Powercolor Radeon 6800 - 1 year later, had enough of the faults...

[Tefty0uk]

So I brought a Powercolor Radeon 6800 a year ago thanks to Gibbo posting on the forums during the poop storm back then of opening orders for 5-minute slots.

At first the card was pretty unstable, constant DX errors on games, black screens etc etc...
Replaced my PSU as it was getting on (Sunflower 1kw), upgraded my ram (because why not...), stressed my CPU and Mobo with my old 1070 and no issues at all so all pointed to the card.

Convinced myself it was a driver issue and things got a little better over time, DX errors disappeared etc... but still the card would black screen every few days and a hard reboot was in order. Mobo lights indicate the graphics card has disappeared and its as if the card has pulled too much power or something and then just dumps itself.
Windows logs indicate the graphics card seems to have suffered a power loss as graphics card errors appear in the logs before the unexpected system shutdown which is probably me hard booting it to fix the issue.

What's even more annoying is that I can't replicate the issue. Sometimes I can go days being fine, others hours. I've tried Undervolting, overclocking, pumping more power into the card, ramping the fans up so the GPU and bridge are nice and cool, nothing seems to work.

Giving the graphics card poop storm and lack of access to the cards I bent over and took one up the shooter accepted it is what it is until now a year later its got to the point I've had enough as its literally once a day and trying to play my favourite game atm, FFXIV, has become a nightmare as I have to reboot and join a 4+ hour queue to get back in and game until the card craps out again.

Gonna phone OC in the morning and request an RMA because it's driving me nuts now but what's the likelihood of this getting sorted any time soon if at all with the current state of GPU's as they are.

 

[The_Arbiter]

6800s are like hen's teeth. I've not seen one in stock anywhere for a long time. You could likely end up with a refund/vouchers sadly.

 

[Jimbo]

Silly question but you have obviously tried a full fresh install of windows haven't you? No problems at all with my Sapphire 6800XT Nitro.

 

[gpuerrilla]

6800s are like hen's teeth. I've not seen one in stock anywhere for a long time. You could likely end up with a refund/vouchers sadly.

Same, I Have never seen one in stock, I probably was not hawking obsessively over it but all the rest of the lineup I have seen just not this one over all the retailers. Hopefully they RMA him an XT for nothing.

 

[eeii]

Sounds like you have had bad luck with that one. You could try. Few things. Like making sure separate power cables are used and changing what sockets they are in on your power supply. I would also factory reset your drivers and game with default settings. Update your bios and chip set drivers aswell.

 

[Heinz57]

Sounds very unlucky. Without wising to tempt fate, my reference RX6800 is probably one of the best cards I've ever owned. Quiet, quick and no problems with drivers at all.

Are you using two separate PCI-E cables to power it? I've heard using just one cable (with two plugs) has caused problems with Radeons in the past.

 

[Firegod]

That was going to be my 2 questions as well.

1. Confirm you are using 2 separate cables to power the card, not one cable with two connectors.
2. Try a fresh Windows install (or at the very least confirm Windows is OK by doing an SFC /scannow and perhaps a DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth).

Perhaps maybes check that Mobo BIOS is up-to-date as well.

 

[Joxeon]

Try dropping the core and VRAM clocks and see if it still crashes.

 

[LeMson]

Powercolor 5700xt red devil, had to rma it 3 weeks after buying cos it died , it dissapeared for 4 weeks with them, they still have it and never contacted me, ghosted me when I contacted them, so after a month with no card ocuk gave me a full refund. Powercolor are a terrible company, wouldn't buy a powercolor card ever again..... Good luck with your rma

 

[Freddie1980]

I have the a similar problem with my Sapphire 6600XT Nitro+, it will black screen on startup and I'll have to reboot often several times in order to get to work.

Sadly this sort of stuff has been going on for years now at AMD, they rush products out without proper QA and we get threads like this. You can go back as far as the Radeon Fury line up, there's plenty of people reported issues with the Radeon 7 and RDNA 1 cards (see above). What's even worse AMD drags their heals when it comes to fixes, unless a big Youtuber makes a fuss these problems will drag on for months or just never get addressed. Their graphics division really needs to get there house in order because this hyper demand for there chips won't last forever.

IWhatever you do don't accept a refund as strange as that sounds as you more then likely won't be able to get an equivalent card for the same money.

 

[Harlequin]

I have the a similar problem with my Sapphire 6600XT Nitro+, it will black screen on startup and I'll have to reboot often several times in order to get to work.

Sadly this sort of stuff has been going on for years now at AMD, they rush products out without proper QA and we get threads like this. You can go back as far as the Radeon Fury line up, there's plenty of people reported issues with the Radeon 7 and RDNA 1 cards (see above). What's even worse AMD drags their heals when it comes to fixes, unless a big Youtuber makes a fuss these problems will drag on for months or just never get addressed. Their graphics division really needs to get there house in order because this hyper demand for there chips won't last forever.

IWhatever you do don't accept a refund as strange as that sounds as you more then likely won't be able to get an equivalent card for the same money.

AMD dont build the boards, and exactly the same thing happens at Nvidia as well.

 

[TNA]

So I brought a Powercolor Radeon 6800 a year ago thanks to Gibbo posting on the forums during the poop storm back then of opening orders for 5-minute slots.

At first the card was pretty unstable, constant DX errors on games, black screens etc etc...
Replaced my PSU as it was getting on (Sunflower 1kw), upgraded my ram (because why not...), stressed my CPU and Mobo with my old 1070 and no issues at all so all pointed to the card.

Convinced myself it was a driver issue and things got a little better over time, DX errors disappeared etc... but still the card would black screen every few days and a hard reboot was in order. Mobo lights indicate the graphics card has disappeared and its as if the card has pulled too much power or something and then just dumps itself.
Windows logs indicate the graphics card seems to have suffered a power loss as graphics card errors appear in the logs before the unexpected system shutdown which is probably me hard booting it to fix the issue.

What's even more annoying is that I can't replicate the issue. Sometimes I can go days being fine, others hours. I've tried Undervolting, overclocking, pumping more power into the card, ramping the fans up so the GPU and bridge are nice and cool, nothing seems to work.

Giving the graphics card poop storm and lack of access to the cards I bent over and took one up the shooter accepted it is what it is until now a year later its got to the point I've had enough as its literally once a day and trying to play my favourite game atm, FFXIV, has become a nightmare as I have to reboot and join a 4+ hour queue to get back in and game until the card craps out again.

Gonna phone OC in the morning and request an RMA because it's driving me nuts now but what's the likelihood of this getting sorted any time soon if at all with the current state of GPU's as they are.

Did you do a clean install of windows? Have you reseated the card? How old is your PSU, what power and are you putting separate pcie cables? Some people daisy chain and use a single cable which can cause issues.

Best to do all the above as getting an RMA now will mean either waiting a very long time or just ending up with refund.

 

[Oblivion007]

Sadly this sort of stuff has been going on for years now at AMD, they rush products out without proper QA and we get threads like this. You can go back as far as the Radeon Fury line up, there's plenty of people reported issues with the Radeon 7 and RDNA 1 cards (see above). What's even worse AMD drags their heals when it comes to fixes, unless a big Youtuber makes a fuss these problems will drag on for months or just never get addressed. Their graphics division really needs to get there house in order because this hyper demand for there chips won't last forever.

Had a Vega 64 for years without the slightest issue. Incidents like this happen with both green and red - it's not an explicit AMD problem.

 

[TNA]

Had a Vega 64 for years without the slightest issue. Incidents like this happen with both green and red - it's not an explicit AMD problem.

+1

 

[gpuerrilla]

As above. Vega was awesome the time I had it. Both sides will get rogue fails but that's down the to QA before shipping them out or in other circumstances the users setup has a component that doesnt get along with it. You can tell this when RMA processes send them back to the user as it works fine on their test bench conditions - which is why you should always rule stuff our with spares/friends rig so that your not without and still receive same item back after weeks of inconvenience.

 

[_Cereal_]

not a fanboy or anything but AMD GPUS and black screens seems stupidly common.

 

[gpuerrilla]

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/discover/270925/black-screen-fix/

 

[_Cereal_]

nah, it happens way more often on AMD cards and its not even remotely close, my 5700xt was a pain because of it, had 4 mates back then who also bought 5700xts and literally every single one of them also had black screens every so often, sure you could blame it on our system but most of us ended up swaping back to Nvidia back then (2070 super) and the problem went away. go to any AMD forum and you will also get wayyy more people moaning about black screens.

 

[Game]

nah, it happens way more often on AMD cards and its not even remotely close, my 5700xt was a pain because of it, had 4 mates back then who also bought 5700xts and literally every single one of them also had black screens every so often, sure you could blame it on our system but most of us ended up swaping back to Nvidia back then (2070 super) and the problem went away. go to any AMD forum and you will also get wayyy more people moaning about black screens.

the 5700 series was awful until about December last year

my r9-390 before that never had a single issue with anything

my 560ti nvidia was an absolute dog of a card for black screens and hated windows going to sleep

 

[Freddie1980]

nah, it happens way more often on AMD cards and its not even remotely close, my 5700xt was a pain because of it, had 4 mates back then who also bought 5700xts and literally every single one of them also had black screens every so often, sure you could blame it on our system but most of us ended up swaping back to Nvidia back then (2070 super) and the problem went away. go to any AMD forum and you will also get wayyy more people moaning about black screens.

I agree and I'm someone who would normally defend AMD in a discussion like this but after going through the same experience I can now see why people sometimes avoid Radeon when they have a choice.
I mean rather then AMD actually acknowledge a problem they marked the 6600XT black screen thread on their support forums as fixed/solved because apparently if you upgrade your PSU to a 750 watt model that fixes the problem on a card that only draws 160 watts!