This is kinda strange, On the top of your website I see ForceWare roundup. Is that the way Nvidia support their fan websites? im not sure other than the fact u use the same 3 letters as them what the problem is . But then again they also use the words forceware and yet you dont recieve a letter complaining about that

that sux
nvidia is full greedy peoples
and that sux
they try to extract money from normal peoples by copyrighting everything
if they dont have a copyright in your country they cant call you to chourt ?
are they going to forbid you to edit thear drivers?
i dont understand


p.s.sorry for bad english

Damn Nvidia lets get mad over a name

What a bunch of complete MORONS!?! It really does amaze me that some companies are run by such immature, unreasonable, and inconsiderate people. *deep sigh* And the other part I don't understand is; since ULi is now owned by Nvidia, how is this some terrible "violation" against their copyright? Sure it enables decent SLI on a ULi chipset, but very few will ever attempt it. And any issues with compatibility will likely encourage people to move to a "real SLI" chipset. So in fact, this simply promotes SLI, and Nvidia, not damaging them in any fashion.

At the same time, I can also see your point about them threatening your site with legal action. I doubt that I would comply if I was in your position, just as a matter of principle. Companies like this need to learn to approach things differently.


P.S. Overall just another reason for me to go away from Nvidia when I can. Besides I've never liked the lack of performance with SLI. I just don't like the idea of spending 100% more for video card when it only produces about a 40% increase. Makes more sense to me to just buy the best card you can get and settle for that level of performance, until you can afford another "upgrade".

And when it comes to software physics (Havok X) I'd much rather have a Radeon Xpress 3200 chipset with dissimular ATI graphics cards. That way I buy one "high end" card now and move it to physics processing duties when I upgrade in the future. I simply am not going to buy 2 of anyone's cards at once. If they can't make video cards that are "fast enough" then I'll wait till they can build one "fast enough" to buy one. But I don't see myself ever buying 2 video cards for the same system, even if money was "not a consideration".

I really and truly admire your stance with them on it. If they would ask, you'd do it; but since they're being pricks you're playing hardball.

Kudos!

G'luck, please keep us posted with developments. Have you heard from Derek Perez yet since publishing this peace or do you expect to be "handled" by Brian?

Hiya Digi nice to see you here been a while

On your last question I emailed Derek Perez myself on behalf of NGOHQ and Regeneration not long after Rege forwarded this email to me on Thursday. So far no response back from him or nVidia directly.

As far as I am concerned and told Rege on MSN that night this is a load of BS and I don't think he should pull anything until NV at least has the decency to contact him directly. This issue belongs to PR and Driver Developement at NV not some quack lawyer.

NGOHQ is one of the few boards online that has a predominately Pro nVidia membership and to date have never been offered sponsorship or CO-OP from NV. What the F**k is up with that ?

I am still very pissed over this issue and perhaps its best if I end my post here for now !!

EDIT: Was Thursday night on the email long weekend here but was 48 hours !!

Bah! i dont know what to say. Bad job nvidia!!

I’m shocked to hear about it. Nvidia haven’t learned a thing from the past? The public surely don’t like when some big corporation is threating some website. Especially their own fan website. I really hope they will do the right thing.

Good luck and keep up the great work!

im upse that nvidia wasnt more professional about the situation

Im not surprised that nVidia acted that way, after all it expects monopoly over its SLI tech.
Why do they have to sell everything for money?
It was already prooved that SLI can run on every MB with 2 PCX sockets, why is it necessary to buy a product from nVidia when you can buy a better motherboard from a better company.
You're a graphic card company and stay a graphic card company. You dont have to sell your soul for every freakin penny.

NGO should put back the SLI patch, and nVidia should start asking nicely before they're sending legal threats. especially when they've ignored NGO for a LONGGGGGG time while other newbish sites have been in full cooperation with nvidia.

Come on Nvidia we are the people who keep your company running, without us the consumer there would be no Nvidia to speak of so instead of trying to take away from the community how about giving to the community for once, the people who mod drivers and patches do this to help us they dont do it for profeit you greedy bastards.............

Yeah, Im glad your holding your ground on the situation, Im glad nobody dropped to they're knees and cried but instead you guys pulled some Braveheart move.

I hope this all works out. This in way is good for NGOHQ as it brings us much needed attention and publicity.

To Nvidia from Zandro.

Janwillem van de Wetering once said..

Quote:

Greed is a fat demon with a small mouth and whatever you feed it `s never enough.

Your sincerely

Zandro

Hi everyone.

I've posted this story on our site. You can find a direct link to the news post here:
http://www.pcper.com/comments.php?nid=2159

I have also started a thread in our forum to generate some discussion.

Good luck guys. I hope this all works out.

- Jon.

W1zzard at http://www.techpowerup.com has also included coverage with a link to this thread

might I recommend a followup letter to that tin star hopped up attorney?

Heh im not suprised at all , after seen that company that produces heat mats(dont know it this is the right word) for laptops ask web site to take it reve off it cos they DONT LIKE it ,and fee other cases then i see nvidia doing shit like that , its nothing new.

Good way you handlet it Rege. Keep posting info when some about this case come out.

Iwuld say that nVidia is now prime DEVIL , rather fee stupid people who (sadle) have rule power out ther.

And like you Rege i dont like being threaten by someone if ther is a way to solve it nice and clean.

Still no word from Nvidia.

No response here on my email yet either ....

They definitely should've acted on a more professional way. Good job Regeneration on taking such a stand. NVidia must learn that there are ways to do some things, and that way is not by threatening.

I can just see the next Mastercard advertisement now...

- Cost of sending polite email: FREE

- Cost of hiring a Lawyer to send a threatening email to a website that ultimately promotes said company's products: $500 per hour.

- Cost of seeing Nvidia management's faces when they realize all they had to do was send a polite email in the first place, but instead have received very bad publicity and denouncement all over the internet: PRICELESS.

Hee hee I like that Cool Barn and its so true isn't it

Glad to see you've stood your ground on this rather stupid, and greed-ridden complaint. I was suprised to read that the patch actually came from ASRock. Is this the Power Express enabling driver that's on all of the ASRock driver CDs? I wrote an email to NVidia asking why they had disabled it and showed my frustration on the matter

My correspondence with NVidia was as follows:

I wrote:

Dear Sir / Madam,

Why does SLI no longer work with my ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2 motherboard, after I updated to the latest drivers for my 7800GTs? I have read on some forums that it has been disabled for reasons involving nvidia's acquisition of ULI. Could you please clarify exactly what the problem is?

Kind regards,

They replied:

Hello,

Im sorry but Non NVIDIA chipsets are not supported in SLI mode. This company position has nothing to do with ULi aquisition. Please see the link below for SLI Certified products.

http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone2_build.html

Best regards,
NVIDIA

I then wrote:

Dear Sir / Madam,

This is exactly the kind of response I expected.
On the ULI support page, it states: "ULI Electronics has been acquired by NVIDIA Corporation. You are still our valued customer, so rest assured that we will continue to support ULi products with drivers and sales support."

Then NVIDIA disables SLI on this chipset when it was working fine before. This is a contradiction. I will not buy an NVidia based board, as I'm guessing this whole issue is a ploy to encourage users to do so. This has disappointed me & many other users with this chipset, and fails to show good faith to your graphics card customers.

Regards,


And although I said I didn't want a reply they replied:

Hello again,

SLI is never supposed to work on non NVIDIA chipset's or now in this case newly acquired ULI chipset's. SLI working on ULi was never supported by NVIDIA engineering nor marketing. This company stance predates ULi acquisition as it was made in early 2004.

Thank you for your understanding.

Best Regards,
NVIDIA

I was going to reply with a comment about the spelling & grammar in their responses, and that I never asked for a response, but was merely making a statement, but I didn't want to waste my energy [Smile]

I also posted this in an OCWorkbench thread (which was where I discovered that ASRock users were unable to utilise SLI after Forceware 81.98) NVidia are giving themselves some really bad press. I'm pi***d about their attitude and greed, and I imagine a lot of users who just spent a wad of cash on their systems, and now discover they are being forced to change motherboards, when it was working fine before.

To be honest i was expecting this rather unprofessional move from nvidia, playing hardball with your lawyers ain't gonna get you what you want. If they took another aproach this would be settle in a friendly way without all this talk and bad press. Shame on you.

Just a quick point, I would not expect to see ANY response from anyone at nVidia until at least Tuesday (April 18th).

It's a 3 day holiday weekend here in the US for Easter, most schools/businesses will be closed on Monday and I highly doubt that anyone from nVidia PR deals with anything like this over the weekend.

Although I will admit that even I'm writing to DP & BB about this one. They routinely just shunt my letters off to their recycle bin, but it's the thought that counts.

If I have to "work" in the holiday because of them then they can do the same. No one told them to send us that legal threat on a holiday! Instead of spending time with my family, I have to deal with their threats.

It was nice of them to drop this nice easter egg on us...they really have an awsome holiday spirit no doubt...

Ah, Nvidia, have you learned nothing from the past? Oh well. Most big corperations these days do the exact same thing. Wonder what ATI would do if there was a patch similar to this for Crossfire. Hahaahha

there are some similar case i found at gamespot.com
hope it can help

Nvidia, your acting like ****tards

1. SLI is only capable on NVIDIA BASED VIDEO CARDS
2. THEY COST A PRETTY PENNY
3. WHY THE FUCK SHOULDN'T WE BE ABLE TO RUN SLI ON ANY MOBO WITH 2x PCI-E SLOTS.
4. NVIDIA SHOULD BE SUED FOR RUNNING AN ILLEGAL MONOPOLY ON THE SLI TECHNOLOGY

Nvidia are a bunch of greedy bastards, and their nforce drivers suck....... Nvidia customers should start to boycott their products and buy from their rival ATI. Nvidia can't even produce enough quantity of their product; we are the ones that should be complaining... Once I get a copy of that SLI patch, I’ll distribute from multiple T3 connections.... Teach their ass......

I thought that the thing about nvidia is using people in forums is fake but after reading this who knows what they can do! now I'm going to sell my old 6800 and get some radeon x1900 instead. i'm doing it because of you! you always supported the community and you saved my LG monitor after using normal forceware always played with my monitor settings.

Shame on you nvidia!!

wow so many comments here. i dont understand why they dont say sorry bcuz it make them look so bad

I have nothing to say. Good thing Regen mods both sides drivers !

Good luck Regen, it's going to be a fun ride

I thought to drop support for one of them, you can guess why.

It's not the right way to talk to Israelian.....
LOL
If he want to talk to us he can come with a Pig head to Abu-Tir st. in Jennin we will wait him by the musque... ONLY TO TALK
LOL

ROTF. threating israeli's is surely not a smart move! look at the condition in the middle east for example.

What can I say ... unbelievable! The "nice" way would have been to ask politely to remove the patch - I don't think ngohq would had said "no" this way. But in this case, it shows a great arrogancy of nVidia ...

Actually, I take it back, these little tit-for-tat games are pathetic, and disgustingly enough both sides play those games.

Who really cares! Even if the user isn't using your specific nV chipset, people are still going to buy more of your 'nvidia' merchandise! They still need 2 of your video cards to get it to work, so you didn't make money on the chipset, in the end you big conglomerates still make money! BIG DEAL!

The SLI chipset is based off the Ultra chipset anyways, one of them just has some of the circuits unlocked! I know that the SLI-32 is a little different, but of course uses the same principal with more-faster pipelines. So, another company managed to figure out how to get them to talk, congrats to them! I think you should suck it up and stop trying to push people around, because you are likely making the money off the video cards anyways! Pisses me off....

Congrats to you Regen! Stand up for your rights! I still don't think I'm moving to ATI any time soon, even with all of this stuff, because it happens on both sides, and I've been a loyal nV fan through all of their previous issues as well. I don't like the extra software, nor their dependencies, and I don't need all that VIVO stuff. Unless I get one for free, then that's a different story, and CYA nV *LOL*!

Declaring war on your own customers by sending a e-mail written by a cockroach (lawyer)
is ill advised, since english is a rather dull language when it comes to swearing in going
to switch to North-Norwegian instead:

"Nei dåkker kan sykle vainnrett i helvette og breinne dær før evig tid, og måtte
han belsebub skolde ræva dokkers inn te hoftebeine i samme slengen!"

All this talking about lawyers reminds me a small joke about them. One time some guy went to home through a graveyard. He noticed some grave says “George R. Norman – A good man and a lawyer”. After he saw that, he said to himself: “Oh my god! The condition in this country is so bad that they have to bury TWO GUYS in a single grave??”

HAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAA
good one Eran!

Haha that was a good joke, got to remeber that one

The more people standing like Regeneration did , with companies that behave like regimes , once they hit a certain size, the better.

That was typical lawyerish office rediculous movement (and rather ignorant) , i'd suggest Nvidia change policies regarding some issues and definitely a counsel firm ... go with a serious one. Unless all that is a prank , a practical joke , an April's fool leftover

Its irrational and obnoxious

Points worth taking note :
1. Patch has been removed time ago already
2. Patch came from Asrock, official nvidia partner

Now regarding the SLI issue, i realy dont get by any common sense the fuss about it. Its not like its a blooming technology that sells like crazy ... seems more like a technology that is dying outperformed by the company's own increasing number of surpassing cost / performance ratio single card offers that do anything than motivate SLI sales ... Plus if everybody could go SLI by a patch i guess some people might be tempted and go buy A SECOND NV card increasing their cards sales, (instead of having SLI boards being unsold) Duh ......

Thumbs up Regeneration

(*) even that SLI bridge legal issue is equaly obnoxious

ROFL..so true...so true...LMAO!!!

Nvidia Nvidia Nvidia What a bunch of A%&%HOLES There slowly turning into Microsoft!

mtype101
lets hope NOT! (about that microsoft thing...)

This must be a joke.... I dont see any wrong with NGO.com. And i still remember when i see that patch here which was how many months ago??? O_o Should'nt nvidia be happier when customers would purchase more cards for systems? This news is rather disappointing from them

I really hope NGO team does not bend to nvidia will.

Because your driver saved me from cancelling a lan party.

What? how :O

Don't worry, i really don't see that happening anytime soon, you can rest assure.. It would take way more than this for us to cease our support to all you guys.

Brother she may be slender but nVidia will never bend her

What (we) NGOHQ have asked for here is proper PR, protocal and of course respect. We are not a bunch of lame ass teenagers running a PHP Warez board

Ya know Mainman had a good point bring it on .... we are not afraid .... NGOHQ is our family and they ours

I’m going to go with the assumption that this whole thing originated in NVIDIA’a legal department (probably some hotshot, knownothing young lawyer type looking to hit it big), and has nothing to do with the rest of the company’s management. I would really hope that the NVIDIA management would not be this ignorant to sic their lawyer dogs of war before investigating the situation further and realizing that that the modified drivers probably help sales. I’m drawing this conclusion from the use of “Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA")” plug, and that this act is going to (or already has in some cases) make end users switch to ATI, and that attacking their customers/supporters/fanboys/and the community in general is a really, really dumb practice.

So there just may be an internal hunt going on right now to beat the crap out the idiot who did this, I hope.

But of course, I still don’t care about SLI or Crossfire, both solutions are still too young to be effective and the incompatibility between the two is just a pain in the arse.

I won’t be leaving my Nvidia cards anytime soon, but this seriously hurts their image in my mind.


Although all this is just based on my hopeless belief that people aren’t complete morons 98% of the time and just plain stupid the other 2%.

i think nvidia has something wrong himself,he has changing nothing state now,so he blame you,you can ignore him,so long as you effected nothing from him,we hope a existing and longliving ngohq.

If Nvidia wants to solve this nicely then there is a way to discuss this matter with us. And that’s by PR. There is a way to treat and to contact us on a professional level.
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Yeah, your right...They should have got a non involved 3rd party and have you served with legal papers. (law suit) In my opioion you got a fair warning without legal papers. What more could anyone ask for?! You have no room to complain about how they handled the situation, it's more than fair.

It sucks this happened, even though I dont use SLI, many people do and the patch was great. From what they said in the suit, they were more consurned over the "SLI" name wich most people would think as Nvidia. Perhaps with written papers or a phone call they might let the patch stay, but with a different name (of course). It dont matter what its called because the advertisement of the forums, it will still be a mass downloader.

The issue is now solved. Thank you all for the great support!