my (aweful) PNY experience

This Post goes way beyond the typical "I bought a
ASUS/Abit/MSI motherboard. It didn't work right, so never by
an ASUS/Abit/MSI motherboard!"

PNYs idea of "warranty" is to send you a
somebody elses reject. They even slap a "refurbished" sticker on
the back, and it is one of those that voids the so called "warranty" if
you remove it. Read on for the details:

I got a 6800u, and had to send it back to PNY cause lockups
in Doom3 were constant. Boy, what a mistake! (sending the card back,
that is)
This replacement CANNOT be clock adjusted AT ALL. With coolbits, I can
move the slider, but doing so is pointless cause I get an error message and
the adjustments won't stick. It always reverts back to "default"
which is 425/400 3D/2D. So what you say? Turns out, the prob all
along is that with this particular brand of card, the D3 lockups are
caused by different clock values for 2D/3D. So in effect,
PNY booby trapped the card by permanently fixing the clocks to
values that cause the computer to crash. It was deliberate!
And this has nothing to do with the AC characteristics of the card
it will do 446 Mhz core. But they've done something to
defeat coolbits, so you can't adjust the 2D/3D speed to make them the
same. So my workaround was to use a BIOS editor to set the 2D/3D to the
same value. This worked......for about 4 hours. Suddenly, I'm getting
lockups and weird corruption during the windows splash screen. Pop in
an EVGA card, no problem, so it was the card itself.
The kicker is that the original card worked just fine. About 4 days
AFTER I returned my perfectly good card, I found that it was a
wrong setting problem,
not a bad card. My original did 446/1114 core/mem, and worked perfectly.
I traded it for "the card from hell" cause I mis diagnosed the problem.



Bottom line is this:
PNY gets in some number of problem cards over time, and all they do
is shuffle them around and randomly send them back to unhappy customers.
Joe gets Bills bad card, Bill gets Sams bad card, Sam gets Toms bad
card, etc. No wonder they offer a "lifetime warranty", it doesn't cost
them anything.
I doubt if they do anything in terms of debug. So be advised if you
have thoughts of sending a card back to PNY....you won't get
a new card replacement, you'll get somebody elses reject.

Jeff B