Death of a Graphics Card

Today I find myself mourning the death of my GTX 590 :(

Yesterday I was playing Rome II. On some of the maps I was getting some severe artefacting, I thought 'it's just Rome II, I'm only getting it on the occasional map.

Anyway a couple of hours later my system completely locked up and needed a full system restart to get it running again, well actually it took a few attempts and a system restore but I got it back into Windows but I didn't go back to Rome II. Today powered up my machine and it just would not boot fully, so I nicked the 560ti from my wife's machine and everything is fine again.

I can't complain though I got the GTX 590 for free a couple of years ago after it was written off with fire damage and I should now have a shiny new GTX 780ti by Wednesday. (though this time it's not free)

I've been lucky though, I've been building PC's since 1990 and had very few hardware failures. Anyone else had catastrophic system deaths and what died on you?

4850 started artefacting, sent it back to ASUS for RMA and I got 1gb version of it 2 weeks later :)

I'd go with either 780 or 290 but 780ti is pretty good as well :P

I'm sorry to hear that it died. Though the new GPU will be nice!! :D

Xbox 360....2 of'em (one with artifacts and one that would not do HD W/O strange lines on the screen....1 PS3 (crazy loud fans).

Oh a motherboard once....

I had 3-4 X360's die on me... Old version though... Bought the slim version when it was released... The old one died a day or two before it was released.

Good luck with your 780ti

Using hardware made before 2002 and after 2007? None. The period between those years? Plenty.

I lost:

Soyo Via KT-266a (Athlon XP) motherboard

Abit Via KT-266a motherboard

MSI K8N Neo 4 Platinum (Athlon64 X2) nForce 4 Ultra motherboard - bought in 2005, died in 2009

HP Pavilion ze5270 laptop motherboard

Apple iBook G3 laptop motherboard

All the above I blame on the Capacitor Plague

Hard drives? Nope.

Video cards? Nope.

The capacitors of my MSI K8N. I'm still sort of pissed at the whole capacitor plague thing because the board's feature set was great (dual Gigabit NIC, optical out, etc) only to be ruined by poor capacitors.

I've lost a 5770 when the fan died and I didn't noticed until too late.

Other PC stuff I have lost, like two PSU's. One Intel MOBO. One Seagate HDD.

@jun_aka_pekto:

I've had a capacitor pop about 2 feet from my face. I was watching a flaky PSU power up when it went bang! Needless to say my under-ware needed changing :)

my old PC (fluffy) had a somewhat mysterious death.

it was around 2.5 years old. last time i was using it there was no problems. perfectly stable and reliable. fulffy was a money no object PC so i didnt do anything daft like skimp on the power supply.

i was going to be leaving it alone for a few weeks so i shut it down and switched it off at the mains.

came back after the few weeks, turned the PC on....failed to POST. tried a few more times....still failed to post. i then did all the usual things then, removing non essential hardware, trying different sticks of ram etc. to try and get it to POST. nada. unfortunately i didnt have the spare hardware to replace everything one by one so i had to start guessing.

i ruled out replacing the graphics card (yea you can see where this is going :P) becuase sometimes an image did come on the screen before the whole thing locked up. so ended up replacing everything else but the graphics card and it still didnt work. so i replaced the graphics card. worked fine after that of course (it was a new PC in all but HDD). that became mittens.

so i decided to start spreading the hardware i thought was working around to family members and one by one they came back to me saying DOA.

so all of my hardware from that PC had a complete and utter catastophic failure. the only thing i can think of is a lightening strike. there were no reported lightening storms though (in my area they are extremely rare. one a year is a lot). bit of a mystery that one.

the only other hardwre failure i have had is my old laptop (fuzzy). it was 9 years old when it kicked the bucket after quite a bit of use. great laptop. never gave me any trouble up until then.

i hope my MSI gtx570 survives 10 years!

Have had harddrives fail , psu's fail and have had one graphics card fail because a CRT monitor blew up sending a surge to my old Geforce 7600. XFX's warranty covered it lol.

I still have an old Geforce 6600gt still going strong since 2004-2005 so its at least 9 years old.

Since 2006, the hardware I bought have been problem free aside from the MSI K8N motherboard which I bought the year before (and would die in 2009).

The hardware I bought since 2006 were:

A Core Duo Mac Mini

Toshiba Satellite A215-s4757 AMD Turion X2

Core 2 Duo Mac Mini

DIY PC AMD Phenom II X3/Radeon HD 5770

DIY PC AMD Athlon II X2 270

DIY PC Intel Celeron E3400/8600 GT

HP laptop

GTX 560 Ti

GTX 550 Ti

Sager i7 laptop

i5 Mac Mini

ASUS M5A78L-M/USB3 (FX-8350) motherboard

ASUS RoG G46VW

ASUS Intel Baytrail-M laptop

plus a low-end AMD E-series Compaq laptop someone left behind. No one's claimed it yet.

All have been problem-free so far. It's amazing how my hardware problems have been very period-specific.

I didn't have those kind of problems. All my problems were either spontaneously rebooting in an endless loop or the PC simply quit starting.

My computer is a geezer, going on 7yrs now and was top of the line when i got it.

E6600 core duo 4 gigs ram, 8800 gts videocard, 600watt power supply on Vista 32bit.

About 2-3yrs ago my 8800gts died and replaced with a 560gtx TI (Cost alot back then) And recently my power supplied died replaced with a 550watts.

If it wasn't for that 32bit os i could add more ram and keep computer longer but not being able to do 4 gig minimum games anymore i will have to get a whole new system soon :( I hate dealing with that stuff so when get a computer i aim for one that will last me a long time.

I've been pretty lucky with computers, they tend to run a long time without stuff dying on them.

I still have an old Voodoo2 kickin.

I actually never had a single of my video card die out although I have had a PSU die out and 1 motherboard.

I went from 580 GTX SLI to a 780 GTX ti and eventually to 780 GTX ti SLI (lost my mind modding Skyrim for a while). While the 580SLI (or 590) was pretty awesome mine died a similar fate (although it turned out to be a faulty motherboard with a dead second pcie slot)..

That said I do not regret the 780 upgrade. They are awesome cards. You will be pleased, I think.

Is that voodoo still in use though? The oldest card working I have lying around is a an Geforce 4 MX 440 sitting in a box

GTX470, stuck using a 8800GTS now, dunno if I should still wait for Maxwell (2015 now...) or just get a 7xx.

been lucky so far only had one stick of ram die. At the time I had no idea about pcs so I thought the pc was dead. Eventually I got mad and started removing stuff and soon enough I took out the bad ram and it worked system is 9 years old and counting (till friday) Then my new mobo ram and cpu will be here and then the whole system should be like new.

I forgot. I think the PSU on my laptop when bad once... After 2-3 years of use. Got it covered under warranty luckily though :D

I had 1 HDD fail and then of course multiple 360s........

Been really happy with my EVGA GTX 460. I think I'm sold on the brand and all future cards will be EVGA, especially the factory overclocked ones ;)

I like that EVGA has their top GPU with waterblock installed already... Probably never going to buy one, but none the less I am happy to see that someone sell it.

My 590 has been really loud recently. Saying that though, I really need to get the dust out of it. Need a new can of air.

@jun_aka_pekto said:

Using hardware made before 2002 and after 2007? None. The period between those years? Plenty.

I lost:

Soyo Via KT-266a (Athlon XP) motherboard

Abit Via KT-266a motherboard

MSI K8N Neo 4 Platinum (Athlon64 X2) nForce 4 Ultra motherboard - bought in 2005, died in 2009

HP Pavilion ze5270 laptop motherboard

Apple iBook G3 laptop motherboard

All the above I blame on the Capacitor Plague

Hard drives? Nope.

Video cards? Nope.

The capacitors of my MSI K8N. I'm still sort of pissed at the whole capacitor plague thing because the board's feature set was great (dual Gigabit NIC, optical out, etc) only to be ruined by poor capacitors.

Man that is A LOT of losses.

As with most people the only problems I've ever had were with recently purchased parts. Nothing has ever catastrophically failed in my system.

The two Via motherboards died in 2003. The two laptops croaked in 2005. The MSI motherboard died in 2009.

Too bad too. I liked the Soyo and Abit brands back in their heyday.

The thing is, my ASUS A7M266 (Athlon XP) motherboard with AMD 760 chipset from 2001 outlasted them all. It still works up to now:

I had a 280gtx die after a couple months use. It was made by BFG which was going under at the time and I couldn't get any warranty cause they are now completely gone. It was funny how they were delaying my warranty process, I didn't know till later why they were doing that, very sneaky classic corporate trick, no wonder those scum went out of business.

I didn't buy another Nvidia card for years after until the 680gtx. Its going strong still. Its EVGA and they seem to have a better warranty then BFG did, or seems like they do on the surface anyways, we shall see. If it did die and its not on warranty doesnt matter since I've been using it for 2.5 years now and gotten good use out of it.

This "artifacting" is caused by overheating or what?

I'm getting worried about my GTX560TI , i usually keep the temps under 75 , generally speaking what leads to the death of a graphics card?

Under 80C your fine.

Got my new card the other day and it's now installed and running nicely, hopefully it'll live longer than a couple of years ;)

@mjorh:

75C is fine for a GTX560ti, my ex-GTX 590 sat at around 95C underload, apparently this is fairly normal for those cards but I think it's got a lot to do with it's short life.

'Artifacting' is graphical glitching, this should give you the idea. (this is not my video)

The main problem with my card , and the reason it was an insurance write off, was permanent damage to the fins on the heat sinks from soot corrosion, meaning that it did not dissipate heat as efficiently as it should. I haven't had the time to fully dissect the card yet but I suspect that it's actually a RAM failure rather than GPU.

@GarGx1 Congrats on your new card !

Yeah , i can recall that my ex-8500GT was like that before it went to the full failure . How's that possible ? i mean damage to the fins , their job is to extent the heat transfer and i can't imagine what can cause catastrophic damage to them, or what causes the soot corrosion? . And your case has a good ventilation system so there shouldn't be any problem with dissipation and stuff....

@mjorh:

I work in fire and flood restoration, a couple of years ago we were dealing with the electronic equipment in a large research type building that had suffered from a fire. When plastics burn the resulting soot is very acidic and attacks any unprotected metal, causing rust and corrosion and this particular building had a lot of plastic burnt during the fire.

My GTX 590 came from this loss but was very heavily contaminated with corrosive soot and the heat sink (being unprotected metal) was quite heavily corroded. I did restore it to as near to perfect as possible but some of the damage was permanent (pitting and such) so it was never capable of properly dispersing the heat.

This is how it got damaged in the first place and didn't live very long.

@GarGx1 That was quite an story ! My field of study is kinda related to these stuff that's why i was interested to know , thanks man!

Just one of the RAM sticks that went faulty.

Lol, seriously, how does a desktop GPU like the GTX 590 just die for no apparent reason? I've had a junky Lenovo y570 over three years ago that has a lesser 555m that I constantly use for a variety of different games, I constantly use it on games that are very demanding, and the laptop itself does not cool very well. Yet, it still works to this day and I haven't had any issues with it "dying" or anything like that. I'll admit it, it's not as good as a 590 but at least it still works. Is OP not telling us something about something he may have done?

@GarGx1 said:

Got my new card the other day and it's now installed and running nicely, hopefully it'll live longer than a couple of years ;)

Bad choice, 3gb wont be enough in two years.

@Alienware_fan:

That's ok, in 2 years it'll either be SLI'd or completely replaced.

Anyway, if you think one of the most powerful single GPU cards on the market today is not enough, what would you suggest?

Building and upgrading my pc's sine 98 and for some strange reason i only had 4-5 failures ( and those where years after purchase ). All in all in 15 years i only had a power supply , 2gpus,1 hard disk and a faulty disk of ram

@Alienware_fan said:

@GarGx1 said:

Got my new card the other day and it's now installed and running nicely, hopefully it'll live longer than a couple of years ;)

Bad choice, 3gb wont be enough in two years.

What? seriously ? in two years u mean that monster won't be enough? !