There's no such thing as bad publicity...

There's no such thing as bad publicity. It's a lesson that was gifted to me from my father who was an amazing businessman and a fantastic individual. I learned from my fathers success and mistakes, I learned that fanatical customer service is the most important aspect to building a successful business. I also learned that whether you get a bad review or not isn't going to kill your business, unless your intentions are to screw customers. I don't believe the company in question is in the business of screwing anyone, they have a fantastic reputation.

That being said, I caught the latest news on [H]ardOCP about a review gone bad on a company that I hold in high regard. I think the review was well written, and certainly fair, but there are many who questioned both sides of the

Here is the original review.

Here is where the backlash started.

Here is the forum discussing the entire ordeal.

Here is my response on their forums:

Hi guys, I just thought I’d offer my two cents, whether you care or not I hold both Falcon-NW and [H]ardOCP in high regard. Regardless of the situation, I believe that the system had a problem and that’s how the review works. The purpose of this review is to point out the end user experience.

One can conclude that there was a hardware problem (not a BF2 problem) simply by reading the Falcon-NW response stating that the video card was bad – and perhaps by reading the review again.

We’ve delivered systems that have, for whatever reason, failed out of the box, but it’s far and few between, and when it does happen we go through all lengths to fix the problem. We cover the shipping both ways, labor, parts, etc. Falcon does the same, thus the reason they have a great reputation.

The bottom line is you have ONE chance to make a first impression, and if we fail to deliver a fantastic out of box experience, we fail – period. I embed this into my team everyday - we have one chance, and that's it.

So [H]ardOCP is supposed to be buying a machine from us at some point, and we don’t know what to expect. I’m guessing that there will be some good points and bad points about our system from the reviewers’ standpoint and we’re willing to take those bad points and fix them.

Generally speaking, ATi chipsets have indeed been sub-par in the past – and if the technician over the phone suggested to change ram timings it tells me that he was scratching his head as well. Clearly he thought it was a chipset issue, in fact, according to the posts from the reviewer, it’s true – the tech claimed it to be a chipset issue. It would have been my first guess too, considering the machine worked in every other game.

We recommend newer ATi chipsets(RS482) in some of our Media Center machines because they’re slick, they’re fanless, and they perform nicely. I am sure that NVIDIA will be releasing a chipset that’s fanless, with DVI down, and it’s going to kick some serious ass, and we as gamers can appreciate the added tweaks that NVIDIA chipsets offer with their Forceware drivers.

The bottom line is [H]ardOCP is right when they alluded to the fact that this particular ATi chipset may not be the best choice for gaming. It’s not – that’s a fact, and I’m sure when NVIDIA releases some real uATX solutions (which they will) you’ll see a sudden change in many of these SFF systems. The NVIDIA nForce4 team is unstoppable; they do build the best performance chipsets on the market – period. In fact, Intel should be giving the entire nForce4 team backrubs(edited for PG13) all day long for elevating the performance of their desktop CPUs.

Here’s the ultimate test – when ATi finally releases their Crossfire edition x1800 board I can’t wait to test it with an nForce4 vs the latest ATi chipset. Everyone knows Crossfire works with nForce4, and I think we’ll see the difference a chipset makes. I think the fact that ATi designed it to work independently of the chipset is the best feature of Crossfire. We’re currently evaluating Crossfire on nForce4 using 850XT’s (ATi paid us a visit last week), it should be interesting once we get some of the better motherboards in with ATi chipsets.

Anyways, quit accusing [H]ardOCP of writing a bad review, it was a fantastic review and given the fact that we were all told that it would be a one chance only blind evaluation - we should be willing to eat the bullet. Falcon-NW still makes a great system, and this review isn’t going to hurt their business, they should know that. We all have bad hair days once in awhile don't we?I probably should have just kept my mouth/keyboard shut. Feel free to flame me now, you have my email address.

Rahul Sood
aka El Presidente VoodooPC