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Sloppy GTX 780?

Watlinguk

Watlinguk

Watlinguk

Associate
Joined
1 Aug 2010
Posts
1,870
Hey guys finally got my EVGA 780SC ACX yesterday and popped it straight in! Wiped everything on my computer so that I could have a fresh start. Downloaded everything, all the new drivers etc etc and got some games on the go.

In honesty I don't know what I was expecting but I was hoping for some kind of wow factor or at least see some gains in frames/smoothness but I didn't get that.

Firstly the card I got has huge coil whine and one of the heat sink fins are bent so its going back, but I just thought id get your opinions on if I was hoping for too much or if something doesn't sound right with the system. I'll post my spec below, im almost sure there's no bottleneck to throttle the GPU's power but could it maybe be a setting holding it back? I dip a lot of times under 60 frames on games such as WOW, battlefield 3 on 1080P resolution.
I got better performance out of my old MSI 7970 card!! << This can't be right?

The system:

i5 Ivybridge overclocked to 4.8ghz
16GB Corsair Dominator Ram running at 1600mhz
Asus z77 Sabertooth Motherboard
EVGA 780SC ACX ---- Previous Card MSI 7970
SSD Samsung 830 250GB
OCZ 1250 Watt PSU
BENQ XL2410T Running at 120HZ


Thanks for reading!
 
well i'm not sure about wow, but battlefield 3 @1080p shouldn't be dipping under 60 fps, I have the gigabyte 780, and I get 60 - 80 fps @2560 x 1600, so you should be getting 100+ fps, what driver are you using.
 
But but nVidia cards don't get coil whine! :p

No but really, it won't be bottlenecking.

It could be possible that the drivers haven't installed properly, you should definitely not be getting more performance with a 7970 so there's definitely something wrong there.

Outside of that, maybe it's a case of you don't really need the extra performance and you just had the upgrade itch?
 
I think when people upgrade they expect the pc to do magical new things it couldn't before when in reality the gains are small unless the pc was really struggling before.

I had the same slight disappointment when i went from a 7850 to 7970 but Im now happy as I can play all the games I like at the best settings with 60fps
 
Hey guys thanks for your input. I deffo had the upgrade itch im not going to lie :D

I just don't see why it would be dropping under 60fps when these cards are designed to ramp up when your in need of the performance?? I must say ive only really played WOW and battlefield up to now so these are the only games that are sticking out for me. The coil whine is extremely loud anyways, would the seller accept this back for that reason? That and of course the bent fin....

The drivers im currently using are: 320.18
 
Maybe RMA? Coil whine certainly sounds 'odd' and bent fins??:eek: Isn't there a perspex cover over the fins? Caspsian Sea MP 64 player I'm getting ~90-110fps. Coming from xfire 7870's the fps leap isn't huge but the experience is smoother.

EDIT: Few folks having probs with the latest driver. I'm running 320.11, no problems so far.
 
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Yeah the coil whine is horrendous, notice it more on crisis 3 and WOW. Yeah on the ACX version you can see the heat pipes and the fins on that one is bent, not sure how that has happened :S
 
coil whine, bent fins, maybe there is something else underlying thats causing the card not to perform as well as it can also. I'd rma it right away.
 
thanks guys. Just gone back to 320.11 drivers and I get high frames in places where there's nothing going on but when there's a few people in the mix I saw it drop as low as 40 frames.

I will run a few benchmarks of heaven just to see if the scores are matching up. Will post back very shortly!

Regards
 
Okay just run the test and the final score was "1390" and my min fps was 8 and my most fps was 116. Not really sure what these tests will mean but the benchmark did not feel and look smooth whilst it was running
 
For wow the bottleneck is the Ivybridge not the GPU, your 7970 probably wasn't running at much more than 50%.

Wow slightly favours NVidia cards, but a GTX 780 is a massive overkill.

My GTX 670 runs between 33-60% usage.
 
I had a bent fin on my EVGA 780 ACX but I just bent it back into place, wasn't too bothered (took like 5 seconds to do) and it's not the first time I've seen that on a graphics card (e.g. MSI GTX 580 TwinFrozr). Not making any excuses here, especially for a £600+ card, but in the end I just didn't think it was worth the hassle sending the card back since I had just fixed the problem and everything else about the build quality was fine.

I also had pretty severe coil whine on my card, but it dies down quite a lot after you burn in the card for a few hours. The coil whine is now the same as in every card I've had since my HD4870 and is only really noticeable in game menus, where the fps is extremely high.

Regarding performance, everything seems to be spot on for me. In BF3, 1080p @ ultra settings, in a packed out city map 50 man server, I average around 100fps. I've seen it drop below 60 fps, but I don't think that can be avoided really especially in a multiplayer environment where there are many factors that affect fps, irrespective of the GPU. This is using a 2700K @ 4.6ghz, but bare in mind that this is actual multiplayer gameplay and if you are using benchmarks of BF3 from the popular review sites, they are usually using the scripted scenes from the singleplayer campaign to benchmark, where framerates are naturally much higher.

What I'd recommend is that you run controlled benchmarks like Unigine Heaven and Valley and use the the scores on this forum as a guide. I've posted my score in the Valley thread and I know someone else with a EVGA 780 ACX has posted a score which matches up with mine.

I hope that you get a better example for your replacement, but since I had the same issues as you, maybe it is the norm for these cards.

PS: My Heaven score at 1080p, Ultra quality/Extreme tessellation/8xaa is 1414. Assuming you ran it at the same settings, your scores seem normal, maybe a bit lower considering you have Ivybridge, but that could be attributed to many things depending on how your system is setup. Might be worth doing a clean install of Windows at some point.
 
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Hey bud thanks for your reply it is appreciated!

To be honest the fin didn't bother me so much as it looks to only be cosmetic. I think im more discouraged at the fact I get the same performance if not worse in comparison to my MSI 7970. I don't know what I was hoping for but I was for hoping for maybe some improvement. Games like WOW is definitely worse but that could be a driver situation so I can accept that.

I think I will be returning it based on the coil whine and the fin but would hopefully like to think that the cards performance was at fault but maybe not? Maybe it is the normal for these cards.
 
Not sure how much of an upgrade you were expecting over a 7970? The 780 is probably only 20% faster and you'd only really notice that in benchmarks.
 
Was your 7970 overclocked? A well clocked 7970 is probably equal or close to a 780 at stock so maybe that explains why you don't notice much difference. Also what did you have the 7970 memory clocked at? Bf3's AA is really intensive on the memory so having a high memory clock really helps. My 7970 ploughed through bf3 with the memory at 1823mhz whether it was at 1080p or 1440p with AA enabled.
 
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if i had a whine or bent any thing on a gpu i'd send it straight back :p
but that whine would bug me too much.
 
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