whew, thats been a un-fun 2.5 hrs swapping out graphic cards!
Was really impressed that my Zotac arrived today as I figured from Gibbs statements it would likely be end of the week and maybe even into next week, but it was picked and packed Monday about 2 am. If only the installation was as simple!
It started off badly in that I couldn't reach the little release tab to get my old gtx970 out! Damn big Noctua with dual fans was in the way! I guess it goes to show what a good build the old ocuk Typhoon was from late 2014 as i've never had to take the card out before. Thankfully I was able to unclip the fans and just about got some leverage on the tab to release it. Unfortunately removing the fans shone some light on my rather unpleasant heat sink cooler which after 6 years had become very clogged up with dust, that needed cleaning. I suspect but can't be sure that one of the fans was mounted the wrong way round and so both fans were pulling air - surely thats not right and that one should push and the other pull? Of course once I started cleaning I couldn't really stop, so took off all the fans and anything else I could to do a deep clean that normal quick clean couldn't reach.
Getting the new card in was a bit of a pain too, partly due to the cpu cooler, but also the case just seemed determined to be awkward to work with. Then I decided to replace the gpu power line which had 2 6+2 pins daisy chained off a single cable with a single none daisy chained one. I suppose that wasn't necessary, but I dislike exposed power cables dangling in a case.
Finally the moment of truth, reconnected power and all my other external cables and powered on. Everything sounded good, but the monitor complained there was no DP signal! Yikes. Trying not to panic I remembered I'd always had a problem with this build since I got in from ocuk in that whenever you disconnect the power lead or turn off the power at the mains it had a tendency to think that the overclokcing had failed and would reboot automatically into some other type of bios screen. Problem was that other screen doesn't seem to like DP output or at least it didn't this time and i got no picture. Thankfully the card and monitor both support HDML and switching to that and rebooting let me access the boot options.
So everything appears to be good now, though i'm convinced the colors have changed and I can see jpeg artifacts on my wallpaper that I'd not noticed before - lol.
Obviously going to run some tests and monitor temps, especially on the cpu to see if flipping the fan round makes much of a difference.
Finaly well I can't help but be disappointed at the price I had to pay for the card, I do commend OCUK for the efforts in getting them to customers and the prompt delivery when we know the warehouse is under pressure. Since ordering I tried 3-4 times to make an order from various stock drops I got notifications for, but while a few places may still have slightly better prices I've never got as far as entering payment details, let alone snagging a FE. Its my suspicion we have not finished seeing price rises on these in the uk nor will there be a return to good stock availability any time soon, which is why i jumped on the zotac when I got the chance.
