Nobody said it was easy to design hardware. I give them credit for what they do, but I hold it against them that they cut corners. As for your motherboard, it's possible you just had a defective model, or the quality on that specific model wasn't exactly up to par. In any case, I still hold my opinion, be it graphics cards, motherboards, or anything else.
No, it wasn't a defective model, it was just a low end board that used a 3 phase PWM that was easily overloaded. However, the 3 phase PWM design is common, especially on pre-builts, and it just doesn't hold up. If the caps don't pop(which isn't like on my board since they are solid caps), then the mosfets burn up and pop.
Well, perhaps they should start voiding warranties for the few people that run their cards out of spec instead of throttling it for everyone. The GTX580 suffers in Furmark even at stock clocks.
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense though when you think about it. The only people that that are affected by the throttle are those running furmark. It isn't throttling for everyone, because the only people running furmark are the ones overclocking and overvolting. I mean, how many normal users that never overclock do you know that run furmark just for the fuck of it?
My point is that Furmark shouldn't kill cards. Designing a high power video card with the thought of "oh well, anyone who buys this will probably only run Solitare on it anyway so I don't need to design good power circuitry" is pretty inane as well. As for your car analogy, yes, if I want to blow up a car by doing stupid shit to it I should be able to; however, I don't agree that running Furmark on a graphics card is akin to flooring a car in neutral. Furmark is a good benchmarking tool and a good tool to test for stability (OCCT is great for this as well). I'm not very keen on cars, but I don't think people "benchmark" their cars or check for reliability by flooring it in neutral.
And my point is that it doesn't kill cards when they are run at stock speeds, what they were designed for, even if you disable the throttle. Hell, the limit is 300w, that is what the limitter is designed to keep the card under, and with the limitter disabled a stock GTX580 only hits a maximum of 305w with furmark. That 5w ain't going to kill the card, as I said, the limitter isn't there to save stock cards it is there to save overvolted/overclocked cards. You can run the card all day long with the limitter disabled at stock settings and the card ain't going to die.
It came down to nVidia and manufacturers that didn't want to keep replacing cards that overclocker novices killed, so it was either set up something that limitted the current so idiots couldn't kill the card, or void the warranties of anyone that overclocked. Personally, I'll take the limitter and keep my warranty.
And while furmark might be a decent benchmark(I won't say good), there are plenty of better benchmarks out there, and I don't think the 60 second benchmark is what nVidia/AMD was worried about. This would be like a proper dyno run with a car.
However, leaving furmark running 24 hours, which
is what nVidia/AMD was worried about. And there are idiots that will stand on the gas in a car until the motor blows, just like there are idiots that will let furmark sit for 24 hours. Hell, if you don't know what you are doing you can blow an engine on a dyno run if you let it rev too high and don't shut it down, I've seen it happen.
I would disagree that furmark is a good stability tester, there are far better ones out there, particularly ones that actually look for errors and don't just overload the card and hope it crashes(which is often doesn't despite the card being unstable).
If they're not popping under stock settings then why even design this feature in the first place? Tweakers such as ourselves ought to know that there's a risk of blowing stuff up when increasing the voltage. As I said before, instead of retarding the cards to protect from cards being run out of spec, maybe they should just stop accepting RMA requests from people that run their cards as such.
I've already explained this. Tweakers like us also know how to disable the protection. The protection is there for people that don't know what they are doing beyond installing Precision/Afterburner, and they see that litle voltage slider and jack it all the way up because they can.
And there is no way for the manufacturers to stop accepting RMAs from people that overclock/overvolt because there is no real way to know. They could design a system that sits on the card and monitors the clock speeds, and if the clock speeds are changed it voids the warranty, but that is probably more complicated and expensive than a current limitter. However, as I've said, the only other option was to implement the limitter which allows the customer to overclock and still keep the warranty.
I don't see why you would favor no overclocking or no warranty over a limitter that only affects 1 program(and programs based off it) that still allows us to overclock and keep our warranties. I don't see how that makes any sense at all.
