Topic: BFG exits GPU market...for now... (Update - July 7, 2010)

[MysterD]

NEW - July 7, 2010:
Oh, this doesn't look good...BFG lets go of its PSU department...

OLD:
BFG is done w/ graphics cards...for now.

BFG Technologies today announced their exit from the graphics card category. The company will continue to sell their line of BFG Tech power supplies as well as their Deimos gaming notebooks and Phobos gaming systems.

"After eight years of providing innovative, high-quality graphics cards to the market, we regret to say that this category is no longer profitable for us, although we will continue to evaluate it going forward", said John Slevin, chairman of BFG Technologies. "We will continue to provide our award-winning power supplies and gaming systems, and are working on a few new products as well. I'd like to stress that we will continue to provide RMA support for our current graphics card warranty holders, as well as for all of our other products such as power supplies, PCs and notebooks."

[Pugnate]

That is so sad. I have good memories of my BFG 7800GTX, and I still have the BFG shirt that came with it.

The problem is that they were really screwed by Nvidia's recent problems. I guess all those rumors about Nvidia partners being put to the cleaners by the delay of the Fermi chip were true.

[scottws]

nVidia has had recent problems?  Man, I am so out of touch with the PC enthusiast market.

[Pugnate]

To keep a long story short... they were threatened by Intel's move towards GPCPU solutions where their CPUs were coming with GPU architecture; my laptop's core i5 processor has a graphics component. Plus Intel were talking about making a GPGPU (a GPU with some CPU handling campabilities).

So with the downwards spiral of PC gaming, Nvidia panicked a touch. They invested heavily in a GPGPU, codenamed Fermi, and that chip was delayed by nearly a year with Nvidia having nothing on the market and ATi selling their 5xxx cards like insane. Fermi finally came out a month ago (GTX 4 series), and was extremely power hungry (700 watts PSU required or something), and ran insanely hot. Plus the chip cost so much that Nvidia had to cut the profit margins of their partners.

This has resulted in companies like BFG left in strife.

XFX ditched Nvidia exclusivity and went to ATi when the first Fermi problems came to light.

[Cobra951]

That's awful.  I had no idea about all this myself.  I'm way out of touch.  So I guess if by some miracle I'm able to buy a gaming PC, I should really go for a recent ATi card.  Nvidia needs to get its act together.

700 watts!

[scottws]

Didn't Intel's GPCPU project end up getting canned?

I think the GPU market is funny.  It's so back and forth.  I remember when the Radeon 9700 and 9800 cards came out and just bitchslapped nVidia and they didn't have an answer for a long time.  But then people got tired of crappy ATi drivers and overheating issues and nVidia had the 8800 line, which bitchslapped ATi back.  Now nVidia's being slapped again.

Good stuff, bring on the competition.  But yeah not 700W.  None of that noise, please.

[Xessive]

I had a 500W PSU on my old system with the 8800GTS, everything is great and the world is dandy. When I was considering an upgrade to the 275GTX it said the minimum requirement was a 550W PSU, in which case I considered just getting a 600W, which I still thought was a bit much.

Btw, I was able to run an older Radeon X1650 which requires 400W on a 250W PSU (on my little Shuttle XPC). Not sure how it worked exactly but it's been running with it for two years now and no trouble.

[MysterD]

Oh, that doesn't look good...
Please say it ain't so...
 

[scottws]

BFD.