Whether or not reference is a good thing depends completley on how good the chipmaker makes the reference design. Visiontek is very reliable as a gfx board manufacturer because they consistently build High Quality reference design boards. The older Geforce 2 and 3 cards didnt have a perfect reference design. The 3 was pretty good though and thats when Visiontek really took off and their sales were incredible. With the Geforce 4 the reference design is almost impossible to improve upon except possibly for adding a couple interesting overclock features and extra heatsinks like leadtek and asus have done. So, as according to most reviews Visiontek GF4 cards rank right at the very top of quality graphics cards. Its pretty much the best money can buy.
I personally own the Visiontek TI 4600 and have installed many many other Visiontek GF4's for customers and friends and they all perform beautifully. I wouldn't trade this card for 5 of any other brand, i'm incredibly happy with it. I very highly recommend Visiontek over PNY for the origional poster. PNY has the least experience of gfx card makers and doesnt have the QA of Visiontek. Visiontek aslo uses better quality parts in their boards which produces a higher quality 2d image according to everything i've seen and read.
When the reference design is really good, a reference board is what you should get. I'm all for Visiontek's goodness in being faithful to a proven design without adding in extras and crap that raise the price and cause more bugs.
edit: forgot to mention, everyone uses reference drivers anyhow cause they're the best and fastest and most up to date. So...yer argument more than falls apart, if you can call it an argument.
The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the empires state building, along came goblin, wiped the spider out<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by williamc on 05/28/02 02:06 PM.</EM></FONT></P>