Graphics Card Finally Died... Help?

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Candiss

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Dec 30, 2016
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Hi guys,

So funnily enough, a few months back I was asking what I could do to upgrade my machine, and a lot of people said GPU would be a good place to start. Well, today my GPU firmly hit the grave so now I have no choice but to get a replacement.

Specs as they sit:
Intel i7-4770k 3.5ghz Quad (Water cooled)
ASUS Z87-K Motherboard
16GB DDR3 Corsair Vengance RAM
128GB SSD
2TB HDD
Corsair CX 750 PSU

I was running a Nvidia 770 GTX beforehand, and while the thought of a 1070/1080 second-hand seems appealing, I prefer to get my card new if I can. I don't have a huge budget, so I was looking at the RTX 2060, but my question is, can I put (pretty much) any card into my computer and have it run? I'm aware I may run into RAM / CPU bottlenecks opposed to GPU ones, but if I can take the card out of this rig and put it into a future upgrade that would be ideal. As a side-note, I will have the space and the PSU connectors for a new card I'm fairly sure.

Any card recommendations with the above in mind would be really great. Thanks in advance for any help guys!
 
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Any PCI Express graphics card should work just fine. The 2060/Super would be a fine option - I'd probably try to stretch to a 2070 Super in your position, if the 770 lasted you this long. I suspect the 2070S will have longer legs.

Also, as an aside, what happened to the old card? I make threads here about repairing dead graphics cards - I might be interested in it if it really is the right kind of dead.
 
Thanks for the advice! I think really the issue here is I only have a max budget of £350, and the super / 2070's start at around the 400-450 mark and, given the current climate, I really can't rock the boat too much haha.

The card just gave up very suddenly. I started having black squares across games I was playing, crashing and then white lines appearing across the screen. I've tested different cables, monitors and downloaded new drivers, nothing worked. Take the card out and put the monitor into the motherboard and try it, everything else seems to work fine. The card has honestly been plugged into that PCI-E slot for 8 years, aside from the odd cleaning. Fans still work, it still acknowledges the HDMI input, but can't get the screen resolution or the clarity to appear, just a bunch of white lines.

I have some pictures I could DM you if you'd like?
 
You can look into the regular RTX 2070 and see if the prices are notably lower. The 2070 Super is essentially an RTX 2080, but the original RTX 2070 is still fairly fast. In general the RTX 2070 seems to be a bit faster than the RTX 2060 Super.

By the time you can afford to upgrade your CPU the next generation of AMD Ryzen should be out and you can do a platform upgrade then.
 
Candiss said:
Thanks for the advice! I think really the issue here is I only have a max budget of £350, and the super / 2070's start at around the 400-450 mark and, given the current climate, I really can't rock the boat too much haha.

The card just gave up very suddenly. I started having black squares across games I was playing, crashing and then white lines appearing across the screen. I've tested different cables, monitors and downloaded new drivers, nothing worked. Take the card out and put the monitor into the motherboard and try it, everything else seems to work fine. The card has honestly been plugged into that PCI-E slot for 8 years, aside from the odd cleaning. Fans still work, it still acknowledges the HDMI input, but can't get the screen resolution or the clarity to appear, just a bunch of white lines.

I have some pictures I could DM you if you'd like?
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The Radeon 5700 or 5700XT might be a good alternative. They can be had around the $350 mark here in the states, but are roughly equivalent to the 2070 in performance*. If you want to go this route, I think Sapphire is the brand to look at, but they're frequently not the cheapest. Gigabyte would probably be my second choice, I think.

*This varies by game. Some games do better on AMD hardware than others.

On the old card, have you tried plugging the cable into more than one of the ports? Chances are, you've got the sort of problem it isn't particularly practical to fix, but that kind of behavior can occasionally just be caused by the port becoming flaky.
 
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If you can't stretch for the 2070 Super, I'd second the recommendation for the 5700XT. Have a few friends gaming on those cards and they're really happy.
 
2070 or 5700/xt and oc that cpu up to 4.2+ and you have a perfectly capable system again for another couple years. then when youre ready to jump to a current gen cpu move the gpu over.
 
Best bang for your buck might be to get a Radeon 5700 (non-XT) with a dual bios and flash it. You can get within 3% of the XT’s performance while paying less than any of the other proposed options.
Important questions to ask:

1) What games do you play?
2) What resolution are you playing them at?
 
Nebell said:
Bake your old GPU in the oven.
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Oh God, don't do this. It's an old wives' tale that this works, and you stand to have everything you make in your oven from then on taste like burnt electrolyte.

Realistically, you won't get the card hot enough in a domestic oven to melt the lead-free solder that's used on most modern electronics, and even if you did, it's not always the BGA solder balls that fail, but rather the interconnects between the chips and their solder pads on the outsides of their housing. No amount of baking will fix that.

What you need, if you really want to repair that card, is proper diagnostics, and most likely a BGA rework station. Not worth it at all for the purpose of actually using the card.
 
FrgMstr said:
There is plenty of documentation on this forum that shows that reflowing cards does sometimes work.
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Yeah, but it's more a matter of just getting lucky than it really working reliably, and it's not likely to be a permanent fix even when it does.

I guess it's worth a shot if you have nothing to lose, but I don't think it's wise to go recommending that people bake graphics cards in the same oven they use to prepare food.
 
RazorWind said:
Yeah, but it's more a matter of just getting lucky than it really working reliably, and it's not likely to be a permanent fix even when it does.

I guess it's worth a shot if you have nothing to lose, but I don't think it's wise to go recommending that people bake graphics cards in the same oven they use to prepare food.
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So by your admission, it is not an "old wive's tale?"

Definition of old wives' tale

: an often traditional belief that is not based on fact : SUPERSTITION

And yes, I would suggest that if you card is broken then you have nothing to lose.
 
FrgMstr said:
So by your admission, it is not an "old wive's tale?"

Definition of old wives' tale

: an often traditional belief that is not based on fact : SUPERSTITION

And yes, I would suggest that if you card is broken then you have nothing to lose.
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I get "The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary..."

With great respect, is there any sort of data regarding what the success rate of that actually is? Is this something you've actually kept track of? I still think it's mostly superstition, but I gather it's worked often enough to keep the dream alive. I'd be willing to be proven wrong if actual data exist.

Knowing what I know about reballing BGA chips, I'm pretty skeptical that JUST reheating the board works often enough to be worth recommending. There's a lot more to doing it "correctly," particularly with respect to cleaning any oxidation from broken solder balls, and using a flux to prevent further oxidation when you melt the solder.

As you say, though, if you have nothing to lose, it's worth a shot, I guess.
 
RazorWind said:
I get "The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary..."

With great respect, is there any sort of data regarding what the success rate of that actually is? Is this something you've actually kept track of? I still think it's mostly superstition, but I gather it's worked often enough to keep the dream alive. I'd be willing to be proven wrong if actual data exist.

Knowing what I know about reballing BGA chips, I'm pretty skeptical that JUST reheating the board works often enough to be worth recommending. There's a lot more to doing it "correctly," particularly with respect to cleaning any oxidation from broken solder balls, and using a flux to prevent further oxidation when you melt the solder.

As you say, though, if you have nothing to lose, it's worth a shot, I guess.
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You can check the ongoing thread in this forum and read about successes and failures, but it is far from an old wive's tale.
 
If you are planning on keeping this card long at all, get an rtx one. You'll lose out on dlss and raytracing with a Radeon. These will become very important this and next year.
 
I would say best bang for the buck right now is maybe a 1660 super or 1660ti, pretty much a 1070 or 2060 level performance card for $200 ish pre human malware virus. As mentioned above the 5700 is a good bump in $300 range as you can flash and competes with 2070. Heck maybe grab a used rx 580 at around $100 and just enjoy until next gen or markets settle down? Should be a bump over that 770gtx, if even to just get more memory for eye candy goodies.
 
GoldenTiger said:
If you are planning on keeping this card long at all, get an rtx one. You'll lose out on dlss and raytracing with a Radeon. These will become very important this and next year.
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That's what they told us over a year ago.
 
GoldenTiger said:
If you are planning on keeping this card long at all, get an rtx one. You'll lose out on dlss and raytracing with a Radeon. These will become very important this and next year.
Click to expand...

My personal opinion, if your budget is RTX 2060, forget about RTX Ray Tracing as a feature unless you want every game to look like a slideshow with really cool lighting effects. Sure, it’s available, but it will kill the frame rate.

Again, the question is, what games do you play? At the stated price point, the best VALUE is a 5700 non-XT with a flashed BIOS as an overall choice, unless you play titles that favour Nvidia.
 
If I were in your position, I'd grab a 5700 model that has been confirmed to be able to flash to a 5700XT and do that...

I remember my 6800GT trying to overclock to Ultra speeds...
 
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