BFG Technologies

» see bfgtech.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Turkish hardware forums of the mid 2000s ran on signature blocks. You listed the motherboard and the graphics card under every post you made, and the card was the line people actually read. On donanimhaber and frmtr, a BFG in that list meant you had bought the factory-overclocked version, from the company that printed a lifetime warranty on the box.

BFG Technologies was founded in August 2002 in Lake County, Illinois, and sold Nvidia-based graphics cards into North America and Europe. Its pitch was never that it had the faster silicon, because the silicon came from Nvidia and everyone's was the same part. The pitch was the packaging around it. Cards shipped clocked above Nvidia's reference speeds, and the warranty on most boards ran for life, backed by phone support staffed in the United States around the clock. BFG was among the first partners to sell factory overclocking as a feature you paid for rather than something you did yourself and voided your coverage over.

There were power supplies too, and from 5 January 2009 a line of gaming desktops called Phobos with a touch panel on the front and liquid cooling inside. The graphics cards were the business. They sold into a market where Nvidia's board partners competed almost entirely on cooler design and warranty terms, because there was nothing else left to compete on.

On 18 May 2010 chairman John Slevin said BFG would stop developing graphics cards, the category having stopped being profitable for it. The statement promised that existing warranty holders would keep their RMA and support coverage. That promise lasted about three months.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the letters in the box ~

In August 2010 BFG began liquidating, starting with the GPU business and widening to take in the whole company. Customers who had sent cards in under the lifetime warranty got them back unrepaired, accompanied by a short letter saying the company was winding down and that its major supplier would not support the business. Slashdot had the story on 16 August and the enthusiast press carried it the following day.

The reaction was severe for a practical reason. That warranty had been the entire justification for paying BFG's premium over a reference-clocked card from a cheaper partner. PNY offered stranded BFG owners a discounted coupon toward one of its own cards. That program closed on 31 December 2010.

~ what the brand did next ~

Best Data bought the BFG name along with certain assets. Best Data also owns Diamond Multimedia, so two of the loudest consumer graphics brands of the previous twenty years ended up filed in the same cabinet. Nothing shipped under the BFG name afterward, and bfgtech.com now returns an empty body under a nonstandard error code.

~ the warranty question ~

A lifetime warranty is a promise that the company will outlive the product, and there is no mechanism anywhere that makes such a promise true. When a manufacturer liquidates, the obligation drops into the pile with every other unsecured claim, and the owner of a graphics card is a long way down that pile. BFG is remembered for this more than for any board it ever shipped, which is a hard ending for a company whose hardware had a good reputation the whole time it was selling it.

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