My BFG GTX 280 OC Died!

I turned on my computer this morning and I had streaked lines across my screen (the usual: your video card is about to die look). The computer failed to boot all the way into windows with a BSOD. After about three attempts to boot, I stopped getting any video all together. I pulled the card out and threw an old 7800 GTX in and it booted fine.

My BFG GTX 280 OC was 17 days old and performed flawlessly during that time with several hours of gaming each day. I was not overclocking it and have a PC & Power Cooling Silencer 750. Has anyone else had one die? I hope it was just a lemon and not signs of things to come.

I contacted BFG and they quickly set up an RMA. The guy told me that they couldn't do a cross ship because the card was too new and they didn't have any on hand, but then said they would ship out my replacement card the same day they recevied mine. WTF? I shipped it this morning. It will be next week before they get one to me I'm sure.

Fuck it! I guess I'll find a book to read.



*****UPDATE ON POST #80.
I have had three BFG GTX 280s die. I will be on my fourth one in two months.

Wow man, I'm sorry to hear about that. I hope you have better luck with the next one! All of these stories I keep hearing, and the ones about heat + the prices, CrossFire 4870's are looking better and better to me.

what motherboard are you using? were your temps high at idle?

I had a bad XFX GTX 280 standard clock. It functioned but it produced a weird jerkiness in games. Sent mine back to Mwave and got a new one, total turn around time was nine days, I did two shipping, had originally gotten overnight shipping and of course they shipped the RMA back via UPS ground.

I've seen a few posts about bad cards, hard to determine if there is a problem or if the failure rate is normal. Certainly for the card to work out of the box and then go bad after a little more than two weeks is a little disconcerning.

Good luck with the RMA and enjoy the book!

Originally Posted by ZippZopp

what motherboard are you using? were your temps high at idle?

Asus Maximus Formula. To be honest, I didn't monitor my temperatures of the card. I have ample cooling in my case. I ran a 9800GX2 for three months without issue. I had two 8800 Ultras in the same case when I had my 680i.

Of course when it started showing signs of failure the computer was just turned on, so heat couldn't have killed it at that point. Unless it degraded it over the last two weeks.

I think that people might be overstating the heat problem as these things are supposed to run a little hot when loaded. There's might be a problem with the cooling but these 3 GTX 280's are throwing out a TON of heat when they are loaded and seemed to be hitting about 90 after an hour of Crysis so I think that at leat mine seem to be handling the heat ok.

yep one died with only a few minutes in.

interesting. i have a maximus formula as well and got my BFG gtx 280 a few weeks ago. i've been participating in the power saving issues thread and it is looking like the gtx 280 on an x38 motherboard doesn't throttle down the clock speeds so it runs cooler. so basically, on my maximus formula I have my card idle at about 67c which is kinda high, at load i'm at no higher than 84 or 85, but it is usually under 80c. maybe high idle temps had something to do with yours failing. hopefully mine holds up, but i'll keep you posted.

Originally Posted by ZippZopp

interesting. i have a maximus formula as well and got my BFG gtx 280 a few weeks ago. i've been participating in the power saving issues thread and it is looking like the gtx 280 on an x38 motherboard doesn't throttle down the clock speeds so it runs cooler. so basically, on my maximus formula I have my card idle at about 67c which is kinda high, at load i'm at no higher than 84 or 85, but it is usually under 80c. maybe high idle temps had something to do with yours failing. hopefully mine holds up, but i'll keep you posted.

Well, I guess I'll monitor my temperature closely next card. I wasn't too worried about it since I wasn't overclocking it.

mine finally comes back from RMA tomorrow. hope it lasts more than two hours like the first.

Man that sucks. For a person like me who hasn't built a system for 7 years, I have no hardware compatible to fall back on. All my old hardware is AGP video... doesn't bode well for a PCIe x16 system.

Guess I may be looking for cheap PCIe cards in the for sale section to fall back in case I have to do an RMA with a couple week wait. <shrug>

yeah, same here. i have a couple 4850's in my rig right now, but after i sell those off, i won't have a backup either.

Seriously hoping these aren't the 360's of the PC world...

Originally Posted by TerranUp16

Seriously hoping these aren't the 360's of the PC world...

LOL..Good one!

Originally Posted by g1xx3r

LOL..Good one!

Well, until GTX 280's start exploding, that won't fully come to pass. But damn, from initial impressions these things sound bad. As implied, I got a 360 in March '06- a gen 2- and it red ringed in four months (this was back when there were only three month warranties, failure rates were "less than 3%" and "reasonable", and when they charged $130 to fix their defective crap) and blew-up a couple of weeks later. Luckily I'm not planning on a new card until August (to go with my new system I'll be taking to college) so it will be interesting to see if this is just a bad first batch due to nVidia's pushing the cards out far too soon in order to compete with the HD 4870 or if it is an architectural problem.

Really would like to go with the GTX 280, especially if it does drop down to around $400 (wishful thinking perhaps, but MSRP is $500 now and we've all seen how low distributors have managed to push prices on nVidia cards) by August. CUDA is definitely on the rise and it happens that the engine Wartide is using utilizes nVidia PhysX (well, it was Aegia when the programmers we just linked-up with started programming the engine, but they've modified it heavily), so given that I'm pretty much building this as a development rig the GTX 280 is very appealing. But I'm not keen to repeat the kind of experience I had with the Xbox 360 (or, as I call it, the XplodeBox 360).

can't blame people for hating on the GTX woes. all that should change when they shrink it to smaller fabrication process.

In the same boat as you guys; had my eVGA 280GTX SSC die after about 4 days of use. Was using the eVGA 790i board. eVGA replaced it quick enough. All is well with the new card.... so far.

my new cards has been back in my rig for an hour. running way cooler and spilling a lot less heat into the rest of the case. i'll post back if i have any more problems.

Originally Posted by TerranUp16

Seriously hoping these aren't the 360's of the PC world...

LoL, remember the 7900's? Although I think that was more related to the type of memory used on them, but still, a lot of duds.

Originally Posted by Proxy

LoL, remember the 7900's? Although I think that was more related to the type of memory used on them, but still, a lot of duds.

Admittedly after I got my 6800 Ultra I tuned-out of the gpu world for pretty much an entire generation, lol. Though I ended-up considering a 7900GTX vs. an 8800GTS 320mb Spring '07 and ended-up going with an 8800GTS 640mb Superclocked, lol.