MSI ATI Radeon HD 5850 RMA?

[renandstimpy]

Bought one of these 2 weeks ago and I think it could be faulty. I say could because a few days ago, I had black pixels on my desktop which got worse as I scrolled up and down, weird. Also had the squealing noise a few of you have reported, although that has only happened a few times, and not heard it for a while. My question is, if I RMA it, how do overclockers test for faults? Im afraid none will be found because the problems I get aren't consistent. It's like bordering on ok and faulty, and sending it back might be as waste of time. What should I do?

 

[ThomasTheTankEngine]

Before you send it back....... have you tried reinstalling the drivers? Or installing several different versions of the driver? I've had artifacts with my 5850 which were caused by one of the drivers: I reinstalled and everything was fine.

 

[renandstimpy]

I've not seen the artifacts for a while, and I have updated to 11.1, so since the new drivers, its been artifact free, but it was most of the time before. Same with the very loud squealing, heard it before the driver update, but that cant be driver related can it?
So I dont think overclockers would find a fault, even though I know it has to be faulty.

 

[mrfil13]

When i got my 5850 twin frozr i get the black dot artifacts in windows but it would be fine playing a game. Also the system would blue screen after 10/20 mins at the desktop. I tried mine on a fresh install + different drivers and a different PC and the problem was consistent.

Now if your not getting any bluescreens/artifacts etc it will be hard for them to find a fault.

What i would do is get it to run Furmark for along time and also try unigine, if its not in good shape one of them should find an issue.

 

[renandstimpy]

I ran Furmark for 2 hours at 775core 1125mem
No artifacts, or squealing noise. Temp went up to 75C ish tho. That an ok temp?

 

[BISH422]

75 is a lot higher than mine goes, do you have good air flow in your case, and how fast was fan set to ??

MIne hits about 55C max even clocked to 900 core with fan at 40ish %

idles at 33C fans at 26%

 

[Macky]

I'm RMAing mine for Capacitor squeal.

 

[mrfil13]

Depends on your case cooling, mine is overclocked to 890/1125 and 30 mins of kombuster it hits 66c at 55% fan speed. I have a side case fan blowing over the 5850, turning the side fan off brought the temp upto 70% even though it only spins slowly.

 

[renandstimpy]

I'm RMAing mine for Capacitor squeal.

How often do you hear it?