bye bye gpu, maybe

[Sammy]

7 months of light use and my evga nvidia card looks to be toast. Computer wouldnt even post this morning with it installed (I think) and no signal is sent to the monitor. Did all the usual things like strip everything out except the cpu&ram. The fans looked to be running. I am currently running my amd card with everything else put back and all seems to be fine. The newer card is 8-pin power while the amd is 6. Something wrong there maybe? Anything I can do to check for that? Any other things I can do to see if its the card or something else? All worked fine when I shut down last night.

 

Anybody ever do the cross-shipment RMA with evga? I am %99 sure the card is a goner. But I fear in the back of my mind that they would check it out and find nothing wrong with it then send it back. Or keep it but not refund the cost of the replacement card.

[WiZiD]

You dont know anyone with a computer that could check it? You really should take the RAM out and just put it back in. Bad Memory will cause no video as well. Try one stick at a time. If you take the cooler off the CPU and do not see any thermal compound or its dried up. it could be your CPU. That will cause you to have no video. Do you watch your temps when you game?

[J3st3r]

Most of the time they won't even test the card unless it's a Higher end card then they may repair it.My Brother had a 6 month old GTX 970 go bad back in October and they offered to not only RMA it but Upgrade it to the GTX 980ti 6gb card for $100 which is a smoking deal.

 

http://www.evga.com/support/ear/

 

With EAR they ship the new card right away and you put your card in the pre paid box they send with it and ship it to them free of charge.They still offer the Step-Up program so if your interested in upgrading now would be the best time if you have the cash.

 

 

 

 

If your confident that the card is bad but not 100% sure you can give them a call ask for Tech Support. U.S. and Canadian Customers: 888.880.EVGA (3842)

[Sammy]

Their tech support emailed me that so long as they get it back, working or not, then they will refund the money. If it does actually work for some reason they just put it through their recertification process. The step up program expires after 90 days according to the product registration page.

 

Thermal compound is only a few months old.  Yea I did the memory thing as well and I would think if my amd card works fine then its unlikely to be memory anyways. I dont do gaming much except cod4 occasionally. Usually modding. I do some short term CPU intensive processes for digital video. But those are not offloaded to the GPU and I watch CPU temps to make sure they dont exceed rated thermal limits.

 

This did make me check out current technologies for mb/cpu/memory. The mb and mem are a bit on the older side. The processor not too bad. The good stuff, but not top of the tine, is a bit pricey for me all at once. I could get an AM3+ board+mem and keep my processor for now. Intel i5's looks nice as always but a bit steep.

[Damage_inc-]

You dont know anyone with a computer that could check it? You really should take the RAM out and just put it back in. Bad Memory will cause no video as well. Try one stick at a time. If you take the cooler off the CPU and do not see any thermal compound or its dried up. it could be your CPU. That will cause you to have no video. Do you watch your temps when you game?

excellent advice

[HellTiger]

I have used the cross ship RMA with EVGA. I highly recommend cross shipping your faulty product.

Also call EVGA to help you troubleshoot. They have some very knowledgeable people in tech support who I have used to help me when I get stumped.

Edited February 26, 2016 by HellTigris

[ChknFngr]

yea that is why i only buy evga cards. i had one bad card they send me another one and an upgraded version ... love it

[Sammy]

For the cross-shipment I will have to pay $200 collateral on my card, as they call it. Which is fine so long as I get the money back in a reasonable amount of time after they receive the bad card. Tried a couple other things this morning, just to see if there is any kind of change, but nope. I think the system itself actually boots up because when I put back the amd card win7 said something about an unexpected shutdown after I logged in and the desktop loaded.

[J3st3r]

Yep sounds like she's cooked.I would not keep plugging it in you could hurt your mobo.

Might be a good thing in the long run if you can upgrade.Ask Tec support if you can still Upgrade your GPU.More than likely you will still be able to.

[Sammy]

Already went through the process so we shall see what they send. The card itself was a gift so I dont have the original invoice. They might have required that.

 

The mb+mem are old by todays standards. The cpu (phII 965 black) is still considered relatively good so it seems. So when budgets are tight might just upgrade those two things to keep costs down. Probably need a new cpu cooler as well.

[WiZiD]

How much memory do you have. Pleas heck your mother boards memory compatibility list as I may have that for you. (and please post it here) For free of course. What do you have for a cooler now as I might also have something a little better for you, for that as well. I am like the AMD guy around here. Lots of old junk..hehe

[J3st3r]

965 BE is a decent CPU yet.I didn't really see much improvement in upgrading to the FX 8350 until I put 16 gig of decent memory in.Then it was very noticeable especially when doing video conversions.

 

Higher end Intel chips will always be better but not everyone can afford them.Good Intel Motherboards are still almost 2x the price of the best AMD 990fx motherboard.

[Sammy]

I have 8gb mem, which is the max the board can handle. I did say it was a bit old.

 

My cooler is the big ass Zalman one that looks like an airplane turbine. I forget the name of it.  But then again a lot of them are huge these days. It still works fine I am sure, but it is a bit on the noisy side.

[Sammy]

Fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck!!!

 

- Eric Cartman

 

Shit. Got the cross-shipment and it doesnt work either. Did everything I could short of taking it completely apart and reseating the cooler. I was hoping not to do that. But reinstalling the cards (using the old amd one again now, still on nvidia drivers so nothing more than basic use)  I noticed that the cooler actually looks to be significantly off center. Maybe. So I wonder if I fried the cpu at least a little. Or something else related. However I dont know why that would cause this gpu to not even show posting info while the amd one does.

 

Does explain how within the last couple weeks why cooling didnt seem to be quite as good under moderate to higher loads. Not overheating. Just maybe not enough. Idle is 39. Not great but a little higher than average for this cpu I think.

 

Since I am on a budget I hate spending money if I can upgrade things cheaply. However the cpu/mb/mem are kinda old and already at the upper limits. Assuming something is actually broken I would only be replacing parts in an older system with previous generation parts. I suppose the most cost efficient thing to do would be to upgrade the core components instead of throwing more money at older ones. I dunno. Amazon does have some very nice deals on i5 processors right now.

 

Once I come up with something I will post possibilities, maybe someone has experience with them. But for boards I am leaning MSI or asus, crucial or corsair mem, and a mid range i5. Any suggestions on good mb's? It will need to be beefy enough for some heavy graphics and likely Unreal. Gotta go make dinner but I have already made up a 'worst case scenario' list of possible combinations to purchase so will be going through them again.