As the thread title. I am considering buying a 7900 GT for a friends computer I'm building, i have heard a lot of talk about the cards being randomly unstable/artifacts/crashing and being RMA'ed.
Is this talk justified? Or has been blown out of proportion?

FYI: I'm thinking of the BFG 7900 Gt which only costs £187

My 7900GT is overlocked to 640/1900 with volt mods, i have had no problems. I payed £217

The failure rate is much higher on the current 7900 series than on any previous card generations. And companies like XFX & eVGA have actually came out & stated their cards are having this higher than usual failure rate. Pretty much all 7900 series cards / manufacturers have been affected.
Some examples on this eVGA forum posting ..
http://www.evga.com/community/messageboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=15366

They have even coined a phrase for these failures how often they are occurring ...

Your maybe suffering form NSDS (nVidia Sudden Death Syndrome) if you experience the following during and/or after the 3DMark06 tests.

1. Artifacts, tearing, fine colored dots, black spots with missing graphics.
2. Severe distortion during Deep Freeze test.
3. Complete system hangup during Deep Freeze.
4. Flickering desktop about 1 or 2 second intervals after the test is over. Desktop may have colors missing or black spots in windows, taskbar and start button. You may see this distortion earlier between 3D tests when 2D desktop is exposed.

These seem to be the most common symptoms of a bad card. At this point RMA is inevitable.

Other symptoms may be random rebooting, BSOD, lock-ups while playing games, getting dropped on the desktop, etc.

More interesting posts ..

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1059136&page=1&pp=20

http://forums.tweaktown.com/showthread.php?t=22246&goto=nextoldest

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/67909965/m/442006229731/p/1

I would suggest an X1800XT instead. They are faster at stock can overclock very well, they are also cheaper and proven to be more reliable so far.

Trouble is, people like myself that have a high-powered rig simply cannot afford the pricey-upgrade to the PCI-e world, as I would want a high-powered rig for the price id have to be paying, and the Gainward GS+ is the only option to play the best way.

I have my 2nd card, and will be returning it again to OcUK as the 1st time it came back as being fine, but I cant even run a 3dMark test, never mind artifacting as its running!

Before I just said it had pixellation issues (still does) but now it wont play any games or play the 3dMark tests, so now I have a bigger list of issues, I should (hopefully) get a brand new fully working GS+. If I did, id be well happy!

evga have fixed the problem with the new batch of cards by changing who supplies the ram, the new ram doesnt artifact.

So if you want a 7900 an evga is the way to go.

I've had my 7900GT for about 3 months and I have finally got around to testing it again with Deep Freeze (and the rest of 3dMark06), to see if it's failing as some 7900s do after a while.

I read War and Peace while my CPU ground through the CPU test at about 4 spf (no typo) and then...bugger, flickery artefacts on Deep Freeze.

Then I realised that the "flickery artefacts" were actually particles of wind-blown snow and should be there

Duh, silly me.

It seems as though I got lucky, or Leadtek cards don't have the problem.

Had mine for about 2 months now not had any crashes with it.

Very impressed with it.

Ive had my Galaxy 7900GT for nearly 3 months and so far I havent had a problem.

Have had my ocuk 7900gt (XFX branded) for a few months now.
No issues whatsoever

lay-z-boy said:

evga have fixed the problem with the new batch of cards by changing who supplies the ram, the new ram doesnt artifact.

So if you want a 7900 an evga is the way to go.

Click to expand...

They have changed the RAM from Samsung to Infineon, but they don't know for sure if that is the problem. They believe that the voltage regulator on the PCB may also be faulty, which is ironic considering most people buy these to volt-mod them.

Everything ACESHIGH said is basically everything you need to know.

About as stable as a one legged table.

I went with an x1800xt aftering hearing about the problems with the 7900gt. Strange thing is that there is very little mention of this in the Anandtech forum.....maybe the americans got a difference batch?

uk_sam said:

I went with an x1800xt aftering hearing about the problems with the 7900gt. Strange thing is that there is very little mention of this in the Anandtech forum.....maybe the americans got a difference batch?

Click to expand...

There's tons about it on Anandtech.

Úlfhednar said:

There's tons about it on Anandtech.

Click to expand...

Oh right, I think I got the wrong impression from their forum then. Its just that a lot of people seem to recommend the 7900GT over there from the posts I read.

AFAIK the issue was that due to some quirk of the PCB design, there was local areas of the PCB which became much hotter, particularly over the RAM chips, causing them to overheat and die. The problem also existed more with pre-overclocked cards, due to even more heat I presume. I suppose different component manufacturers for capacitors can make the difference, and maybe these different RAM chips on newer boards can handle the heat more.

also interested in this, got another post running about a dead 7600gt, so far the owner of the card says its using samsung memory. the plot thickens.

I've had two working perfectly for a month, and one on it's own for a month before that. Deep Freeze is perfect, and that is with them both overclocked to 540/1700. I've played HL2 E1, Quake4 and am now playing Prey with no problems whatsoever. My cards are both XFX, although the first one was the 520/1500 model and the second one was the 470/1370 model.

Maybe I just got lucky

Thanks for the input guys
I have read on the Guru3d forums and it is a problem with memory (cores can be pushed really high), but the overclocks (factory overclocked) are huge compared to the standard spec for the ram.

Anyway I plumped for the BFG 7900 GT OC afterall BFG have a lifetime warranty so that should'nt be too bad. What I have noticed is the ram is only OC'ed by a measly 60 Hz whereas XFX or other are several 100 Mhz Maybe BFG know more than we do

Besides my friend won't be doing any overclocking so it should be too bad, I will stress test it for a long time!

Custom Cooling !

Hi All

I have been reading up on the 7900Gt scene, it appears like many have said that ram overheat is a major problem, ram sinks have to be a very worthwhile investment. The 7900Gt overclockers claim that a core overclock which appears to be the safer option also provides the best performance yield.

With regards to core cooling the Zalman VF900-CU Quiet Dual Heatpipe VGA
Cooler is the way to go comes with heat sink HS coolers for ram.Its a great cooler apparently as long as your not going to use an Sli setup, though Dfi nf4 expert and other boards with loadsa room may be ok.

Tidy 7900Gt cooling



Extreme Nutzoid 7900Gt Cooling

Johanson said:

My 7900GT is overlocked to 640/1900 with volt mods, i have had no problems. I payed £217

Click to expand...

Very interesting link but very sad.