Buying the best graphics card can often be a serious investment, but have you ever taken into account which GPU gets returned by consumers the most? If reliability, customer satisfaction or general buyer’s remorse are any indication of quality, then you might want to give AMD 5000 GPUs a miss.
According to Mindfactory, a German hardware retailer, AMD 5000 GPUs were returned more often than Nvidia Turing GPUs despite Nvidia selling more cards: 76,280 compared to 44,100 respectively.
The data includes Nvidia cards from the 1660 Ti and above, and the 5500 XT and above for AMD. In total, 1,452 AMD GPUs were returned compared to 1,607 Nvidia GPUs, which equates to a 3.3% return rate for AMD and a 2.1% return rate for Nvidia. That’s roughly a 50% higher return rate for AMD cards.
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So is it a clean sweep for Nivida, then? Not exactly. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti was actually the most returned card at 5.3%, which is the worst for any GPU on Mindfactory’s list. When you consider that the RTX 2080 Ti is Nvidia’s flagship GPU, it is slightly surprising.
Return to sender
The reasoning behind returning a GPU can obviously vary from person to person. AMD’s 5000 GPU series launch was met with a number of driver problems for instance, which tested the patience of many users who may have simply had enough. Nvidia has usually managed to avoid these types of teething issues during a new card launch, although that’s not to say its cards are perfect by any means.
Some third-party cards could also be blamed for inflating the return rate of a particular set of GPUs. In this instance, it appears that AMD cards from Powercolor are most likely to returned.
With rumors of AMD’s RDNA 2 (or 'Big Navi' GPU) and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 continuing to circulate, the war to win consumers’ cash shows no sign of dying down soon. Clearly, though, AMD has work to do in Germany at least, if it wishes to dethrone Nvidia next time around.
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