Update: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Settlement Claims Website Now Open
by Ryan Smith on September 12, 2016 9:30 AM EST
Update 09/12: Bringing this back up, over the weekend the website to submit settlement claims went up. Owners of GTX 970s who purchased the card between its launch and August 24th of this year can participate in the settlement in order to receive $30 per card. The settlement itself has not yet been approved by the courts, but is expected to be approved in December.
Interestingly, there is no damage cap in the settlement, so all participants will receive a fixed $30 per card regardless of the price paid or the number of claimants. Meanwhile the proposed attorney fees total $1.3 million.
Original: 07/29
Word comes from Top Class Actions (via The Tech Report) that NVIDIA will soon be settling a series of proposed class action lawsuits brought against the company regarding the GeForce GTX 970. Under the preliminary settlement, United States residents who purchased GeForce GTX 970 cards would be able to claim a $30 settlement in return for dropping further litigation against the company. With the GTX 970 having launched at $329, this amounts to a de facto 9% rebate on the card.
The class action suits in question were brought against the company almost immediately after NVIDIA made the important (and more than a bit painful) disclosure that the initially published specifications for the GTX 970 were wrong. Specifically, that the card had an unusual memory crossbar organization where one ROP/L2 partition was disabled, giving the card only 56 ROPs instead of 64. Furthermore, this meant that the last 512MB of the standard 4GB of VRAM could not be accessed in a contiguous manner, impacting how it could be used. To that end, as the Top Class Actions article notes, the $30 settlement “was calculated to represent a portion of the cost of the storage and performance capabilities the consumers thought they were obtaining in the purchase of the product.”
With that said, at this point the settlement itself has yet to be approved by the court, and signups are not yet available. Assuming it is approved, I’d expect that signups will be made available shortly thereafter.
Source: Top Class Actions (via The Tech Report)
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jas340 - Thursday, August 4, 2016 - link
GTX had the same issue back in it's day. It is in some of the old reviews. Stunk even more since the card most came with 2GB memory with only 1.5GB accessible at a useable speed. Nvidia has always been behind the curve when it came to memory. Thank goodness my 1070 comes with 8GB!jas340 - Thursday, August 4, 2016 - link
GTX 660CiccioB - Tuesday, September 13, 2016 - link
GTX 660Ti to be preciseShadowmaster625 - Monday, September 12, 2016 - link
Wait if 512MB out of 4GB is worth $30 then that means the entire 4GB must be worth $240!!! Simple math. So the remaining parts of the card, the gpu itself, the pcb, the fan, all the VRMs, caps, connectors, and shrouding, all that stuff must therefore only be worth $90. I love lawyer logic.rrinker - Monday, September 12, 2016 - link
I guess I am "entitled" to $30, but I'm not sure if I will bother - mainly because I think this is a load of BS. Wonder how much the lawyers get for every $30 claim filed? I've had no issues with my 970 and strange access to the last .5MB of RAM has not had any real performance impact - just check the benchmarks.ruthan - Monday, September 12, 2016 - link
I curious why anybody did same class action in whole eu, im sure that i would be success too.. im envy to all "american fattened pigs" they have always the best prices, sales, debates etc..jsntech - Monday, September 12, 2016 - link
I got my Zotac GTX 970 from Amazon within the affected time period. The newly-linked web site (thanks, Ryan) seems to require a claim number in order to file the claim online, but offers no hint as to where that claim number should come from (Amazon? Zotac? Nvidia?). I'd rather not have to print and snail-mail a silly paper claim form...Icehawk - Monday, September 12, 2016 - link
Made my claim, might as well get $30 for "free"AnnonymousCoward - Monday, September 12, 2016 - link
I'm gonna not claim my $30, because this lawsuit is stupid.3ogdy - Monday, September 12, 2016 - link
I hope they pay through the nose for it.Oh, and yeah, AMD should face some lawsuits regarding Bulldozer too. It can't possibly be that you're marketing an 8-core CPU that can only use 4 cores properly at a given time (video rendering is slower on 8 cores than it is on 4 exactly because a core in each module has to wait for the one next to it to do its work). Should've marketed the CPUs as quads + (insert marketing name) from the beginning.