Gigabyte Windforce 7950 Problem

[phobic]

So this is my third 7950 in a month, and it seemed to be going ok for about 2 weeks, or so i thought. First of all, the core clock speed is 1Ghz, not 900Mhz as advertised on the website and the box. First time i fired it up, i got no signal to either monitor, but i just put that down to luck and rebooted, and it seemed fine after. But as time goes on, i'm getting this problem more and more frequently. Suddenly i'll lose signal to both monitors or the system will just hang. A few times also, i have had major artifacts on the bios and windows/linux start screens.

I tried a new Bios from Gigabyte's website and flashed it through the Atitool. Apparently it reverts the core speed to 900Mhz, but i flashed it and GPU-Z still shows 1000Mhz stock and current speed. I'm guessing these issues i'm having might be due to Gigabyte overclocking it too high or not enough voltage (1.25v if i can remember correctly). I don't really care about overclocking my GPU, and i'd rather have a stable card.

The problem comes in trying to reproduce the issues i'm having, since they seem so random. I can run Furmark sometimes for an hour straight without a crash. Other times it will crash within 10 mins. Same goes for Unigine Heaven or any games like Far Cry 3.

Should i RMA? My worry is that they won't be able to reproduce the issues. Or should i try to underclock it a bit? But would that even work? Since i was getting issues in bios and windows start screen, it would still be overclocked by the GPU bios right? Until it reaches windows anyway...

Getting very frustrated with these 7950's now. First two were MSI with faulty fan diode's. Any suggestions?

Btw, the cooling on the card is fine. The highest i've seen it go was 70 in Furmark, and it usually tops out at 60 in Unigine.

 

[phobic]

Hi,
I've not had similar issues to you with Artifacts or Signal getting lost but I have played around with the Bios for a bit. From what I've found out is we have the Rev2 version of the Gigabyte WF3 7950 card (they have a 8+6pin pcie power cables). Gigabyte have released these with the upped core clock speed of 1000mhz up from 900mhz voltage locked at 1.25v. They are release with the FX0 Bios, and no matter what Bios you put on them they will not allow for core voltage unlock (they seem locked on hardware level), trying to load the F43 Bios only dropped the core speed to 900mhz and I also lost the HDMI output on my card but still the core voltage was locked.

I am currently speaking to Gigabyte support asking them to confirm this to me but they are just ridiculous in the answers they give me and refuse to answer my questions straight up.
With all that said it is still a good card and it runs very well but it sounds like you might have a faulty card. Have you tried doing a clean uninstall of the AMD drivers and installing the latest 13.3 Beta drivers with the CAP files? I am running those on Win7 Ultimate 64bit and have not had any issues on Far Cry 3. Also return back to the FX0 Bios when you do your stability testing.

Hey, glad to see i'm not alone!

I was indeed on the FX0 bios and i tried the FX1 since you can only stay on the bios with a similar naming scheme apparently. I dunno about trying F43 and losing HDMI, since i'm using the HDMI and DVI port at the minute. Did your card become stable with the F43 bios? It might be worth ditching the HDMI port in that case.

Dunno about the voltage lock though. I wouldn't want to raise it though, just lower it if anything. Yeah i've tried several clean driver installs, but since it was artifacting in bios, drivers wouldn't cause that. Are the CAP files not only for crossfire?

 

[phobic]

Just filled out an RMA request...

Hopefully i'll get a 7950 that is as reliable as my old 5850 was. Seriously considering dropping more cash and getting an Nvidia card, since the 7 series are giving me no ends of trouble

 

[phobic]

So i managed to grab a few pics of my issue. Did get an RMA number etc, but just wanted to test some more to be sure.

Here's what i see upon some boots

This was after a bios reset and an attempt to boot into linux, where it had a kernel panic.

On this one, it didn't even boot into windows, but just froze on that screen.

I'd say it's fairly safe to put it down to GPU. I tried a 580GTX for a day or so and had no issues. Strangely though, i tried this card in another system and also had no issues. Though it happens very randomly in my own system. After i took these shots, it took forever to get into either OS. My monitors would just lose signal and had a pain in the ass getting the machine to even post after rebooting.

Anybody think it could be something else?

 

[phobic]

Shot in the dark, maybe a power draw issue from the psu?

To find out, use another pci-e cable and use two pci-e cables to power the gpu, only using one plug from each cable.

Well my PSU is modular and i have another 2 PCI-E cables, but each have their own plug. I did try another PCI-E slot on the mobo in case it was that, so i guess i'll try switching out the cables

 

[phobic]

Looks like borked RAM on the card.

That's what i was thinking. I did attempt to run memtestcl, but apparently it hasn't been in development for some time and throws up false positives for 7 series cards. Couldn't really find any other way of testing the ram alone.