Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Nothing they can't fix with a refund or a discount. It'll hurt but the vast majority of the users will be happy to continue to use what is a very high performance card for a pretty good price.

After all, what are they going to buy instead with their refund? There would have to be a card performing better for the same price in order to make a trade make sense and even then they'll be spending time ripping apart their pc's and travelling back-and-forth to stores or sending back units to online shops. Lots of trouble for little gain.

I'm happy that anandtech took the time to point out the issue but it isn't nearly as bad as it looks from a technical point of view, the discrepancy is only a major one if you notice it in an application that you run and in that case it might be worth the trouble but if you're happy then I don't see the point.

Imagine you bought a car that was advertised as having 7 cylinders and it turns out that you only have 6. That would be the nightmare of every car company but in the end the number of cylinders is less important than whether or not the car performs for its assigned duty or not.

Why would they give a refund or discount in the first place? "I would like to return my Haswell chip because it has come to my attention that some of the execution units can't execute all instructions."

I guess the problem is that they put the memory bandwidth into the official specs.

To make sure their customers are happy.

That's a good thing when you're selling products that people tend to replace every 2 to 3 years.

Yeah, but what else are their customers going to buy? AMD?

Sure. Some people might just get mad enough to do so.

The customers aren't actually going to exercise the refund; the point of offering it is just to prevent backlash.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html (scroll down to #7)

I don't see the relevance here, but that article was actually really interesting. Thanks for the link.

Or more. Serious gamers replace their GPU roughly every year.

Not just the memory bandwidth - the 970 has been revealed to have fewer ROPs and less cache than advertised.

When you sell a Haswell as having 4 cores and 8MB of cache, and when you purchase it you notice that it only has 3 cores and 6MB of cache, damn straight a refund is in order.

>Why would they give a refund or discount in the first place?

Because it will look better when they are investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority. Nvidia wants to frame this as an accidental non disclosure of a technical issue, they don't want you reporting this as fraudulent behavior. Everyone that bought a card, even if they are happy with it should file a complaint. You and I, as the consumer do not have the needed information to decide if we were intentionally or unintentionally deceived beyond Nvidias 'oops, sorry'. A proper investigation may go a long way to make sure we don't get an 'oops, sorry' on the next generation of products too.

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