Graphics Cards Rant

[nickturner13]

Went away for a few days to see the family over xmas, I come from Shropshire, home of Volume 6's upcoming first game, I believe! In fact I grew up in the very kind of small village that game represents.

Anyway, I digress...

When I came home, and turned my PC on... nothing happened. Just went to the BIOS splash screen, then nothing. Couldn't even press Del to get into the BIOS.

after hours of fiddling about I've come to the conclusion that the graphics card has gone pop, as the PC works without it attached, running the graphics through the onboard adaptor. (Although of course, in a lower resolution...)

So, this means no more gaming for me for a while! A real shame as I'm quite into Ark right now and was also having some ideas for city building in Cities:Skylines.

Interestingly, my wife and I both bought GTX 970's in April 2015, and they've both gone bad in recent months... my wife's actually caught fire about 3 months ago, smoke and everything.

Hers was replaced with minimal fuss, when she showed photos of the melted damage on the card. In fact, hers was replaced with a superior model, a 980, for the troubles.

Hopefully I get the same treatment!

Not much of a point to this post really, just wanted to rant a bit to get it out there. The cards were made by EVGA, who usually have a good reputation from what I have read, so it must just be that we are very unfortunate to have had 2 cards both go bad within 2 years of a 3 year warranty, but at least they make the return & replacement process quite easy... I've heard other manufacturers can be a more painful and lengthy process.

Anyone have any similar experiences?

[ratsoalbion]

My EVGA GeForce 680 died last summer, but that was after three and a half years of use.
I now have an MSi card because it was recommended to me.

[eastmcduck]

That sucks you and your wife both had problems. EVGA has always made decent hardware, so that's kind of surprising to hear. Only time I ever had a video card go bad, it was a BFG 9800 GT. I was getting artifacts and crashes left and right after about a week of use. I had a friend reflow the board and it worked fine for a couple years after that and then it overheated one day and literally popped, destroying my PCI-Express slot in the process. BFG has since gone out of business. I replaced my motherboard and picked up an EVGA 650 Ti which I foolishly didn't research well enough. I didn't even realize that it didn't support SLI, and my idea was to buy a second one. I ran that one pretty much until I couldn't run new games, then decided to rebuild. I went with a PNY GTX 1080 for my graphics card this time and so far so good. It's actually quite staggering compared to the mid range stuff I've bought in the past. I went from being unable to even launch DOOM to running it with everything maxed out, pulling a constant 60 FPS with vsync on, 120+ FPS without.

To my knowledge, EVGA still has excellent customer service, so hopefully you get that all worked out. If they replaced your wife's card with a better one, that probably means they're aware of something wrong with the 970s and are trying to cover their asses.

[nickturner13]

A 1080! Nice, yes that's in my plans for next year for sure, was planning on a whole new build as my current motherboard won't support a faster RAM & SSD.

Looking at an i7-6700K, 32GB ram, 1TB SSD to go with it... that should be future proof for a few years

To be fair the cards we had were 970 FTW editions, which I think were overclocked versions of the standard 970, maybe that's what caused the issue.

Will update when I know what I'm getting back in return, it may delay my 1080 purchase.

[Alex79]

Last graphics card I bought was a Geforce 6800 in 2005

[eastmcduck]

A 1080! Nice, yes that's in my plans for next year for sure, was planning on a whole new build as my current motherboard won't support a faster RAM & SSD.

Looking at an i7-6700K, 32GB ram, 1TB SSD to go with it... that should be future proof for a few years

To be fair the cards we had were 970 FTW editions, which I think were overclocked versions of the standard 970, maybe that's what caused the issue.

Will update when I know what I'm getting back in return, it may delay my 1080 purchase.

I'm almost ashamed of myself for getting the 1080. Almost... It was a bit of an impulse buy after getting a Best Buy credit card. It's an amazing piece of technology, though, as well as massive. It wouldn't have fit in my old case. I think you would be very happy with one, especially matched up with the other hardware you mentioned. I've been tempted to get a second one. As big as the cards are, my new case is massive and actually feels a little empty. The case I picked up is a Corsair Graphite 760T. I'll post some pics when I have a chance.

Last graphics card I bought was a Geforce 6800 in 2005

Man, I remember when the 6800 was announced. I used to sit and look at the BFG 6800 Ultras online and fantasize about owning a pair of them. I ran a pair of 6600 GT's in SLI for a couple of years and they served me pretty well. Still the only SLI setup I've run to this day.

[DarthCuddles]

I've had some video card woes recently too, nothing as bad as catching fire bit still inconveniences lime never booting past the windows is loading screen.

I had a single 980 and after all the issues I has I could probably be called mad for getting the `1080Ti founders edition. but I'm a stubborn/idiotic bastard so I did just that.

I thought it should solve the inconsistent issues I'd had with the 980 and the loading windows crash but nope, the problem was even worse. I spent hours trying to reboot Windows and see if I could fix it before realising that the only real fix was reinstalling the whole thing. Did that and Boom everything seems to work right, so I am working my way through games one by one.

I've heard people have had issues with Nier Automata but the 1080Ti just powered through that and gave me a perfect experience and what I've replayed of the Witcher 3 seems perfect(biggest downside is the price, but who am I to complain I'm stupid enough to buy one) so I'm sure glad i upgraded my card and hope that it doesn't take long for game devs to push this card to it's limit. Although Persona 5 is taking up all my time at the moment so there is plenty of time for that

[countstex]

When moving to a new graphics card it's usual a good idea to run a driver cleaner app before removing the old card and installing a new. Not sure if you tried that Darth?

On a side note I've just upgraded to the latest Win10 build and there is an option now called 'Fresh Start' which is basically a factory reset for Windows. Not tried it yet but it might save me some time next time I want to do a re-install. Presumably it wipes all your programs but keeps all your data files saving you from re-loading EVERYTHING on a rebuild.