Best Nvidia board partner?

[Asy|um]

I've had a Gainward card for awhille now but lately it's been giving me some trouble. First a capacitor started leaking so I sent it to Gainward and they fixed it for me, but now the fan stopped working and the warranty ran out. I made a fan/heatsink for it out of some old parts I had laying around and it's working fine for now. Anyway I'm looking to upgrade it to a 6600GT as soon as it's available for AGP. The problem is I'm not sure I want a Gainward card again so I would like to hear some of your opinions on what you think the best Nvidia board partner is. So far I've looked at Chaintech, PNY, Gigabyte, and Leadtek.

[ChrisRay]

My favorite boards have always been Leadtek, and PNY, leadtek for their innovative cooling and board quality. PNY for being Nvidia biggest reference manufacturer aside of EVGA.

EVGA also makes very good reference boards.

[bahamut_2006]

Albatron's nVidia cards seem to do as well as their nForce mobos. Albatron is a newer company but it makes top notch hardware.

[gameman733]

just out of curiosity, what kind of card do you have? i had the "my fan stopped working" problem with my geforce 4 TI4200 GS. vbmenu_register("postmenu_799941", true);

[Asy|um]

My card is a geforce 4 ti4200 64mb Gainward "Golden Sample". The reason I got it is Gainward guarenteed I could overclock it and claimed they hand picked the best chips. It was also covered by a 3 year warranty.

So far the only 6600GT board I see with ram sinks and a decent looking fan is from Chaintech. It also says "1000/1200 MHz memory clock, 16.0/19.2 GB sec memory bandwidth" in their product description. Does this mean there are 2 versions they are making, one with faster ram? I was hoping for something that would overclock well or came overclocked. Will the other board partners still cover the card under warranty if it's overclocked?

[ChrisRay]

Well that bandwith would be correct if it were 128 bit bus. Which its not. The bandwith should be double that.

[Kane]

I'm using a Guillemot board. Only 256Mb vanilla 6800 there is.

[gameman733]

hmm ive got the same card except mines got 128 MB.... i tried e-mailing gainward about it and no repsonse... figures..

[GSDragoon]

I wouldn't say there's a "bad" manufacture. Fans can easily get dirty and break. Cleaning them out can help. But if your looking for a warranty, BFG cards are covered for life. Too bad I have it overclocked, softmodded and put on AS5. Completely voided mine, oh well.

Welcome back ChrisRay.

[Asy|um]

Originally Posted by ChrisRay

Well that bandwith would be correct if it were 128 bit bus. Which its not. The bandwith should be double that.

Actually the bus is 128 bit, Nvidia cut it to save production cost on the 6600 series. I'm guessing you misread and thought I was referring to a 6800GT. Anyway I still can't figure out what the Chaintech site is referring to, all the online retailers I looked at only have the card listed with standard ram speed/bandwith and I saw a couple complaints about the fan being rather loud I can't seem to find any info on what kind of warranty Chaintech gives and none of the others seem to be offering more then a year anyway except BFG wich isn't making 6600's yet. Maybe I'll just get a Gainward again the card didn't have any problems for allmost 3 years