XFX close discussion forums

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Interestingly enough XFX have closed their US discussion forums. It appears too many people were complaining about faulty 7900 series cards. Thats an interesting response. Didnt want people to see the large numbers of complaints i guess.


http://www.xfxforce.com/web/forumsMessage.jspa;jsessionid=awe6-y62f2Ido29MIW

 

[ACESHIGH]

The consensus is that the discussion forum was closed so that the many problems with the 7900 cards would not be visible to people who were not aware of them. This new way of dealing with faults allows you to track your fault alone (whilst hiding other peoples faults from you).


I am a little surprised people arent aware of the problems the 7900 series (7900GT in particular) are having.

What seems to be happening the most are problems associated with playing F.E.A.R., Oblivion, or using the 3DMark06 testing suite, but issues are certainly not limited to this. 7900 cards have been artifacting and/or locking up while playing games. This sometimes happens when the card is installed the first day, or it might happen a month later.

NVIDIA have specifically pointed a finger to the cause of the issues being associated with the overclocking settings that the manufacturers use.
Apparently the GPUs on the cards that were having problems didn’t have the headroom necessary for the vendor’s overclocked specifications. The two most prominent problem areas were the vertex clock (which remember runs 50 MHz faster than the pixel clock) and the memory clock. These GPU subsystems were running far enough out of spec that the chips were having physical issues with stability; causing the random freezes.
NVIDIA say that they have not worked closely enough with the board builders in explaining how overclocking domains have changed on the 7900 series, and that they would be correcting that. Nvidias stance is that the problems lay at the feet of the people that made your video card.

However that doesnt fully explain the increased amount of faults occuring with non overclocked 7900 series cards, so their appear to be other issues as well. That faulty capacitors were used or that their are faulty 7900 cores on these cards (which was mentioned before) is also something that is talked about a lot.

At this point i myself am not sure exactly where the fault lies, but all parties appear to be pointing the finger elsewhere.

 

[ACESHIGH]

This is interesting. There's some evidence that a strategically placed heatsink can solve issues with 7900GT cards, i.e. that it has nothing to do with the GPU and thus nothing to do with nvidia. The idea appears to have been back up with thermal imaging showing a very obvious hot spot and experimentation with heatsinks providing a solution to the problem.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=99895

But that would still put Nvidia at fault. They designed the card & sent the specifications out to the manufacturers who then (except for the overclocked ones) build the card exactly as Nvidia intended. If the card wasnt designed correctly, thats still Nvidias fault the way i see it.