BFGTech Exits Graphics

I am sorry to see BFG quit this space but before we talk about what angels they were. What about those of us that got totally screwed by this decision. I upgraded all my systems and bought 4 BFG cards since December 09. I was really happy about the lifetime warranty, their great reputation for customer service, etc. I was hoping to maybe trade one card up for their Fermi or a better card before the 100 day trade up ended. This is where it all goes sour. They announced Fermi cards, they promised customers they would have them as trade up... they did not deliver on either. Fair enough. Nvidia screwed their partners. Well, even after the Fermi card was out the internal trade up prices were crazy. Paying more than a Fermi for a gtx 280 or gtx 285. Great! I want to pay more $$$ to trade up to a card that is inferior to the newer Fermi. Trade up to a gts 250 for $169??? I bought a EVGA Fermi instead and wish I had given all of my business to them instead of BFG now. I have not had any problems with any of my 4 BFG cards. I hope that continues because my lifetime warranty looks less shiny now.

I am really sorry that BFG could not make it in this space. I am glad they are going to try to support the existing graphics adapter customers. We shall see how that works out. I am not optimistic... if they go out of business completely which seems likely now than we are completely screwed for giving them our business.
 
RIP, BFG. I have fond memories of your 6800 GT card.

I don't see them surviving on PSU's and Phobos PC's for too long, sadly.
 
The iTod said:
I am sorry to see BFG quit this space but before we talk about what angels they were. What about those of us that got totally screwed by this decision. I upgraded all my systems and bought 4 BFG cards since December 09. I was really happy about the lifetime warranty, their great reputation for customer service, etc. I was hoping to maybe trade one card up for their Fermi or a better card before the 100 day trade up ended. This is where it all goes sour. They announced Fermi cards, they promised customers they would have them as trade up... they did not deliver on either. Fair enough. Nvidia screwed their partners. Well, even after the Fermi card was out the internal trade up prices were crazy. Paying more than a Fermi for a gtx 280 or gtx 285. Great! I want to pay more $$$ to trade up to a card that is inferior to the newer Fermi. Trade up to a gts 250 for $169??? I bought a EVGA Fermi instead and wish I had given all of my business to them instead of BFG now. I have not had any problems with any of my 4 BFG cards. I hope that continues because my lifetime warranty looks less shiny now.

I am really sorry that BFG could not make it in this space. I am glad they are going to try to support the existing graphics adapter customers. We shall see how that works out. I am not optimistic... if they go out of business completely which seems likely now than we are completely screwed for giving them our business.
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so wait you are complaining cause fermi was 6 months late to market and the company didn't take it in the ass to offer you a fermi upgrade taking your old cards and cash to make it happen...

dude good people are loosing jobs. and you are bitching about about the 4 cards you wont be able to trade for 4 fermi's you need a serious reality check

bfg is a good company and right now they are trying to stay afloat in some very tough economic times
 
oh SNAP, I never ownd a BFG product but how can you deny a company that is named BFG???

sorry to see ya go. hopefully you will come back with the ATI 6k series :D
 
I have personally never owned a BFG product, but I have heard nothing but praise for them. You hate to see a good company like this have to step down from something that they left better than when they found it.
 
Every nvidia graphics card I've bought since an FX5200 has been a BFG. I love that company....

This makes me very sad. :(
 
So funny to read the negatives on cards, almost all evga, pny, bfg, zotac, galaxy etc etc etc reference cards come from the same assebmly line... the companies just apply a sticker and back it with a warranty. some have modified bios' for OC editions. but the bad bfg card you got, could have been a zotac, evga etc if that box went to a different company.

regardless i think bfg even had a Canadian address for RMA's which was awsome...I hope they come back to graphics market and carry ATI...xfx is nice but ATI needs another vendor with good warranty, persoanlly id like to see one who offers better out of the box air cooling (partener with artic cooling or thermalright etc)
 
BFG is the only company I can remember calling after hours on a weekend that had a american answering the phone. Thats reason enough to be sad they are gone.
 
Wow this is a sad day, Really did not see this with the solid video cards they made been buying them since they came out..
 
I have only used BFG GPU's for years and agree this is indeed a sad day for all enthusiasts everywhere.

BFG GPU R.I.P :(
 
Wow, they were always a videocard vendor I looked towards when making a new purchase
 
maxius said:
so wait you are complaining cause fermi was 6 months late to market and the company didn't take it in the ass to offer you a fermi upgrade taking your old cards and cash to make it happen...

dude good people are loosing jobs. and you are bitching about about the 4 cards you wont be able to trade for 4 fermi's you need a serious reality check

bfg is a good company and right now they are trying to stay afloat in some very tough economic times
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No I am complaining because BFG's upgrade path was a fail, who knows what their lifetime support will be now and they LIED to customers about doing a fermi card and having it as an upgrade option. It sucks they are going under and all but it doesn't give them the right to mislead customers. I could have easily gone with EVGA for all my cards but I heard all these great things about BFG and liked my first card from them. It's not my fault their business failed. I gave them ALL my business.
 
Trade Up was one of the perks provided by registration. Unfortunately, without a supply of new video cards, we are unable to continue supporting that program. Our efforts will instead be focused on providing warranty support.
 
Putz said:
So funny to read the negatives on cards, almost all evga, pny, bfg, zotac, galaxy etc etc etc reference cards come from the same assebmly line... the companies just apply a sticker and back it with a warranty. some have modified bios' for OC editions. but the bad bfg card you got, could have been a zotac, evga etc if that box went to a different company.
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Yea, that's what I was thinking too.. people rave about brand X nvidia card when pretty much all the brand did was put their own sticker on something that someone else made for all the resellers of nVidia cards.

What makes a evga, bfg, or xfx card different besides the sticker and the box?
 
Met-AL said:
What makes a evga, bfg, or xfx card different besides the sticker and the box?
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With the NVTTM program going away, or at least its previous incarnation, fewer cards will be the "same" after launch. As we showed you with Galaxy, it is a company designing and producing its own video cards. EVGA will have to farm production out to a number of companies to build cards for it. The landscape is changing.
 
Their fermi cards are still listed on the site with graphics and pictures of the promotional prototypes. Grab them if you want to save them for posterity.
http://www.bfgtech.com/bfgrgtx4801534e.aspx

As for what happened to BFG, here are my thoughts. They had a great run with Nvidia from the 66/6800 series all the way to the 9800 series with their best days during the 8800 era when those cards ruled the day. Nvidia & their AIBs was churning them out at great profitability and in a time of great demand at the last real jump in the computer gaming technology cycle (back in the days when you still needed to upgrade every 6 months to play the latest and greatest). ATI were lost in mediocrity and Nvidia cards were the only name in the game. Plus, demand was high to the amazing economy at the time. Now the recession has hit everyone hard. Fermi could not have been timed worse for some AIBs.

For BFG in the past year, they've been without a flagship card for 6-8 months severely cutting down their revenue stream while Nvidia was hold back fermi Fermi and also holding their AIBs hostage with demands of how much older tier products and old stock they had to purchase first before receiving any allotment for Fermi. XFX/Pine Group had the clout to balk at this and decline even carrying Fermi and thus avoiding that stipulation. BFG, being a small American vendor with no manufacturing capabilites, basically only rebadging various Taiwanese products and building their name on customer support had no product to sell for months and were prevented from even getting stock of a new flagship card because of stipulations for buying other cards as a requirement severely cutting into profitability and even making them lose money.

I once owned a BFG 8800GT and it was just a reference card probably made by Flextronics but it was decent for what it was and the lifetime warranty helped me to sell it because I don't think BFG required card registration back in those days (correct me if I am wrong) because the guy I sold it to got the warranty somehow. It was very plain and included no freebies. I even had to go buy an extra 6-pin PCI-E power adapter. BFG never had the big presence here in Canada like it did in the states. I understand their CS was probably the best in the business for a time.
 
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Sad, sad, day. BFG has been a 'staple' vid card in many of my builds. Their "ThermoIntelligence" designs were particularly noteworthy! My son's BFG 8800 GT OCX is still kickin arse and taking names after two years of hard use. And BFG's rep, Jeff Kozlowski, was always available on the [H]OCP forums to help end users. Just an outstanding company that set the standard for service. We will sorely miss BFG's presence in the video card arena!
 
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Someone should tell the BFG webmaster to take down the page with the GeForce 400 cards... I don't believe those are coming any time soon... or EVER.

:(
 
Wind said:
Shame, but if you check out the thread in the nvidia subsection there are quite the horror stories going around now regarding RMA, so I am taking the comments regarding that area continuing with a grain of salt as it were. I am on almost week two now of awaiting for my 280GTX RMA to be shipped to me finally, there are other users reporting a month timeframe to and still no movement on their RMAs. This is completely unacceptable and frankly I will not purchase anything from them after this RMA has completed if it ever does.
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Those threads, IIRC were about BFG powersupplies as well. At least the BFG rep seems to be open and communicable here on the forums.
 
Perhaps they could raffle a handful of those 400 series cards out to friendly people who posted here:D
 
RangerXML said:
Perhaps they could raffle a handful of those 400 series cards out to friendly people who posted here:D
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I doubt they have any to give away. They probably only have promotional pictures and maybe some stickers produced. I don't think Nvidia alloted them any chips at all.

The timing of Fermi being 6-8 months late, the buying old stock/lower tier parts extortion AIBs had to go through to get Fermi allotments, the recession, and lack of demand (due to economy and also the state of the computer gaming industry and the lack of urgent update cycle) are all culprits in this. Also we've had a rash of 8800 series deaths and RMAs from pretty much every single vendor in the past year as they neared the 3 year lifetime many of these things seemed to have before dying slowly. I'm guessing all those lifetime warranties chewed into them as well. Lifetime warranties for videocards which probably get RMA'd more than any other component may have been severely unprofitable for such a small fish and they decided to get out of the graphics card business. They may have been able to remain in the business if they had been able to get on the ATI bandwagon or adjusted their warranty policies but I doubt that would have flown well with their customer base as their warranty and service is what they used to differentiate themselves from the cheaper, often Far East based card companies.
 
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We are very lucky to have a few companies still offering lifetime warranties on graphics cards. I suspect they are very unprofitable. I wouldn't be surprised to see the industry turn away from these and back away and have fewer and fewer lifetime warranties except on high priced SKUs that have this cost built in. Even EVGA is sneaking in SKUs that are only 2-year warranty nowadays. I remember HeatlessSun bought some EVGA GTX 480s and discovered they only had 2-year warranties but there was no price difference and you would never know from a glance you weren't getting lifetime warranty. XFX has some models that don't have their double lifetime warranty as well although these are usually lower tier models.

AFAIK, there are no vendors outside of North America that offer lifetime warranties at all. I wonder which was the first company to offer this?

Even EVGA's step up program is a very lucky thing for people to have but I have a suspicion that the reason the step up program exists is to provide a stream of old card stock to ship out for RMAs!
 
Spare-Flair said:
We are very lucky to have a few companies still offering lifetime warranties on graphics cards. I suspect they are very unprofitable. I wouldn't be surprised to see the industry turn away from these and back away and have fewer and fewer lifetime warranties except on high priced SKUs that have this cost built in. Even EVGA is sneaking in SKUs that are only 2-year warranty nowadays. I remember HeatlessSun bought some EVGA GTX 480s and discovered they only had 2-year warranties but there was no price difference and you would never know from a glance you weren't getting lifetime warranty. XFX has some models that don't have their double lifetime warranty as well although these are usually lower tier models.

AFAIK, there are no vendors outside of North America that offer lifetime warranties at all. I wonder which was the first company to offer this?

Even EVGA's step up program is a very lucky thing for people to have but I have a suspicion that the reason the step up program exists is to provide a stream of old card stock to ship out for RMAs!
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Just for the record the EU does not allow "Lifetime" warranties.
 
They did say they might come back if they find it proffitable so keep your fingers crossed but I'm honestly bummed out as BFG is my #1 choice for Nvidia cards followed by XFX then MSI then eVga :( XFX is now my #1 I guess and eVga made it back into my top 3 =.=
 
I had several BFG cards. I preferred them based on one issue I had w/ a card. They resolved it in a week! Amazing CS! I currently have the eVga 470, and only got it because the BFG brand was not available when I purchased it. Sad to see them go :(
 
Spare-Flair said:
I have worked in PLM and engineering for companies that have produced very successful routers and firewalls and anyone that is designing stuff that fails regularly before 10 years should really not be in business. Any decent pcb and chip designs should easily last 5-8 years of constant use with over 10 years being quite common. I just upgraded my 6 year old Asus socket 939 MB from a san diego single-core cpu to a dual-core toledo and upgraded the 4 year old gigabyte 8600GT video card to a BFG 250GTS and it is going great. All of those components still work and I sold the san diego cpu on ebay and kept the 8600GT as a spare. I just upgraded my parents 10-year old Pentium 3. It was slow as hell but still working.

I am not saying that the engineering is not sub-par on some of these components... just saying it should not be.
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Insomniak said:
Just for the record the EU does not allow "Lifetime" warranties.
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That's interesting, I was not aware of that. I would have thought the EU would have been progressive on liberal consumer practices like that. Do you know why this is the case?
 
The iTod said:
I have worked in PLM and engineering for companies that have produced very successful routers and firewalls and anyone that is designing stuff that fails regularly before 10 years should really not be in business. Any decent pcb and chip designs should easily last 5-8 years of constant use with over 10 years being quite common. I just upgraded my 6 year old Asus socket 939 MB from a san diego single-core cpu to a dual-core toledo and upgraded the 4 year old gigabyte 8600GT video card to a BFG 250GTS and it is going great. All of those components still work and I sold the san diego cpu on ebay and kept the 8600GT as a spare. I just upgraded my parents 10-year old Pentium 3. It was slow as hell but still working.

I am not saying that the engineering is not sub-par on some of these components... just saying it should not be.
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I think that videocards are very different from commonplace low-power, low-stress devices or other equiment designed for enterprise or industrial uses. Videocards are a low margin product that often are designed to operate at the very edges of thermal reliability.

As far as engineers for big companies designing things that don't last 10 years? Look at Microsoft and the Xbox 360, many of which didn't even last a single year. A lot of the problems in the industry can be traced back to environmental regulations for lead-free solder as companies have been slow to adapt to using it properly.
 
Spare-Flair said:
That's interesting, I was not aware of that. I would have thought the EU would have been progressive on liberal consumer practices like that. Do you know why this is the case?
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Also, the EU does not allow warranties that are shorter than two years on the significant components. This means that a given component sold in the EU can't be warrantied for only one year; it must be warrantied for a minimum of two years.

But I do understand the EU banning so-called "lifetime" warranties: The definition of "lifetime" is too ambiguous to EU officials. EU warranty law requires that products have a finite warranty period - and for at least two years.
 
That's what I've heard as well, and from what I've seen when speccing out stuff for my European acquaintances, they get a 10 year warranty as a substitute which isn't bad, unless you buy XFX in which you get 2 years instead of double lifetime in NA.
 
Falling Anvil said:
That's what I've heard as well, and from what I've seen when speccing out stuff for my European acquaintances, they get a 10 year warranty as a substitute which isn't bad, unless you buy XFX in which you get 2 years instead of double lifetime in NA.
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Yes, EVGA gives 10 years warranties in Europe which is effectively probably double the lifetime of the usefulness of a high end videocard.

XFX only gives 1 year warranties in the UK as far as I know!
 
Man that sucks to hear :(, been using BFG cards for a long time for friends and my personal machines and have always been impressed with them. Still have a BFG 6800GT OC AGP card I bought new that is still rockin in my old Socket 754 system. Too bad they couldn't go with team red and stay around!
 
Met-AL said:
What makes a evga, bfg, or xfx card different besides the sticker and the box?
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Yah, most people realize the cards are the same, its the support you get afterwords that counts. I've had great support with both evga and BFG, I just bought my first XFX card last year and haven't had any issues with that. I've had horrible experiences with PNY and Visiontek and refuse to buy a card that isn't from one of the three with actual American support.

I'm really sad to see BFG exit, I've been buying their cards since the 7800 series. My two most recent card purchases were both BFGs. Good luck in the future guys! I'll still be buying your power supplies as well.
 
Spare-Flair said:
I think that videocards are very different from commonplace low-power, low-stress devices or other equiment designed for enterprise or industrial uses. Videocards are a low margin product that often are designed to operate at the very edges of thermal reliability.

As far as engineers for big companies designing things that don't last 10 years? Look at Microsoft and the Xbox 360, many of which didn't even last a single year. A lot of the problems in the industry can be traced back to environmental regulations for lead-free solder as companies have been slow to adapt to using it properly.
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Don't make excuses for them. This is just bad engineering and product management. Every one of these products has power and thermal goals and limits. There are lots of video cards that last a long time. I have seen lots of really good PCB and chip designers who always do designs that work great and have few problems and I have seen really bad designers that make linecards that actually start smoking or flame under normal use. Some guys/design teams/companies know what they are doing and take pride in their work and others don't seem to know how to do good work or care to do good work. Sometimes the business guys override the engineering decisions too much. Good companies get this right most of the time. It is sad if companies are actively designing a product to only last 3 years or less on average.

I have heard that Samsung is taking major shortcuts on their TVs with cheap chinese capacitors and otherwise fine TVs are having their power circuitry fail after a year or so. All that needs to be done to repair is replace the capacitors with quality ones but very few people are capable of doing that and good luck getting it repaired inexpensively out of warranty (which is probably 1 year). <SIGH>
 
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