[Geo]

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/articl...ZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

Hrrm. Is this the same issue that pcperspective (I think --or was it TechReport? Edit: Duh, it's right in the article; pcper) addressed originally and NV assured everyone had been dealt with? Or something new?

[sonyps35]

I was just about to post this. And actually thought of posting something like this days ago based on forum posts.

Basically it seems over at Hardocp forums a lot of 7900 GTX's are dying..

Nvidia's hard launch pressure and vendor overclocking biting them in the backside?

[satein]

Probably, NV knew it would be time to upgrade again when G80 comes in very soon (as rumour have it). So, the 7900GTX will serve you just for a stop gap period (if the GTX is dull, the owner will buy out a new one anyway), and it sounds like what ATi did on slide about quick die the GTX coming ture

PS. Don't take it seriously

[digitalwanderer]

Well at least it sounds like the companies are honoring their warranties and aren't shirking the blame, although it sounds like Kyle ain't real enthused with XFX at all....and oddly enough I just spoke to Ryan Dumas last week on the phone my ownself and I can sort of see where he's coming from.

[nutball]

Gosh. Running chips out of specification isn't without consequences. Who'd'a thunk it?

[digitalwanderer]

But it's the whole "manufacturers clocking cards beyond their specs and selling them as stable" bit that doesn't sit right with me.

When an enthusiast does it that's one thing, but when a company is selling an OCed product they should make sure the product can handle the OC.

[JBark]

It seems that manufacturers weren't running the factory OCed cards long enough to weed out the problems. If you read through the evga forums, you'll see that most of the cards worked fine for at least a couple days/weeks, then they started having issues. After they started having problem, even running at nonOCed speed didn't seem to help. And they are handling the RMA process quite well, so that's a plus.

My eVGA 7900GT CO has been fine since March, though we'll see what happens when I step up to the 7900G KO SC. I just want the quieter cooler, but the bump in speed is nice (as long as i works)

[trinibwoy]

Originally Posted by geo

Or something new?

Think it's the same issue. Overclocked boards dying.

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

If you read the forum comments, it seems people are complaining of exactly the same symptoms at standard speeds too.

When a manufacturer overclocks, do they do it with the explicit permission of Nvida? Do they get guidelines on how far they can go, or are they on their own with trial and error?

[Geo]

Originally Posted by trinibwoy

Think it's the same issue. Overclocked boards dying.

Well, that's not a comfort. Part of the pcper piece from April 10th that [H] did not quote was this:

The vendors, and NVIDIA, are being much stricter at the fab where G71 is being manufactured and NVIDIA tells me the new chips going out will be able to run at the speeds the vendors will sell at.

Yet here we are 6 weeks later and "not so much"? Possibly still sell-thru of "pre-much stricter"? One would like to hope, because otherwise some rosy scenario soap got sold to the community six weeks ago, and some people who took that at face value may be regretting it now.

[pharma]

Yep, it's the same issue that was discussed here on April 17th ...

from the HardOP article:

Well today NVIDIA officially got back to me with an answer to all my inquiries on the subject. The short of it is: the GPUs on the cards that were having problems didn’t have the headroom necessary for the vendor’s overclocked specifications. The two most prominent problem areas were the vertex clock (which remember runs 50 MHz faster than the pixel clock) and the memory clock. These GPU subsystems were running far enough out of spec that the chips were having physical issues with stability; causing the random “freezes� we were seeing.

from the TechReport article:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=235

Recently an issue came up with the first batch of 7900 GTX retail cards that were "freezing" in games for 10-30 seconds at time that we have determined is related to the overclock retail cards only. The issue seems to be more related to the vertex clock on the GPU that was running 50 MHz higher than the pixel clock on the G71 by NVIDIA's design. That engine was 50 MHz over whatever the core clock is set at, so a GPU running at 670 MHz had a 720 MHz vertex shader clock. This apparently caused some issues with the chips themselves, causing these freezes.

After talking with BFG and NVIDIA, as well as the other vendors on this issue, it has been mostly resolved. The answer turns out to lower the vertex clock difference or remove it completely in order to get the entire core to run at the same speeds. This doesn't affect performance very much, but does place some concerns on both NVIDIA's and the vendors QA processes.

Todate I've had no issues with my PNY 7900 GTX OC running at 675mHz.

Pharma

[Goragoth]

My brand new (three days old) MSI 7900 GTX at stock speeds (650mHz/800mHz) is having the same problems many others are reporting. So far Dawn of War crashed to desktop after a couple of hours playing and the screen was partially corrupted and would flicker on and off. I was able to see enough to reboot and it seemed fine after that until I played F.E.A.R. for a few hours and when exiting the game bam! same thing again.

Someone at guru3d speculated that this is due to the card not being able to switch from 3d mode to 2d mode properly. Is this possible? Anyway, it seems that 3dmark06 is particlarly problematic so I'm dwnloading that now to test and I'll grab the beta drivers to see if those fix anything. If it remains broken I guess I'll have to RMA

Are there really that many bad cards out there or is there a deeper problem in the BIOS or driver for this card? I would feel somewhat stupid doing the RMA and having the same thing happen with the next card.

[fallguy]

While it may be the overclocked boards dying more, stock clocks boards are as well. This is one of the reasons ATi put a clamp on tampering with the specs of a card years ago. It can give NV a bad rep of producing bad cards.

[Goragoth]

Okay, I've tried 3dmark06 and the Deep Freeze test kills it pretty reliably. First time through going through all the tests it froze completely part way through, had to hard reboot, and the second time (just running the Deep Freeze test) it froze at exactly the same place as the first time but this time it recovered after a couple of seconds and carried on (with a big dip in framerate) but once the test exited the desktop was corrupted and it made with flashing on and off until I managed a soft reboot.

Can anybody here with a 7900GTX confirm being able to run through the Deep Freeze test without problems? At least in that case I can put it down to a bad card, although it seems weird that so many of these cards are failing in pretty much the same way.

I'm grabbing the beta drivers now to see if they fix anything but I'm not holding my breath since the release notes don't mention anything like this.

[SugarCoat]

Originally Posted by fallguy

While it may be the overclocked boards dying more, stock clocks boards are as well. This is one of the reasons ATi put a clamp on tampering with the specs of a card years ago. It can give NV a bad rep of producing bad cards.

The clamp has been off for some weeks now. Very soon cometh the 700/1700 X1900XTXs


Only solution to this is water cooling for everyone!

On a serious note, i dont mean any disrespect to those who like Nvidia cards, but i have had lots of problems like this going back to the 7800s when the gloves were really taken off for overclocking. They dont test many cards that go out. The little write up seems to give the impression that they test each one. A few of the manufacturers have released thousands of units with the completely wrong set of bios in a couple instances with GTX an GT cards from the 7800 series. The AIBs pay little attention to what they're releasing, and rather then testing every card, usually test a random 1 in 20 or 1 in 50 that go out the door. Its obvious the cards are being pushed too hard for the cooling they have. In the cast of many of the 7800 series problems the solution was a bios that removed all dynamic clock function. A beefer cooler is always welcome as well, but that doesnt stop longterm damage.

Goragoth drop your clock by 50MHz and see what happens if drivers dont do anything. You'll lose about 100points in that test and at the most 3FPS in games. If that works and you're adventurous like me you can start hunting around for a new set of bios. eVGA mods/techs in their forum use to build ones on request last time i was there (7months ago).

[Goragoth]

Dropped core/memory clocks by 50mHz each, ran 3dmark06 Deep Freeze and bam! Crash. A little different this time with the graphics in the test itself corrupting, textures vanishing and finally locking up after a few seconds. I suspect there's nothing left but to RMA the damn thing.

[fallguy]

Originally Posted by SugarCoat

The clamp has been off for some weeks now. Very soon cometh the 700/1700 X1900XTXs

Actually, some months now. But yeah, its lifted somewhat. Which ATi needs with so many NV cards being overclocked.

[Goragoth]

Ugh, the underclocking actually seemed to make things worse. About 10-20 seconds into running Dawn of War it crashed with a completely corrupted display. Reseting the clocks to the defaults has at least made it possible to play the game again. Seems odd though.

[atomt]

Originally Posted by JBark

It seems that manufacturers weren't running the factory OCed cards long enough to weed out the problems. If you read through the evga forums, you'll see that most of the cards worked fine for at least a couple days/weeks, then they started having issues. After they started having problem, even running at nonOCed speed didn't seem to help. And they are handling the RMA process quite well, so that's a plus.

My eVGA 7900GT CO has been fine since March, though we'll see what happens when I step up to the 7900G KO SC. I just want the quieter cooler, but the bump in speed is nice (as long as i works)

AMD K6-300/350 have these problem in back in late 98. Start off with 350MHz. After using it for a few hours , the workable clock speed start to drop. (The chip might be good for 370MHz but u won't notice it to fail until it drop below 350Mhz.) The rate of clock speed drop decline and it will stabilize at some lower frequency. Some just die. That problem caused AMD and vendors to implement a lot of additional screens. If voltage is lowered, the rate of degradation slowed down exponentially.

Earlier K6 (200, 233, 266) did not have the problem. AMD eventually fixed the problem but that was a painful period.

Nvidia and/or partners may be pushing clock speed (to compete with X1900XTX) by cranking the voltage up. (Just a wild guess)

I remember slides by ATI marketing on Nvidia clocking the G70 (7800GT) voltage beyond recommendations by TSMC for 110nm. Ironically 7800GTX seem to be reliable. When u flirt with danger, sometime it is OK but sometimes - SHIT HAPPENS. Kind of like Nvidia always
aggressive with using the latest process tech from TSMC until we all known what happened with 130nm/NV30.

I have not read thru the various forums on this but I suspect the problem is more with the 7900GTX than the GT. Nvidia did not need to push the voltage to achieve GT speed even with the small cooler.

[atomt]

Is Nvidia voltage stressing the G71 as well. Anyone have info on the voltage vs recommendations by TSMC?

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...ateStand-5.jpg

[Richteralan]

From my experience with a BFG Geforce 7900GT OC and eVGA e-Geforce 7900GT Signature Series,

I can confidently say the problem isn't with the graphic core.

The first BFG 7900GT worked absolutely perfect for me. NO errors NO artifacts NO lock-ups. Able to overclock pretty high as 570/1720 WITHOUT any artifacts/lock-ups.

The eVGA 7900GT SS is just a bad card. RMAed 3 times and got 3 bad cards. None of them worked through the 2nd day. And all of them having the same problems, as most of the forum users posted. Downclock the graphic memory frequency solved the problem. Downclock the graphic memory frequency while overclocking core frequency has NO problems AT ALL.

Obviously it's a bad batch of GDDR3 from Samsung OR it's a fundemental PCB design/vreg. components failure.

And more funny thing is, NVIDIA/eVGA NEVER acknowledged this. NVIDIA is saying graphic core is overclocked too much and eVGA is just repeating that they will take care of the customers who need to return the card. NOBODY explained WTH is happening and WHY there are so many users experience the same problems.

I'm already getting a RMA with newegg. I don't like to play with these frequent RMA stuffs. I grabbed a X1900XTX from ebay for the same price as 7900GT SS.

Good luck NVIDIA/eVGA

[Richteralan]

Originally Posted by digitalwanderer

But it's the whole "manufacturers clocking cards beyond their specs and selling them as stable" bit that doesn't sit right with me.

When an enthusiast does it that's one thing, but when a company is selling an OCed product they should make sure the product can handle the OC.

That's just NVIDIA blaming others and don't wanna take responsibilities

[Richteralan]

Originally Posted by fallguy

While it may be the overclocked boards dying more, stock clocks boards are as well. This is one of the reasons ATi put a clamp on tampering with the specs of a card years ago. It can give NV a bad rep of producing bad cards.

I'm not sure if it's really related to overclocking. I could oc my BFG to pretty high clock and no signs of failure(yes, n+1 hrs of ATITool artifact scanning/n+1 hrs of RTHDRIBL/and much Oblivion and 3DMarking).

[Richteralan]

Originally Posted by atomt

Nvidia and/or partners may be pushing clock speed (to compete with X1900XTX) by cranking the voltage up. (Just a wild guess)

I remember slides by ATI marketing on Nvidia clocking the G70 (7800GT) voltage beyond recommendations by TSMC for 110nm. Ironically 7800GTX seem to be reliable. When u flirt with danger, sometime it is OK but sometimes - SHIT HAPPENS. Kind of like Nvidia always
aggressive with using the latest process tech from TSMC until we all known what happened with 130nm/NV30.

I have not read thru the various forums on this but I suspect the problem is more with the 7900GTX than the GT. Nvidia did not need to push the voltage to achieve GT speed even with the small cooler.

The eVGA 7900GT Signature Series increased 3D core voltage from 1.2V to 1.45V.

This maybe dangerous because the HSF is too lame when compared with 7900GTX.

But I wouldn't think this is the cause because some 7900GTX is failing as well.

[satein]

Originally Posted by Richteralan

From my experience with a BFG Geforce 7900GT OC and eVGA e-Geforce 7900GT Signature Series,
...

I'm already getting a RMA with newegg. I don't like to play with these frequent RMA stuffs. I grabbed a X1900XTX from ebay for the same price as 7900GT SS.

Good luck NVIDIA/eVGA

Agree, even if the manufacturer pay their responsibility on RMA but it is not WORTH our time and EFFORT doing it frequently! The RMA one, at least, should be tested before hand out to us again.... sigh....