Is my graphics card dead?

[SimonTW]

Hello,

I believe my 4870X2 has died, but I just want to check if there's anything else I can test before I consign it to the afterlife.

My PC turned on fine yesterday morning, I probably had it on for an hour or so, before turning it off for the rest of the day. I then went to turn it on last night and it booted fine and I got to the desktop. However before I started doing anything I noticed little red lines starting to appear, just a few pixels long and kind of following the colour gradient lines of my desktop background. Gradually more and more started to appear. The PC was also behaving a little weirdly, so I powered it down and then tried turning it on again. From then on it failed to even POST, and my motherboard (Gigabyte EX58-UD5) was stuck on the '2b' code. After some searching online this seems to occur when there's a problem with the GPU.

Today I first tried moving the 4870X2 to a different PCI slot, but this did nothing. I then tried putting my old X850 in instead and the PC now works fine. Therefore I assume the 4870X2 is dead, but is there anything else I can try? My only other thought was that the PSU could be faulty? As the 4870X2 requires a lot of power which the X850 doesn't.

Thanks,

Simon

 

[almighty15]

It's dead dude.... Time to replace it.

Get a 4Gb AMD 270x, it'll batter that old 4870x2 in ways you can't imagine.

 

[ShivP]

Try the oven bake tactic - take cooler off and whack it into the oven for a bit, might help but it might not, might as well try it out.

 

[Marine-RX179]

Worst case scenerio is you can replace the card with a 2nd hand 7850 2GB for around £70 (if you have a tight budget)...you'd still really appreciate the switch not only it would have dx11 and be around 50% faster, much lower power consumption and runs a lot cooler, but also you have to bare in mind that AMD has stopped support for 4000 series card anyway, so their performance won't be optimised for newer games.

 

[SimonTW]

It's dead dude.... Time to replace it.

Ha yeah, I guess I just needed to hear it from someone else!

Try the oven bake tactic - take cooler off and whack it into the oven for a bit, might help but it might not, might as well try it out.

Thanks for the tip, I might give this a try. I have fitted an AC Accelero Xtreme cooler to it though which will be a pain to remove and fit, but as I have nothing to lose I'm quite tempted.

Get a 4Gb AMD 270x, it'll batter that old 4870x2 in ways you can't imagine.

Worst case scenerio is you can replace the card with a 2nd hand 7850 2GB for around £70 (if you have a tight budget)...you'd still really appreciate the switch not only it would have dx11 and be around 50% faster, much lower power consumption and runs a lot cooler, but also you have to bare in mind that AMD has stopped support for 4000 series card anyway, so their performance won't be optimised for newer games.

If baking it doesn't work I'll need to buy a new card, but I have a few questions as I've been completely out of the loop for years. As you could guess by the fact that I hadn't upgraded my 4870X2 I do very little gaming these days (the last one I bought/played was Skyrim). However my first requirement is that it must be at least as powerful as the 4870X2, but I expect that isn't much these days. Noise is also something that I would like to keep to a minimum.

Whilst I'm sure I could get a replacement fairly cheaply, I'm open to spending in the region of £100-150 if it will future-proof me for a while. For this price range I've seen the R7 260 and R9 270 models recommended. Is the 270 a significant improvement over the 260? And within the 270 range, what do the 270X models offer over the standard 270s?

The MSI models seem to be fairly quiet, so I have been looking at their 270 range. In particular I was looking at the 2GB 270X, but noticed that OcUK currently have the 4GB version on a TWO deal for just £12 extra. Is the extra 2GB worth paying an extra £12 for?

Edit: After doing a bit of reading of threads about similar budgets on here, I've narrowed in a bit on the 2GB 270/270X. From what I can tell the 270X is essentially a faster 270? But I have read about people OCing the 270 very easily to 270X speeds. With a £20 price difference it would seem the 270 is the one to go for.

 

[Marine-RX179]

The MSI models seem to be fairly quiet, so I have been looking at their 270 range. In particular I was looking at the 2GB 270X, but noticed that OcUK currently have the 4GB version on a TWO deal for just £12 extra. Is the extra 2GB worth paying an extra £12 for?

Edit: After doing a bit of reading of threads about similar budgets on here, I've narrowed in a bit on the 2GB 270/270X. From what I can tell the 270X is essentially a faster 270? But I have read about people OCing the 270 very easily to 270X speeds. With a £20 price difference it would seem the 270 is the one to go for.

The 270/270x in essences are same card as the HD7870, but with different clock speed.

The difference between the 270/270x is that the 270 has a lower clock for the sake of having to fitting into the sub 150W power consumptioon (1x PCI-E 6 pin), where as the 270x has a higher clock and uses two PCI-E x6 pin which allow power consumption up to 225W, which would mean you would get more voltage to play with and should therefore overclock higher than a 270 can.

With that said, there are some brand uses the same PCB for their 270 as their 270x (meaning 2xPCI-E 6pin), therefore if you can identify which brand/model 270 cards are those, you can basically get a some money getting a "270x" which is same card hardware wise that would overclock just as high, with the only difference of lower stock clock.

 

[almighty15]

Heres a few comparisons.

5870 vs 270x : http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1062?vs=1043

A 5870 has the same amount of shaders as a 4870x2 but without the Crossfire head aches so should represent what you're getting at the moment.

260x vs 270x : http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1044?vs=1043

As you can see the 270x is easily worth the extra over the 260x

 

[hawkhench]

Additional bonus to getting a 270x is you can get a BF4 edition and then either play BF4 if that floats your boat, or sell the code and make good money back.

 

[SimonTW]

Thanks for the tip, I might give this a try. I have fitted an AC Accelero Xtreme cooler to it though which will be a pain to remove and fit, but as I have nothing to lose I'm quite tempted.

Well after baking it for 8 minutes at 205 degrees C like this:

I now have this!

I guess I don't need to buy a new card just yet...

Now to see how permanent this is with some testing.

 

[almighty15]

Well after baking it for 8 minutes at 205 degrees C like this:

I now have this!

I guess I don't need to buy a new card just yet...

Now to see how permanent this is with some testing.

Clocks are lower then they should be and crossfire is disabled.

I would still say it's borked.

 

[SimonTW]

Clocks are lower then they should be and crossfire is disabled.

I would still say it's borked.

Good spot, although I hadn't done anything about drivers at that point, so I just uninstalled them, cleaned the drivers and reinstalled and now I have this:

Which looks a little healthier!