, louder, made from cheaper materials) and worse customer service as they're usually also smaller companies.

 

BUT, if you're on a very tight budget, I'd say go for it (just not the blower-style though, they all suck regardless of the manufacturer )

This is nonsense. They are not lower tier brands and are not inferior. EVGA are the ones with the burning VRMs, remember.

[Morgan MLGman]

Just now, Sakkura said:

This is nonsense. They are not lower tier brands and are not inferior. EVGA are the ones with the burning VRMs, remember.

They are usually the cheaper brands and their products are of lower quality in general. I owned Palit, Gainward, MSI, Sapphire and Gigabyte GPUs and I'm saying that from my first-hand experience.

 

From what I know, PNY should be better than those two I mentioned.

[Princess Luna]

2 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

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Well from what I have been seen on my searching PNY is the biggest Quadro cards including the higher end M5000~M6000 supplier in Brazil... that must count for something

[Morgan MLGman]

Just now, Princess Cadence said:

Well from what I have been seen on my searching PNY is the biggest Quadro cards including the higher end M5000~M6000 supplier in Brazil... that must count for something

For what it's worth, it's an American company contrary to Palit/Gainward which are Chinese

[Bcat00]

PNY is a sub company of palit/gainward so they don't focus their business in america.

 

if a company dumps all their resources in asia then most often their subs will do price cuts to bring more customers.

 

and PNY is fine but don't expect anything to blow your mind.

 

[TheMcSame]

From what I remember about looking into PNY, they're one of the few brands who are actually tasked with building Nvidia's Quadro cards. If Nvidia trusts them with that, I don't see a reason to write off PNY without looking at their cards first.

Just check reviews of the cards, see how the cooling performance fares against other cards. As long as you're not looking to push every last MHz out of a chip (if you were trying to do that then I don't see why you'd be jumping on a blower cooler unless your running a custom loop), I can't imagine that PNY's cards would be all that much different from the equivalent offerings from Asus, MSI or EVGA.

 

[Biggerboot]

PNY models tend to be the least flashy, and they don't spend as much on marketing their product to gamers these days.  But they're just as reliable as any of 'em.

I remember back when PNY was one of the few reputable high end card makers.