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Faulty Asus HD 7970 Matrix Platinum

paulpiazza

paulpiazza

paulpiazza

Associate
Joined
23 Jun 2014
Posts
46
Hi all, I purchased an ASUS HD 7970 matrix platinum graphics card around the end of October, and the card is showing graphical glitches whilst gaming, thinking back on this, it has done it from very early days in my having it, but not being one to generally complain and also not being sure it was the card (thought it could just be the games) I let it go, but recently I have been playing some games and the glitching can make it unplayable. Plus, it happens on too many games to be just the games themselves.

I then started looking up this problem and have found it to be very common with lots of postings on this fault with it pointing mainly at the vram and lack of heat sinks and cooling.

I do not overclock the card and get the glitches under factory speeds so the other day I decided to contact OCUK and got myself an RMA number.

I have sent the card off yesterday afternoon and it will hopefully be with the testers by Friday. I also included a DVD of me filming the glitches as they happen on crisis 3 so they have an idea what I am talking about.

Having never sent anything back my question is really;-

How long does the process normally take?

Do they really have to send it to ASUS when they find it faulty? they must have had a lot of this happen with this card, judging on the amount of posts I have seen on the net, and on this forum alone.

Also, what would happen if there is no replacement available?

I'm really not looking forward to the prospect of being pc less from a gaming point of view for too long, especially as I am half way through watchdogs !!

Thanks for any insights in advance !
 
OCuk are generally pretty decent with the RMA process.

If there is no replacement they will probably refund you your money, i don't know if the card needs to go to Asus before they can do that but i would imagine if they find it faulty you'll simply get a replacement or refund.
 
Unfortunately RMA (especially to Asus) could take a while.

If you can finanically afford it, it'd probably be best to buy another card to use now, and then sell off the replacement when you receive it.
 
I have one of these cards, and although it has been excellent in most respects, I have had some artifacting too. Unfortunately, I've seen quite a number of problems mentioned from users on these forums. In my case, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it; sometimes I won't see any artifacting for quite a while (so little in fact that I temporarily forget that I've had a problem in the first place), then it rears its ugly head again. I was considering sending mine back, though I've concluded that it probably isn't worth it just yet. If it gets worse, then I will.

I don't know for sure, but I would have thought OcUK might have a system in place where they could turn around a replacement quite quickly (for brands like Asus / Powercolor and so on). I'll be interested to see how you get on. :)
 
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I've also got a ASUS 7970 Matrix Platinum (bought it in September last year) and I must say I'm very happy with it, it's never given me any problems at all. I guess when problems like this happen and you search on the internet, it's only ever the bad reports that come up, and it will only be a tiny part of a single percent of all the 7970 Matrix Platinum's sold.
Good luck with your RMA buddy, and let us all know how it goes and what the out come is :)
 
Mine had the same problem at stock. I got rid of it for £300 during the mining craze. Good luck with the rma bud.
 
Asus are pretty slow on rma's, one guy here (Gregster) had to wait 6 weeks to get a replacement titan card. =/ IM currently waiting on my 7990 bneing replaced\repaired\refunded\whatever they're gonna do with it, 10 days so far.
 
Thanks for the responses guys, lets hope it sails through smoothly, i will keep you all posted as and when things happen. Oh and snips86x i would love to do that with the crossfire thing, just one llittle thing in the way called cashflow lol. Cheers
 
Well it turns out that I needn't have worried about the speed in which my card was dealt with ! In fact it took 1 whole minute, got a message 20 mins ago saying card received, and then in the same minute got another email saying card rejected due to the "serial number being defaced"

There was a sticker on the back that was half attached to a plastic cover on the back plate of the card when I received and installed it and it would not come off without tearing the sticker accidentally.

I have rang them and they are saying because it has been tampered with they cannot do anything and are sending the card back to me.

surely there is another serial number on the card somewhere that they can check its validity.

Feeling really sick now as I appreciate ocuk have to protect themselves against people that are "at it" but im genuinely not at it and also installed the card with care and don't really know where to go from here !!!
 
paulpiazza said:
and in this video, when this guy removes the plastic cover at 6 minutes in, this is what I did but it tore the sticker (never thought it too important at the time)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl7FQY-YOgQ
Click to expand...
I don't think the guy "removed" the tape, but more like his particular card didn't came with the tape over the serial-number label.

Since you have already teared the serial-number label, I'm afraid the warranty has been voided and there's not much OcUK can do about it (as Asus isn't going to accept the rma from them neither with the label being in that condition...).

I'm afraid the only option you have left is when you received your card back, create a thread to details the (behaviour of) faults and hope that it is just software level fault rather than hardware level fault which people can give you advice on for possible fixes. The best you could hope for is that the glitches you refer to is may be only caused by instability of the high factory overclock on the card, which can easily be resolved either by using 3rd party software to reduce the clock speeds of the card, or increase the voltage...or if necessary, flashing the bios to a different version.
 
Thanks for that, suppose im just clutching at straws really, and just hoped it has happened to someone else that could verify it ( not that it would help much ). I have seen a couple of videos on the net showing a cure with the problem being that there are 4 vram chips with no heat sinks on them, the video shows the fitting ( if a little slapdash in my opinion ) of some heat sinks to these open modules

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz2ybPrjhdw

this coupled with some new thermal paste on the gpu should hopefully solve it.

Didn't want to do this before because I thought it would invalidate my warranty but it seems that my warranty is invalidated now anyway :-(

Just seems a bit unfair that I have something seven months old that I can prove I have purchased and is faulty (in my opinion) and I no longer have any comeback because of a tiny little sticker on the back of a plate on the card.

Surely the serial number is in the software of the card and plugging it in would show it ( I still have the box to prove the number )
 
If the card is 28 days or older then unfortunately it will be sent to ASUS. I know this because I've just had to RMA my 290X (in my sig), which was purchased in April, and will be going to MSI. I can't speak for how long it would take as I've never had to RMA an ASUS product. I'm just sat hoping mine doesn't take long, as I've no spare GPU and I'm having to write this from a tablet. Mine was only a fan issue too, which makes things frustrating.

Best of luck.

Edit: posted this before reading the replies, damn it. I'm sorry your card was rejected :(
 
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I'm sorry to hear that, dude. Perhaps you could try talking to Bailey in customer services, and direct him to this thread? Worth a shot if nothing else.

Thanks for the link to the last video. I'll bookmark it in case. :)
 
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paulpiazza said:
Thanks for that, suppose im just clutching at straws really, and just hoped it has happened to someone else that could verify it ( not that it would help much ). I have seen a couple of videos on the net showing a cure with the problem being that there are 4 vram chips with no heat sinks on them, the video shows the fitting ( if a little slapdash in my opinion ) of some heat sinks to these open modules

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz2ybPrjhdw

this coupled with some new thermal paste on the gpu should hopefully solve it.

Didn't want to do this before because I thought it would invalidate my warranty but it seems that my warranty is invalidated now anyway :-(

Just seems a bit unfair that I have something seven months old that I can prove I have purchased and is faulty (in my opinion) and I no longer have any comeback because of a tiny little sticker on the back of a plate on the card.

Surely the serial number is in the software of the card and plugging it in would show it ( I still have the box to prove the number )
Click to expand...

Its not the serial number itself as such they need,, but the sticker's are often placed where say you removed the cooler etc would move/tear it and so invalidate the warranty, sadly not a lot you can do but try and try and fix it yourself
 
I have had issues with mine as well. I did speak to Bailey about this and we worked together so try and solve it. It seems that the problem was due to the memory being clocked higher than recommended spec. Most cards got away with it but a few could run without glitches. It was difficult so reproduce in benchmarks but not in games.

I decided to lower the memory clock to 1500 mhz in the ccc panel and the glitches stopped. Now I only see it when changing drivers and forgetting to lower it.

Bailey was great and told me that he will take care of the warranty if I get fed up of it, but it's such a great looking card so I kept it.

Try lowering the clocks and see how you go.
 
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