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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Eidigean - Monday, August 1, 2016 - link
Cute. I wrote that I still have a 580. Buying a 1080 when they're back in stock.I make 6 figures, own a half-million dollar house, have a wife and kid, and I'm only in my thirties. How's that for elitism? You must be one of those that believes you're entitled to a supercomputer on a cheap. STFU.
BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
In your response, you attempted to weave in your social status and family situation as brag-worthy. Do you really not have any ability to see yourself from outside your own box?Eidigean - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
Your definition of "social elite" is perplexing; as you've stated that owning a pair of Titans makes one "social". No. Going out, meeting people in person, making a family, THAT is being "social".BTW, I didn't attempt, I SUCCEEDED at making my situation brag-worthy. Time to get away from the computer, I've got a life worth living.
doggface - Monday, September 12, 2016 - link
Oh dear. We've got a live one here. Quick, give him a trophy it might distract him long enough, so that we might have an interesting conversation about interesting things.. Like video cards, or how amazing Eidigean is with his stuff and things.tamalero - Thursday, August 4, 2016 - link
WATCH OUT GUYS, WE GOT A BADASS OVER HERE!!!JoeyJoJo123 - Monday, September 12, 2016 - link
I don't think you're quite as successful and/or happy as you purportedly say you are.I'd believe that if you were as successful and happy with your life, I don't think you'd be flaunting that to other people online. There's going to be at least one person better off than you are, and at least one person worse off than you are. If I found a $5 bill today, I wouldn't flaunt about it online, as chances are, there's someone who found a $10 or $20 bill today. If I found $20, then there's someone who found a $50 or $100.
I guarantee you there's someone online making 7 figures, owns a multi-million dollar house, and has potentially multiples wives and children, and may only be in their twenties.
bji - Monday, September 12, 2016 - link
The thing is though, he doesn't need to care whether or not there are people better off than he is for the purposes of his bragging. He only needs to believe that the people he is bragging to are worse off than he is, for him to believe that is bragging will have the intended effect.Apparently he does believe that the other people reading this thread will think that earning 6 figures in your 30's is brag-worthy. Which is kind of cute in its own way I suppose.
AnnonymousCoward - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
>For me, it's a fully enabled product or bust.Uhh, why?
If you use a recent Intel CPU, you're not using a "fully enabled product" because the iGPU is there in silicon and not being used!
Eidigean - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
I actually have a SandyBridge-E without an iGPU.The reason is that I want a chip that's free of defects. For instance, the GTX 1070 is a defective 1080 that is partially disabled. To entice folks to buy the defective chip, NVIDIA sells it at a discount, and use cheaper, less performant RAM to lower the price further; so that they can get a return on their money.
Back to your CPU analogy, any Skylake CPU that's slower than an i7-6700 @ 4.0 GHz is a chip that failed to meet Quality Control standards. It may function at slower speeds, perhaps at a higher voltage, but only because the tolerances during manufacturing were out of spec. If the chip cannot reliably support hyper threading, then the i7 is sold as an i5. All defects that I try to avoid.
Memory chips work the same way. Take DDR3 for instance. One can find chips that work at 1.5 volts and some that only work at 1.65 volts. Both may have the same CAS latency timings, and are the same design, but the 1.65v chips required that extra push to function within spec. They'll run hotter, and burn out sooner, and so are sold at a lower price. The 1.5v chips sold at a premium because they were defect free.
AnnonymousCoward - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
Why are you so hung up on the notion of "defect free"? What damn bit of difference would it make if the GTX1070 had 1920 physical processors, versus 2560 where 1920 are active??? You would never know the difference!You probably don't realize that virtually all DRAM has defective bits, and the only way to get any yield is by having redundant banks of cells that are used to supplement bad cells in the main banks.