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Annoyances and solutions

AMDVisionI am very patient when it comes to erroneous products. I usually
seel the way of least resistance to get to the goal. But when there’s
something I don’t like much, then it is getting joked on by
companies. Gigabyte is one such who lost my reputation!

What happened?

I bought me an AMD Radeon HD 7970 from Gigabyte. With a price tag of roughly 500 US$, this puppy ain’t cheap. And if it says “pre-overclocked and tested”, one can expect a working product then.

Well, so I popped that graphics card into my computer and had to notice erroneous graphics (visible as texture and geometrical glitches). Well, so that puppy went right back to Gigabyte with an RMA. That was at February 21st, 2013.

That done, I bought me another 7970 as a CrossfireX solution was already planned. So I got me the same card again. Popped that one in and all went okay so far. Till now!

My defective card came back from Gigabyte and the shop clerk told me that Gigabyte has not stated anything about what they’ve done with the card, except that it has been “on tour” for a good 2 months!

Okay, so long time, there must have been done something lately. So I popped the second card in and was looking forward to have blazing-fast graphics as there are now two of these hellish monsters in my computer now. Done so, fired up my computer and all seemed well so far… until I started gaming. Suddenly my computer blanked out and the display went black. I first thought of an instant crash of my game (SimCity 5 btw.!) and restarted my computer.

As I also suspected the temperature of the GPU to be an issue, I also fired up an onscreen monitor to show the GPU temp.

Launched SimCity 5 again and played on for a good 5 minutes. The temperature of the GPU was about 83 degrees Celsius. Nothing to worry about much as the Tmax for this GPU is nominal 95 degrees Celsius until the protection kicks in. 105 degrees Celsius is the absolute maximum! Then it happened again. Black screen and the computer no longer working.

So I waited a couple of minutes to fire up the computer again but what was that. black areas were now poisonous green! I switched cards to exclude hardware failure from my other components but no matter in which PCI-E slot I put that card in, always the same behaviour. Now it wouldn’t have been a big loss if it was the defective card, that returned to me (yes, it is actually still in my coputer and the graphics glitches are still visible – very annoying!!! No, it was the card that worked fine so far! *sob*

AMD7990Fire

So now I have two defective 7970 around, one definitely not working as intended and one that works with flaws.

As I am very pissed now to have forked over 1000 CHF for two high-end cards and still have no optimal graphics, I now ordered one of NVidia’s new hot puppys, the GTX 780 which promises to deliver lots of power for a more reliable price than the Geforce Titan. The GTX 780 is rated 650 CHFm while the Titan card still is rated over 1200 CHF! the 780 however has only 10-15% less performance than a Titan card. So I am going for SLI using two GTX 780. The price is only 100 simoleons more but the power of these two cards is roughly 30% more than one Titan card.

Now you would ask, why I am again going with NVidia and not popping in an AMD Radeon 7990 which is the new Titan Killer. Well, first of that, the 7990 seems to have massive microjudder issues while the GTX 780 is eradicating them effectively according to tests of many hardware reviewers and second, I never had any scuffle with NVidia cards so far. They all worked well but with the 6970/7970 AMD brought out a GPU that offered lots more bang for the buck than the 580/680 that was available at that time.

I still see the 7970 as a good product though but I am fed up with the service, Gigabyte is offering.

My GTX 780 is an ASUS one as I always had good experience with them so far. My mainboard is also from ASUS as they’re rocking that business for a good 20 years now without any flaws.

Gigabyte: It’ s time you learn what customer satisfaction is and how to raise it. Taking two months for an RMA and then still returning a flawed product isn’t the right way to treat customers. So for the next time, this was it with products from you!

So let’s see if the 780 can cope with my hopes and deliver what I am expecting! I’ll keep you updated as soon as that card is arriving and being spanked with pixels from me! Stay tuned!


May 23, 2013 Netspark - 1594 posts - Member since: May 9th, 2011 No Comments »

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