7900 GTX cards keep dying

Everyone who has a 7900GTX should do the test HeavyH20 has done with the last scene on 3dmark and then post what results they got after doing it.
 
You can only choose the last test exclusively with the full version. Otherwise, you have to wait almost 6 minutes to get to the last test.
 
Well I did the "Deep Freeze" test 50 times tonight and everything is still running fine.
 
That what I have never understood about the memory speed ,I had two 7900GT KO which has 1.4ns memory on them and one will overclock to 1950 and the other will do 1860 and I have seen 1.1ns that would'nt even do 1750.
 
^^ has to do with loosening the memory timings on the 79GTs.. that's why they can hit those high OCs with slower memory.
 
Well, a bit of good news. The card I just got from RMA seems to be working fine. I edited the BIOS to reduce the throttle clock to 600 from 630, loosened the memory timings back to Samsung spec, and reduced the memory clock in 2D to 650 from 800 (why heat the memory browsing the web). I kept the 50 Mhz delta and stock 3D clocks of 690/880.

With those changes, I looped the last testof 3DMark06 50 times without any artifacts, hiccups or odd behavior. It scored 29.4 fps average for the 50 runs at default driver settings. Not too bad.

I will do another run, verify it works then flash the card back to stock SC. Then, I will see what the stock BIOS can do.
 
HeavyH20, everything has been running great here aswell. Not sure if the BF2 issue I had was a minor hiccup but since the Deep Freeze 50 round test I haven't had any problems at all.

BF2 is my main game and the fact that it glitched scared the bloody piss outta me, especially after reading about troubles people were having. All seems well now. /me breathes sigh of relief!
 
Well, the 7900GTXOC that I just got back from BFG in an RMA fixed most of the problems, but...

Still crashes during test 5 and 6 of 3DMark06.

Finishes the benchmark, but develops graphical problems and requires a reboot after 3DMark05.

I'm going to email BFG Tech today and see what I can do about getting a card that works. This is my 3rd card I'm on right now.
 
What kind of issues are you seeing in test 5? Usually that test points to bad memory on the system, not the card. Are you seeing artifacts in test 6? Or, are you simply experiencing lock-ups? How about the flashing desktop after exiting the benchmark? There are a few components at work.
 
Basically, the screen keeps acting like it is changing resolutions after test 5. It will keep going to black and then flashing on. Also, the desktop graphic will start keeping some images (windows that were open, etc.) visually frozen in place even if I close them and graphics will get garbled. The flashing desktop that you mention is basically what happens.

No artifacts in test 6 aside from everything that happens above even worse to the point that Windows is unusable and eventually locks up.

My system is rock solid aside from these problems that happen from the two recent 3DMarks (05 & 06). CPU is rock solid Prime stable and memory is rock solid Memtest 86+ stable.
 
Anyone try the BIOS update Mario is emailing out on the evga forums? My first card couldn't run Deep Freeze without a BSoD. My replacement isn't nearly as bad, but it does artifact in BF2 and has come to a crawl before.
 
Mine is finally dead, everything went to total shit last night. Its unplayable and wont even display 2 d now , I am having one overnighted from Newegg and sooner or later evga will ship my rma replacement. I hope i have better luck in sli with the new cards.
 
Mine just died. Noticed some strange lines in Oblivion...decided to loop test 6 on 3dmark06 and I noticed artifacts/flashing desktop on exiting. First day I got it, it was able to pass 120 rounds of test 6 on 3dmark06. Plus I even looped the rest of the tests overnight.
 
I am realy loosing patience with these people. I got an rma number on May 10 and sent them a credit card form for cross shipemnt and still no fucking card. They claim the did not get the form twice. I just faxed it a 3rd fucking time and they say they are shipping today.


I am steaming I am so fucking pissed. I do not like getting my chained jerked by a company that i have advocated for so long. My experience has been the opposite of what i have come to expect and gotten for customer service from these guys. They must be overwelmed with defectives.
 
Question to owners of Dead 7900 GTX : How long did it take to die ?

I've had mine for 1 month working flawlessly. I can push my PNY at 690/880 without a hiccup but usually keep it lower (675/875). Ran many times 3dMark06 fine. So I guess I got a good specimen even though the delta is 50.
 
Dammit! Why did I have to read this thread! Now I am sweating bullets here at work worrying that my new baby (7900GTX) is going to die soon.....

=(...
 
HeavyH20 said:
Well, a bit of good news. The card I just got from RMA seems to be working fine. I edited the BIOS to reduce the throttle clock to 600 from 630, loosened the memory timings back to Samsung spec, and reduced the memory clock in 2D to 650 from 800 (why heat the memory browsing the web). I kept the 50 Mhz delta and stock 3D clocks of 690/880.

With those changes, I looped the last testof 3DMark06 50 times without any artifacts, hiccups or odd behavior. It scored 29.4 fps average for the 50 runs at default driver settings. Not too bad.

I will do another run, verify it works then flash the card back to stock SC. Then, I will see what the stock BIOS can do.
Click to expand...
Please enlighten me on what software/procedures I need to "fix" my cards....especially the RAM timings, I don't understand videocard RAM timings nor do I know of a way to edit them....
 
blurp said:
Question to owners of Dead 7900 GTX : How long did it take to die ?

I've had mine for 1 month working flawlessly. I can push my PNY at 690/880 without a hiccup but usually keep it lower (675/875). Ran many times 3dMark06 fine. So I guess I got a good specimen even though the delta is 50.
Click to expand...

My first lasted 60 days , my second 72 hours give or take befrore degradation began and 10days to near complete failure
 
My first card (EVGA) didn't produce a video signal - so it failed immediately.

The second card (BFG this time instead of EVGA as I did the RMA directly with newegg) had problems immediately.

The third card (BFG - my RMA replacement card after doing the RMA directly with BFG) seemed to fix the problems I had with the first BFG card, but as soon as I started doing video stability testing showed the problems with 3DMark 06 and 05 right away. All games I play (Oblivion and BF2) currently are fine, it's just 3dmark that shows the problems this card has.

I am currently emailing BFG Tech Support right now on this issue. I will update this thread with however that goes.
 
Sovereign said:
Please enlighten me on what software/procedures I need to "fix" my cards....especially the RAM timings, I don't understand videocard RAM timings nor do I know of a way to edit them....
Click to expand...

Well, once I verify the new settings actually help, then we can do these changes. Don't want to do anything drastic too early. I am getting ready to loop this BIOS for a few hours to determine how well it works.
 
OK, thanks! If they work, I would like them so that I can verify that my 7900GTXs are "safe" (but since they're STOCK cards, if they're not safe something's gonna die....)
 
Well, just looped the last test of 3DMark06 for 3 hours. No artifacts, no issues. So far, so good.
 
I always clean my cards before I mount the waterblocks. So, there should be no flux. Front or back, for that matter.
 
HeavyH20 said:
Well, a bit of good news. The card I just got from RMA seems to be working fine. I edited the BIOS to reduce the throttle clock to 600 from 630, loosened the memory timings back to Samsung spec, and reduced the memory clock in 2D to 650 from 800 (why heat the memory browsing the web). I kept the 50 Mhz delta and stock 3D clocks of 690/880.

With those changes, I looped the last testof 3DMark06 50 times without any artifacts, hiccups or odd behavior. It scored 29.4 fps average for the 50 runs at default driver settings. Not too bad.

I will do another run, verify it works then flash the card back to stock SC. Then, I will see what the stock BIOS can do.
Click to expand...


when you set the memory speed in 2d mode lower than in 3d mode when you switch to 3d mode the memory doesnt speed up to what you set in 3d mode. atleast thats what i noticed. try it in coolbits. select your 2d mode then switch to the 3d mode. the memory clock didnt change did it?
 
If you use Coolbits, I see two different speeds. 650 for 2D and 880 for 3D.

As for the core, with a 50 MHz delta, it seemed 630 (680) was a little high for a 650(700) norm. I made a 50 MHz difference to 600(650) to allow the throttle to actually have the right effect by dropping a little more than 20 Mhz. Also, the memory throttle is now 750 versus 800. Just in case. I set the memory spec to Samsung 1.1/1.2 ns spec, as well.

I will loop it overnight and see what happens. Changing the settings to High Quality, 4xAA, 4xAF and 1920x1600 to really work the card.

Edit: Oh ya, it's an NVIDIA card. Can't do HDR and AA. So, no AA on the last test. The widescreen test only looped a few times before the herky jerky effects showed up.
 
HeavyH20 said:
If you use Coolbits, I see two different speeds. 650 for 2D and 880 for 3D.

As for the core, with a 50 MHz delta, it seemed 630 was a little high for a 650 norm. I made a 50 MHz difference to 600 to allow the throttle to actually have the right effect. Also, the memory throttle is now 750 versus 800. Just in case. I set the memory spec to Samsung 1.1/1.2 ns spec, as well.

I will loop it overnight and see what happens.
Click to expand...


yes it shows 2 different speeds but i dont think the card changes from 2d to 3d speed as far as the memory goes.

and the delta is completely different from what you think it is. its actually related to the clock speed of the Shaders and ROPS. Say your card was running at 650MHz and you had a 50mhz Delta set. What that means is that the Shaders and ROPS are actually running at 700MHZ (650+50=700)
 
The memory does indeed change from 2D to 3D if the values are actually different. The stock card is set at 800 MHz on both. The SC card is set at 880 in 3D and 800 in 2D. That is normal. As for the delta, it only affects the vertex clock, not the ROP/Shader. That clock value is determined by the root clock. It has been that way since the 7800 GTX.

So, a 650/800 card will do 700 vertex and 648 ROP/Shader (whole value of 27 MHz oscillation). So, a 40 MHz delta is all that was need on the 7800 GTX and now, due to higher clocks, the 50 MHz delta is used.

If you had a zero delta, then the ROP/Shader cores lock to the vertex and do not make any 27 MHz jumps. The ROP/Shader normally jumps from 648 to 675 to 702 and then 729. If your root clock (on a delta BIOS) is within 13 MHz of one of these whole values of 27, it makes the bump. So, a 688 clock sets it at 675 and a 689 clock sets it at 702.

But, alas, the card is starting to show slight artifacts in the last test of 3DMark06 (second last scene). So, four hours of 3DMark06 at normal 1280 x 1024 settings and no issues. 15 minutes testing in widescreen mode (1920x1200) and the card has begun the death cycle. From here, the memory will slowly get worse, the artifacts will expand, and when exiting a 3D application (game) the desktop will start to flash once the memory has degraded below a tolerance for 800 MHz. The card used to pass 920 on the memory. Now, 890 fails. Once it gets below the stock clocks (880), lock up will likely occur. I will have to clock the memory lower and lower until the memory decays below 800. Then it is likely RMA time, again...
 
My replacement card just started developing artifacts in BF2 in addition to the problems with 3dmark...
 
A few months ago (right before the 7900 was released) I put together a system with two 7800s in Sli (XFX brand, the XXX OC edition, whatever it is called...) with an AMD FX-60...

Seeing that many games (literally) are CPU-bottlebecked (to my surprise), I figure that upgrading to the 7900 models was not necessary... But then I saw benchies of 7800 vs. 7900 and I could not help but consider it...

but if I would have to worry about any issues (my sys is 100% stable...), I'll just wait...

I was gonna just wait anyways until DX10/Vista is out, and the cards for such are out...

Anyone want to recommend that I should upgrade my 7800SLI config now instead of just waiting (a yr at most I would hope) for Vista and the dx10 cards?

I know, slightly OT, but not a complete tangent, I hope... Just want opinions if the 7900 issue is something to avoid if my 7800 system is adequate...

(I was a bit disappt to load up my fave racing games and still see they drop into the teens in fps at times... damn...)
 
Well, I am really wishing I still had my 7800 GTX 512 cards right now. I have read comments from 7900 GTX owners about how they are afraid to play any games with AA and AF options turned up for fear of breaking their brand new shiny(OK, after you clean the flux off) video card.

I am a little disappointed with all the issues, the time expended to troubleshoot the issue to no avail, and NVIDIA's stance that there is nothing pervasively wrong with the 7900. Just the normal odd bad card in the bunch. Right. I have never seen so many threads about looking for a fix for a video card.

Some have mentioned that people post only when something is wrong, not when something is right. But, these same people that have been complaining have also been relatively loyal. They are modifying the card BIOS, trying new drivers, underclocking their cards, and avoiding using the card as it was intended.

The 7800 cards were solid, and the 7900 offers little real world gains. I would stick with the 7800s until the new gen DX10 hardware is available.
 
Well, now that the artifacts appeared, the last test simply locks up in the second last scene of the last SM 3.0 HDR test. Talk about a fast decline.
 
dR.Jester said:
My Battlefield 2 just started doing this tonight. After I thought everything is fine, BF2 starts f'ing up BAD!

http://www.laidbackcrew.com/gallery/files/2/7/1/Image2.jpg

This freaking sucks, and guess what fixes it? When I alt-tab out of the game and come back, no more problems but when they do start to happen is annoying.
Click to expand...



Yup that is almost exactly the behavior my cards did , and them some, i had blue trees , entire airfields going to triangles , the entire sky going to vertrises. I am going sli and if these cards dont work, I am calling my lawyer with a request to oraganize a possible class action lawsuit. I really like nvidia but at nearly 600 a pop , I am going to want free g80 replacements or a couple of 7950's to appease me. We are reaching the point where punitive damages may be necessary. I mean really, it is obvious there is a serious issue here and I have yet to see Nvidia respond in a manner that fully acknowleges it.
 
May be its too early but at the very least I think the issue has reached a level that perhaps Kyle and the boys could do an article on it to bring more attention to the problem
 
jacuzz1 said:
May be its too early but at the very least I think the issue has reached a level that perhaps Kyle and the boys could do an article on it to bring more attention to the problem
Click to expand...

Exactly what I was thinking.

At this point, I don't know that I can get a refund anymore since I am doing the RMA directly with BFG instead of newegg.
 
KJ43 said:
Exactly what I was thinking.

At this point, I don't know that I can get a refund anymore since I am doing the RMA directly with BFG instead of newegg.
Click to expand...

For some warranty claims, if your defect is not fixed in a reasonable amount of time, you're entitled to a buy back from the manufacturer.

I did this on one of my Philips tv sets, don't know how it would work on the graphics cards.
 
Well I just fired up the one i got overnighted from newegg. This one has visable scratches on the sli finger as though it had been used or tested. Anyway , the fuking thing lasted 20 minutes in bf2 before it began to artifact.

I ran CS stress test, no issues at max candy, max res 122fps
I ran fear test benchie 15 times and no issues at 2560x1600 as well with soft shadows off and no artifacts. Could it be that BF2 just plain sucks ?

Fuck! this game ran fine for two months on my first 7900.
 
I feel your pain. I have been fighting this for the last month. I just came to a point where I gave up. These cards are absolutely awesome when they work. I just wish that could be longer than a few weeks.
 
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