To this day, Kyle & Chris have both been extremely active on theirs and other forums defending their position from people now questioning the review. I had decided to just bite my tongue and let the review fade. But it’s been more than a week of this, and if they’re going to keep restating and restating the opinion that torpedoed our review (and their own correction) it’s time our side was heard.
First, and most importantly, why I complained about the review at all: The MSI/ATI board performed well in this review. Its performance was, according to Chris “Extremely fast.†For MSI and ATI to be unjustly accused of the instability was premature and proved wrong, and that was my primary point to have corrected. To HardOCP’s credit they (technically) corrected it. However, their first line bold statement of “ATI Not the Problem†was pretty much nullified by Kyle’s restating and elaborating even more vehemently his opinion of the ATI chipset, based on some other review he’d done in the past. He said it “might be fine for email and Web surfing boxes, but it is not a good solution for gamers.†That this chipset actually performed very well in gaming in this review, which was the supposed point of their correction, just seemed to fuel Kyle’s hatred of it. Although the correction begins with “ATI Not the Problemâ€, by the end of the page most readers seem to be leaving with Kyle’s opinion that the ATI chipset is a problem.
The whole issue in this review is that the videocard developed some slight breakdown at HardOCP – after it passed our burn-in. It passed our 14 hour loop of 3DMark05 at 1600x1200 4x/8x in an 85F room, as well as the rest of our 3 day burn-in tests. When we received the FragBox back from HardOCP, 3DMark05 would BSOD with an “NV4DISP†error after 5 hours of looping at 1024 in a 74F room. The card was breaking down, but not showing any corruption or other obvious signs of failure. If it was a more pronounced error, we could’ve diagnosed it on the phone and just overnighted them a new one.
Kyle & Chris have made a big deal of the fact that our technical support suspected it was the motherboard/memory causing the issue, and that HardOCP called several times over a week and we couldn’t fix this over the phone. Since the graphics card seemed to be running fine during the review, and CPUs rarely go bad, the motherboard or its interaction with memory seemed to our technical support, and to Chris, to be the most likely culprit of the BF2 lockups. And we freely admit when this board first came out we needed to get some BIOS tweaks done to fix a memory timing issue with a specific game title. This BF2 lockup after hours of playing was acting similarly, so we kept an open mind. We were ALL proven wrong in suspecting the motherboard. How does our being mistaken in our suspicion in any way make HardOCP any less wrong themselves? They admitted they were wrong, but still use our tech support’s emails thinking it may be a motherboard issue as some sort of ‘defense’ in their forum posts. Huh?
HardOCP’s mistake was posting that it was a motherboard/chipset issue before the problem was actually diagnosed as a bad videocard. Had they even chalked that up to one flaky motherboard, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Instead, Kyle said it was the unstable nature of the ATI chipset. He went further in saying that it was a bad choice for gaming, and continually states on the forums it’s a “low end chipsetâ€.
