Nvidia May Refuse Warranties for Kepler Cards Overclocked Beyond 1.1Ghz

Californian fabless GPU designer, American company Nvidia is apparently talking with its manufacturing partners and warns that overclocking factory overclocked cards will void the card’s warranty. Nvidia’s Kepler GPU is a very efficient architecture and, while not as easily overclockable as AMD’s Tahiti GPUs, it is often sold in pre-overclocked setups.

Despite the fact that some companies are doing very well by ripping off their clients and buying off the competition (i.e. Seagate and Western Digital), Nvidia is not in a very good position right now, and certainly can't afford to buy the competing companies.

The company’s products are attacked on all fronts by much more powerful competitors. The Tesla line is under Intel’s Xeon Phi marketing siege.

AMD’s simply powerful GCN DP FP64 performance is not making Nvidia’s GPU compute line look any better, considering the specific architectural weakness that Kepler cards have when it comes to double precision floating point performance.

The Tegra line, although really successful and an overall well designed product line, is in danger of being completely squashed by Qualcomm’s huge ARM Cortex A15 push.

Nvidia, although designing very capable and innovative products, has the unfortunate bad luck of having to survive during a prolonged economic downturn and fight contextually powerful competitors.

Thus, the company is reportedly warning AIBs (add-in-board partner) that overclocking pre-overclocked cards will void the warranty of the product if the temperature or TDP recommendations are not followed accordingly.

Nvidia is trying to cut costs wherever possible, and this rumored move will also put it into a bad light when compared with AMD, who encourages its partners and customers to overclock their Radeon cards well beyond the limits imposed by the “Ghz Edition” firmware.