Broke my GPU?

C

crazybearmeow

New member
Hi guys im new so any help would be appreciated...

So i bought a 2nd hand XFX HD 7970 Black Edition and it ran flawlessly for a
week (really stressed it through benchmarks and loads of game playing) so i then decided to overclock it standard procedure clocked it by small increments and then i got to about 1200mhz/1500mhz on a 1.3v and i ran unigine and saw artifacts and then toned it down but the artifacts still stayed so turned it all back to stock but still artifacts...

So i reinstalled windows and they were still there... Read online and some people said change their bios so i did that and now im running a bog standard 925mhz bios and im still seeing artifacts so i think i damaged my GPU but i did turn it down straight after i really started to see artifacts...

So any advice?? Thanks guys!
 
It definitely sounds like you have damaged it. Probably the memory as it's easily done.

Not sure where you are located but in the U.K you need to be the original owner and have to go back to the retailer for warranty.
 
yep that card is done for it. overheated.
that's why i will keep my newly acquired 670 ftw at stock clocks. with kepler boost it goes up to 75°C, that's more than enough.
 
Feronix said:
Maybe you can contact the previous owner, he might be willing to help you out if it's a nice guy...
Click to expand...

No need to bother. Once you break the seal on a XFX it's game over.

They'll be about as nice as PNY when it comes to helping you.

One for the bin I would have thought and a lesson learned. Don't buy cards from a company who don't give a chit about their end users.
 
Feronix said:
I think the word 'punishment' is a bit overdone. I blame XFX on this one, for not standing by their products
Click to expand...
well then the lesson is screw XFX, isn't it? people tend to do the same mistakes over and over again when there are no consequences. loosing a lot of money usually helps to get the message across. i feel bad for him though, a very unfortunate failure.
 
It's probably because you went all the way up to 1.3v... I wouldn't go that high even under water x.x

Since artifacts are usually to do with the memory, it might be worth underclocking the memory heavily to see if they go away (and the core too) and then finding how high you can you can clock it without them appearing.

Yeah it's a bad situation, but try to make the best of it :)
 
Sorry to hear about this... were you monitoring your temps whilst you were overclocking?

To be fair to the manufacturers I don't see why they should provide warranties for us lot who take the GPUs apart and throw volts at it. That doesn't make sense.

Also there is no telling what the previous owner did to it. It might not have been your fault - you just happened to be there when it happened.
 
Feronix said:
I think the word 'punishment' is a bit overdone. I blame XFX on this one, for not standing by their products
Click to expand...

Hmm. I guess it depends on how you look at it. I don't like XFX at all but where do you draw the line?

Do you let people take your cards apart, over volt and over clock them and then give them a new one?

That's what BFG used to do. BFG charged a premium on top of their cards so that they could send replacements when things went wrong. Look where it got them...

Nvidia pulled the 2 series and there was a 6 month hiatus between ending the life of the 2 series before the 4 series fail came and it was enough to put BFG out of business.

XFX were also a Nvidia partner then too, so have only survived due to being a bit crap when it comes to warranty.

Personally I don't overclock my hardware. That's just my preference. I also tend not to take it apart, so basically will buy a custom cooled card and then just leave it be.

This situation is very unfortunate, but as has been remarked upon 1.3v is very high. I did do some searching around last night and it seems others have used that sort of voltage but it's hard to draw a line on this because it was working perfectly before that voltage and overclock was added.

This one is definitely user error. It would have been nice if it were a Gigabyte card as the OP could have returned it but them's the breaks I guess.
 
Agreed guys, I do not mean that any manufacturer should cover their products when people take them apart and overclock them. That would be like buying a used Renault car, throw in a Ford engine and then go to the Renault dealer to tell them that your engine isn't working properly.

But I've also heard plenty of stories where XFX just didn't care for their customers at all. Even the ones that used the stock coolers and didn't overclock. I've read stories where the RMA took ages to get through, and once the card was sent back they didn't hear from XFX at all. Or even one case where they kept the card for 4 months (!!) before even looking into the RMA.

Would personally not buy an XFX card after reading those kind of stories :p
 
Sadly near on all of the manufacturers do not deal directly with their customers which is a shame.

BFG were the first to step out of the shadows and they were awesome. I bought a 5900 Ultra many years ago and a friend of mine decided he wanted one. Sadly his was faulty so we called them and they sent him the latest 6 series card.

But near on all of them now only deal with the people who are selling them (IE Scan Aria etc) so you have to go back to them. And when you do it all depends who you get on the day and you usually tend to find they're not as sympathetic with you because it's an inconvenience to them.

MSI will deal with you directly and they are very good when you do. Gigabyte are actually UK based so are the best IMO. But XFX, Palit, Gainward, Asus.. All demand that you go back to the retailer.
 
Right I'm going to bump this up because of something a friend of mine said to me today.... He had been overclocking his 7970 and landed himself in the same position OP did. He, however, fixed it.

Nah, it's nothing to do with memory - I don't overclock it. It did shit me up when I first saw it though, but uninstalling Afterburner sorted it out.

It's something to do with the 'unofficial' overclocking hack in MSI Afterburner (that allows speeds greater than 1125MHz on 7970 cards), it buggers up 2D clocks or voltage (or something!) which means you get artifacts on the desktop, but it's fine when gaming. Not worth the hassle IMHO, I'm sure there will be a better fix in the future :)

I'm perfectly happy with my current OC, especially on the CPU. I was playing BL2 with PhysX on high last night - generally fine, did get a little less smooth in some areas involving a lot of flowing liquids e.t.c. Back on medium now!
Click to expand...

Basically the same thing happened to him (squares on the desktop) and it came down to being Afterburner causing it once he had hacked the cfg file to get past the 1125 block.
 
Last edited:
big names such as xfx don't need to care about their customers because they have so many that a handful complaining doesn't matter to them
 
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