OCUK 6970 TFIII (Lightning) review.

[ALXAndy]

Well top job from MSI then for agreeing to sort this out for you. How would you rate their service?

Well it's been 28 hours since they agreed and I've given them what they asked for and haven't heard anything yet.

I wouldn't be best pleased if it wasn't for the fact I will have another card here by Friday, but given that it's going to stay in the box as a spare I am more patient than usual.

I'm going to keep the returned card any way. If anything this has taught me that I need a spare kicking around.

I'm just gutted because I found that some guy has basically redone every last texture in Fallout 3 and another one has added weather (irradiated T-storms and snow ETC) and so I had gotten right back into that. Problem is it just crashes after an hour or two and if you have just spent 40 mins wandering around outside it doesn't save.

So there's no point in trying to continue

I'm definitely going to need the 7970 that's for sure. Making Fallout 3 look better than Crysis 2 DX11 has come at a huge cost - it devours GPU power and VRAM. When the thunderstorms come and the lightning flashes things get stuttery.

 

[ALXAndy]

Heard back.. Got RMA, sending it on Sat morning.

 

[ALXAndy]

It's not really OCUK's fault, it's more MSI's fault, but for the price, it's amazing.

Try and hold off on buying anything if you can, 7950 and 78xx series are coming in the next few weeks.

It's not really MSI's fault either. Of any batch of any part you are going to have faulty parts. You can't sit and test every single last one of them in real world circs.

Also, remember - he who has a problem shouts the loudest. Happy people usually say nothing.

I'm happy so far. They've supplied me RMA and I gotta send it back to Holland, but it'll only cost me £4 more than sending it to OCUK and they're 100% going to replace it for me, with a tested one.

Good for you matey

I wonder if they will repair or replace it?

Replace. I asked them to just replace it.

 

[ALXAndy]

Hmm... i'd like to see that in the terms of their warranty, rather than a copy and paste from some email that a user has posted.

I think you'll find there's not much they can do about it.

Firstly there is no way for them to know. The card does not log what you are doing with software, the bios is read only.

Secondly they would have trouble in court because they are supplying a program designed to do what it does.

And thirdly you do not bite the hands that feed.

Overclocking plays an enormous part of whether a product will sell or not. If you start alienating your audience they go elsewhere.

Years ago ATI (9800 IIRC) started putting easy blow fuses on their cards. Blowing it didn't do anything, but it just showed them you had overclocked the card.

At that point they voided your warranty. Know what happened? people just went to Nvidia instead. If Intel didn't want people overclocking there would never have been a K series Sandy. ETC, ETC.

It's a sign of the times, it's what people want. So now? they have put thermal throttles in place. But punishing people for overclocking is totally daft. People will just go elsewhere.

 

[ALXAndy]

Do you have a fan profile in Afterburner? or just relying on CCC?

 

[ALXAndy]

My card is arriving via UPS in the morning..

It seems that paying £18 to send it back to The Netherlands could pay dividends

It seems MSI have no idea that the card was actually a reboxed failed Lightning card. Their RMA system simply detected it as -

So there may be a silver lining to the cloud after all

I'll find out tomorrow when it arrives, but will be a nice bonus if it turns out to be a fully fledged and grade passed Lightning

 

[ALXAndy]

Will do. It's out for delivery.

Just setting up Acronis so I can image my PC before making any changes.

I bought a SH Zotac GTX 275 for £40. Basically I do need to sell the 6970 (too much money spent to sit on) so I can not only use the 275 as a spare, but it'll make a cracking Physx card for the 7970

 

[ALXAndy]

*smiles from ear to ear*

 

[ALXAndy]

I had no problems with BF3 at all. Well, not until my card died so hard that I couldn't even get into Windows with a loaded driver.

I do know that Crysis and Crysis 2 refused to play ball with the card overclocked though. Even if everything else was absolutely 100% happy with the overclocks they weren't. To get a good game out of them I had to run at 880mhz.

Yeah I'm pretty chuffed. I do have to sell it really though. Bit of an expensive spare tbh. It's made far harder by the fact it's in its red guise though haha. Usually MSI just send their RMAs in a plain white box.

 

[ALXAndy]

I can't send PMs mate and I don't want to land myself in hot water.

It's on AVF.

 

[ALXAndy]

You did well there. Well done.

Well I wouldn't say I did well lol.

I'm still going to be out of pocket once it sells..

But yeah, was cool of them. Mind you, as I suspected, their computers don't know it was a reboxed Lightning. The serial simply shows it up as a Lightning hence the like for like replacement.

Tis making it hard though. That red box would look so sweet atop my cupboard haha.

 

[ALXAndy]

avforums.

You should be able to find it via Google.