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Nvidia Reliability

Lethagized

Lethagized

Lethagized

Soldato
Joined
23 Nov 2007
Posts
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I hardly used my 980Ti and it suddenly broke one day. I can only boot in safe mode at a res of 1024x768, any higher and it artifacts. I've seen a lot of other faulty Nvidia cards of this type also go faulty.

There wasn't any heatsink on my vram chips which is the first time I've seen that.

Was there a known production line issue for high end nvidia cards.
 
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Lethagized said:
There wasn't any heatsink on my card which is the first time I've seen that.
Click to expand...

Huh?
You used the card with no heatsink and it broke?

I don't think I entirely understand your post, but as far as I'm aware Nvidia cards last just as long as any other card. There are countless threads about electronics from all manufactures breaking.
 
Lethagized said:
There wasn't any heatsinks on the vram chips.
Click to expand...

Not sure why you think there should be heatsinks on each memory chip, they are normally none and only heatpads that make contact to the main cooler or if ram at back heatpads to the backplate too.

I think you were just unlucky or maybe caused an issue while installing it or on a poor PSU as 980tis need a lot of power too and a poor PSU will damage them.

My 980ti classified was one of the best cards I ever had and still living a happy life being used by the new buyer.

What model card is it ? Also post a picture of the card, maybe it just needs a VBIOS flash to fix it if the VBIOS has gone bad for a reason. Need more information what's going on to maybe help you get that card up and running again.
 
I'm away from my computer right now and don't have any pics, but the 2 fans blow through the main heatsink fins onto the vram chips.
Only the core is cooled by the heatsink.

It's an Asus ROG Matrix Platinum.

Also, the reason I question Nvidia is, I've read 2 posts so far in this sub forum about recent card failures, plus there's tons of faulty 980ti sold on eBay.
 
asus-matrix-platinum-gtx-980ti-review-heatsink.jpg
 
There usually are no heatsink a on vram, on side cards they have a heatpad between the vram and the block's sink but even that's not super necessary airflow is enough to cool vram
 
The reason for lots of faulty cards on eBay is because they're well old now and probably spend much of there life powered on.

Things break, more so when they get old. Sold a 980ti that my son never stopped gaming with for years, last year and it's still going.
 
It is normal For older cards not to have cooling on vrams.

Now the failure u describing is pointing to gpu die fatigue, unfortunately Not much u can do about it.
U can reflow new gpu chip , or even reflow the current one to see if it fix it, but not much more.
 
I know this isn't helpful but electronics these days are not designed and stress tested to be functional after 6 years. Graphics cards are not throwaway items but we are talking about a 4 generations now?
 
At the end of the day cooling is down to the manufacturer and I guess they see it as a way to save money by skimping on the cooling. My Inno3D iChill GTX1070 has a huge heatsink for the core and VRM chips and a heatplate for the memory chips so everything that needs to be cooled is directly cooled using heatsinks and this was one of the cheaper GTX1070's. People get roped in by things like Asus ROG range expecting them to be top class while in reality you can be paying a premium price for a inferior card. If you want to make sure a card has adequate cooling check reviews that strip the card down before buying.
 
Lethagized said:
I'm away from my computer right now and don't have any pics, but the 2 fans blow through the main heatsink fins onto the vram chips.
Only the core is cooled by the heatsink.

It's an Asus ROG Matrix Platinum.

Also, the reason I question Nvidia is, I've read 2 posts so far in this sub forum about recent card failures, plus there's tons of faulty 980ti sold on eBay.
Click to expand...

do you know why that is ? because crap tone of 980ti's where sold so you are going to see a large number of failures even if the percentage of failures is low.

TBH your post is light on the details
 
The reason so many cards On ebay is becoz no alternative .

Ppl offloading dust gathers coz other people have no other choice.

And hight rate of failure on 980ti is not a thing.
Any card can fail and there is % of failure.
Unfortunately % is reflected On total amount .

If total amount is high then failure rate will be high to.
 
Asus never used to bother cooling the memory on their cards. All of the DirectCU-style coolers attached to the core only and left the VRM and memory to get by with airflow from the fans (after it had been nicely warmed up and lost a lot of its pressure by passing through the main heatsink). Their AMD cards were even worse though, as they just reused coolers designed for Nvidia cards on them, like their notoriously crap R9 290(X) where the die only made contact with one full heatpipe and partial contact with two others out of five, because the cooler was designed for the GTX 780's much larger die.

asus-r9-290-direct-cu5lj3m.jpg
 
As said above they sold loads of the 900 series so some will become faulty plus they are now starting to get old. I bought my 970 new for £180 and sold it last month for £104. So the cost of ownership was £76 for several years use. Don't think its a bad idea to sell a card on as it gets older and more likely to get a fault if other people are willing to take on that risk
 
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