Widescreen Gaming Forum

I had a PC build about a year ago, I spent a month configuring and shopping and a day assembling and installing. Since then I have Re-Formatted almost a half dozen times.

Recently it experienced its second hardware failure (the first being a hard drive failure (one of four hard drives). But this one was the graphics card, before the failure, the video drivers would crash (but vista would restart them (yay vista) to have them crash again minutes later. This was remedied by installing EVGA precision tool and changing the fan setting from auto to maximum.

But then something else happened, while FRAPSing some in-game footage the hard drive reached maximum capacity (shame virtual memory does not work the other way (I have 8gB ram) and that led to having to do a reformat.

After the reformat everything went fine until I installed the video card drivers, at which point the machine would only boot into safe mode or last known good configuration.

Three to four phone calls to EVGA later a senior support staff member came to the conclusion that there was a problem with my vram and the card is leaving tomorrow for a warranty RMA.

Tonight I was packing the card and I felt sad, why did the loss of this card affect me so? It WAS the single most expensive piece of hardware in the PC. It was also the most premium piece of hardware I ever purchased (9800 GX2).

Has anyone else become emotional over a piece of PC hardware?

A point I want to raise. If you need to max out the fan speed on the gfx card for it to run stable. Something is wrong. You probably have a airflow problem in your case. either your intake filter are dirty (if your case have them), you don't have enough case fan (or they are at too low a speed) or you have a air circulation problem (your air circulation pattern is leaving a pocket of warm air near the GPU).

A point I want to raise. If you need to max out the fan speed on the gfx card for it to run stable. Something is wrong. You probably have a airflow problem in your case. either your intake filter are dirty (if your case have them), you don't have enough case fan (or they are at too low a speed) or you have a air circulation problem (your air circulation pattern is leaving a pocket of warm air near the GPU).

OR that the gfx card has/had a problem

I had two 8800GTS512 & all was fine but for a little problem both had the fan maximum blocked at 50% (even though that's not what the default BIOS said) which caused problems with memory temps with some rare games ...
of course it could be solved with manually forcing higher fan speeds with rivatuner.(generally 60~70% was enough)

This was just an example to show that not everything is black & white, while you got a point, the universe of possibilities is wider than that.

Yes, his card have a problem. It's probably caused by being repeatedly overheated.

EVGA are fairly good at the Heatsink design and software control. I have never had to raise one of their card above default fan speed unless I'm overclocking it. So if a EVGA is overheating at default fan speed something else is wrong.

Well the RMA was completed today and my replacement arrived.

A GTX 280!!!

But it has one less output so my hopes of adding a third display to my two 3840*1024 are dashed. BUT it gets much better specs at high resolutions in Crysis so I may actually get to play the game on higher quality.

NIce upgrade from teh 9800 you had.

time to update your sig.

I made love to a sound card once. But it meant nothing to me.

Thanks Abram, I will do that right now.

EVGA are fairly good at the Heatsink design and software control. I have never had to raise one of their card above default fan speed unless I'm overclocking it. So if a EVGA is overheating at default fan speed something else is wrong.

Except for the eVGA exclusive card coolers, such as the Akimbo series, eVGA, just like BFG, XFX and others... all use the 'reference' design for their coolers. They are no different to any other reference cooler out there. And the 9800GX2 was the sort of 'sandwich' design which is a royal PITA to get a decent cooler design for - aside from watercooling, there wasn't an option outside of the stock cooler AFAIK.

I will grant you that their software is well designed but it doesn't really do anything that other apps didn't do already. The Precision software just makes it a little more user friendly.