How many video cards are failing?

I had an 8800M GTS die on me in an iMac. Stock clocks and fan settings.

I've had good luck so far with video cards but then again I have a decent UPS and actually keep myself grounded, unlike a certain few people. :)

Oh my gosh, this post has been up for about an hour and nobody has made a Mac joke yet! I would have expected someone to have said something about the high mac hardware costs + early failure != you got what you paid for.

If they don't downgrade you, you are golden.

This above really annoys me. I hope I never have to deal with the return process as I wouldn't be able to stand it if XFX replaced my 5870, some two years down the road with a 5850 etc.
 
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I've had a few cards fail. One was oc'd, most weren't.

I've had:
Geforce2 Ti
Geforce4 Ti4200
Radeon 9800 Pro -- died from personal fail -- didn't clamp hoses on CPU wb, water dripped onto card during use.
nvidia 6600gt x2
Sapphire x800gto2 - clocked to x850xt speeds, failed after ~2 years
Radeon x850xt x2
Radeon 2900 Pro x2 - clocked to 2900XT speeds, one failed within 6mo
MSI XFX 8800gt x4 - stock clocks, 3 cards failed. One artifacted, 2 booted sometimes - eventually just wouldn't boot (I think they just sent the same card back from RMA). Last card they sent had a larger heatpipe cooler and lasted until I sold it.
Galaxy 9800gt x2 - current setup, no issues thusfar.
 
I'd like to see how many still have working 8800 GTX/Ultras.

Started using x86 in 1992 and since then I''ve had one card completely die on me (Cirrus Logic ISA graphics), one show symptoms of wear and tear (Radeon 3870) and two issues with bad fans (Sapphire ATI cards, a 9600XT and a 2600XT).

Had my 8800 GTX for almost 2 years now and she is still rocking. Definitely runs better in my i7 rig, but seeing that Im a fiend for the best eye candy I can get my hands on, a 5870 is in the works.....which one though is the question.
 
I had a number of video cards fail on me but I believe that over the years it was my poor taste in power supplies, namely Antec rebrands, one of which had showers of sparks shooting out like a fireworks fountain. One card still makes me superstitious, my ATi 9800, which died while playing Neverwinter Nights, and while I was randomly pondering how long my video card would last, and thinking wouldn't it be creepy if it died while I was thinking that, which it did! Curses!

I used to buy from local stores, but there are no real computer stores now around here, just large chains selling computer pieces. The employees are nice but are bound by company rules, so I usually order from the net, and send to manufacturer if there are problems. Fortunately my 3870x2 is still holding up, I am waiting for the next generation after ATi's next GPU refresh to buy, I don't want a higher clocked 5870, but a little more advanced tech and I am willing to wait(unlike years past).
 
Remember the Nvidia 7900GT's? I had an Asus Top 7900 fail and an EVGA 7900 Signature series fail on me. Both failed within a month. This forum had threads going on for a dozen pages or more with people complaining about their failing 7900's. I think that cost Nvidia a lot of money. It was just a bad design. Other than that series I haven't had any problems. My 8800 GTS has been in two machines, and has lasted over two years. Now I'm just waiting to see how things sort out (prices come down) between AMD and Nvidia before I upgrade.
 
I've been noticing my past couple of GPU's fans making noise after about a year, my case is an old Lian Li with the reverse ATX, almost as if the fans were only made to hang downwards... Weird stuff... But other than that, no problems. Of course I don't use UPS, just FedEx.

Could be bearing noise. Are these sleeve bearings? If so it's possible they need to be lubricated - on a normal case fan there is a little port on the back, usually under the sticker, that you can stick a drop or two of sewing machine oil in. But for a GPU fan I'm not sure.
 
Savage fanboy!!! All kidding aside, I'm in the same boat as you having owned probably 8 different graphics cards with none of those cards dieing before my card has lost its usefulness to me. Generally, I just hand-me down the cards to friends whom continue to use it for a few years till they recycle it. I do tend to keep my cards well cooled in large cases with lots of fans in an air conditioned environment.

at the time they were cheap and the savage 3d was the only one that had hardware assist for DVD, Savage 4 was pretty decent and once S3 went tits up for all practial purposes, ATi was the only viable choice........cause Nvidia cost a lot back then and still does today.
 
yeah i seemed to have the worst luck with with a Ti4600, had Leadtek one replaced 3 times with overheating and failing, wasn't even trying to overclock it much, also had 2 6800gt's bite the dust. I'd blame Nvidia but i didn't have any ATi cards back then, no issues with 8800GTX and 8800GT, and 4870's (all 5 ) and 5870's (all 3) haven't give me any trouble at all.
 
To be honest I think that its not too much of a stretch to say that 90% of electronic failure is user error. Dirty power, under powering, ESD, etc etc etc are all very common.

How many people use UPS's?
How many people actually care about ESD?
How many people use 400w power supplies for video cards that require more? (this one get tossed around here a LOT.. "you can run x card with y power supply, its plenty".. even though it pushes it WAY beyond the efficiency curve).

I won't even list the video cards I have gone through.. only one of them being DOA.
because these things cause the nvidia solder joint failures, the black lines and the failures to boot? maybe you can explain how "baking" a card fixes any of the problems you have described?

My own similar experience was with a 8800 GTS, never overclocked or anything connected to a corsair 700W psu. same outcome.
 
I suppose I'm in the minority here. The only card I've ever had trouble with was a 6800GT. Oddly enough, when I first purchased it it came to me with the fan shroud falling off. One of the screws had broken, I suppose in transit. They sent me another one and told me to keep the one with the broken shroud. A few years later (like, four) the second one bit the dust so I screwed the shroud back in on the first one and it's been working ever since.

Hell, I still have a Leadtek Ti4400 collecting dust that was recently moved to the closet. It still runs like a champ to this day. Same for the 8800GTS I've had for almost four years.
 
I've owned upwards of 10-15 cards (not gonna sit here at work and try to figure out how many exactly). Starting with a PCI Trident 64 with 1MB of memory and a Voodoo 4MB 3D card. Never had a single one fail on me. Still have an original Radeon All-in-Wonder that still works... :D
 
ive had a DVI port die on a 7300gt, but havnt had any new cards die, ive had two 8800gts g80's, 8600gts and gt, 8800GTX, 7600GS... oldest one that died was a nvidia geforce2 MX. i do my fair share of gaming but ive been NUTS about cooling them down.

Ive had an HP laptop with a 6150 shit the bed but thats a given..
 
I had two GTX 295 cards fail within three months, also a 9800 GTX and and 8800 GTS fail. All were eVGA and were replaced no questions asked. On my third XFX card, 5870. None have given me the slightest trouble.
 
I have yet to have a card fail on me, however I have had to replace the heat-sink or fan on almost every single ATI card I have bought or recommend to a customer. No one brand in particluar, all different system setups, the default ATI cooler hardware just sucks, which is why I guess we are seeing so many manufacturers releasing cards with custom heat-sinks.
 
I had my All-In-Wonder 9800 fail on me.

I had the side panel open and had a fan blowing on the inside, it was a shitty HP that was silent but with pratcially 0 air flow....I never dusted the heatsink, when I finally did the dust on one of the passive sinks were so thick I could peel it off.

I'll be baking it soon ^_^
 
The only 2 cards I've had die on me was a 6800le and 9800pro

The 6800le just didn't like be over volted and the extra pipes opened up plus being OC'd to 6800GT speeds. Eventually, after a YEAR, I had to turn the extra pipes off to make the artifact monster go away...

The 9800pro was run at XT speeds and finally the fan died. So technically this one didn't die, it's still being used today in a buddy of mines comp with a 120mm fan zip tied to it. :)

Oh, and total I've owned 13 Vid cards and to my knowledge all the other ones are still working without issue, or sitting on a shelf.
 
I've only had a 6600GT fail on me after about 3 years.

Most of the failures I have seen are due to the fans crapping out on the cards, and the users not noticing it until after the card fried.
 
Started building computers with an nvidia Ti4600 and have had nearly every nvidia card since then.
5000series,a bunch of 6000 series, 7800s,7900s,8800GTs and GTXs,260s,280s, 285s.

ATIs 3800s,4800s, 4800x2s,5870s.

My son beats the snot out of video cards, and generally uses my old cards when I upgrade.

I've never had a single failure......ever. I overclock to some degree.:D

Currently I have a 7900GTX running perfectly,a 6800GT running 24/7, an 8800GTX that gets a daily work out, a 4870 that runs almost 24/7, and two 5870 E6 models.
 
I only had one card that failed on me within 1 year and that was my ol' GeForce 4200Ti (or something like that). I think it died in about 6 months of normal usage with no overclocking.

I had a 1900XT 512mb which failed on me as well, but it was 3 years old. I was planning to replace it with the HD 5850 anyway.
 
I think it has more to do with people cutting corners and cheap soldering and stuff like others are saying. Here's my cards and what happened:

Geforce MX440 no problems
Geforce 4 ti4200 no problems
BFG FX5900 artifacted out of the box, returned and the second one was rock solid
Sapphire 9800pro started artifacting after a year or so, wound up destroying it in the street
Visiontek x800pro no problems
Sapphire x700pro was fine up until about 2 years ago then the fan melted off (friends computer, could be poor cooling/ventilation)
Sapphire x1600xt had this super annoying coil whine or something upon load. Got it oem so sapphire told me to fuck off basically, think I destroyed this one and went nivdia for a bit
Evga 7600gt no problems at all until a few months ago, started artifacting in a friend's computer, baked it and it works now
Evga 8800gts640 worked fine for a year or so, then artifacting; baked it and works
Evga 260gtxcore216SC had to be underclocked stock or artifacting would happen. RMAd it and the 2nd one works like a charm still
ASUS 5870 Fan started grinding about 3 weeks ago, still waiting on a reply from ASUS
ASUS 4890 TOP works fine, just got it

So it seems hit or miss to me from both sides of the fence (Nvidia/Ati) but I always find myself wishing nvidia had the better cards as of late because I just am in love with evga's RMA process. I'll never buy sapphire again, 2/3 cards I owned failed and they genuinely seemed like they DIDN'T want to help me.
 
I've never overclocked a card and I've had many die at the stock settings all which were well within their thermal specifications.

EVGA 7800gt failed within the first month.
EVGA 7900gt just short of a year.
2x Galaxy 8800gt g92s with defective memory out of the box.
2x XFX GTX 260s after half a year each.

Apparently the 7800gt I got from the first RMA that I sold just failed recently as did one of the underclocked 8800gt g92s I gave away.

Ordering a 5850 and not touching nVidia again. Far too many bad experiences over the last several years. RMAs are expensive when you live in Canada and have to ship to the USA back and forth all the time.
Gotta look toward the common denominator in all your problems. PEBKEC.
 
I have 2 evga 8800GT, a Gigabyte 8800GTS 512, and an old 7950GT that all still work perfectly.
 
Sapphire x1600xt had this super annoying coil whine or something upon load. Got it oem so sapphire told me to fuck off basically, think I destroyed this one and went nivdia for a bit

That sounds about right. If you buy OEM, then the place you bought it from is supposed to help out. Sapphire (or any other company) will only give you support if you bought a new retail version.

Only exception would be for companies like XFX which has Double Lifetime Warranties (US only I think). When the original buyer sells it second-hand, the warranty is transferred (only transfers once).
 
Gotta look toward the common denominator in all your problems. PEBKEC.

Between all the shit slinging Charlie does towards nVidia back at the INQ, Apple/HP/Dell having high failure rates with the nvidia mobile GPUs from a few years ago, all the threads around here, EVGA/XFX acknowledging problems with the hardware, TSMC blaming nVidia engineering and nVidia blaming the TSMC, friends with endless problems with their nVidia hardware... I'm going to say not bloody likely. Seems every thread about bad experiences with hardware and/or customer support (RMAs) brings out the apologists who like to point fingers everywhere else but where the problem actually is.
 
I'd like to see how many still have working 8800 GTX/Ultras.

Started using x86 in 1992 and since then I''ve had one card completely die on me (Cirrus Logic ISA graphics), one show symptoms of wear and tear (Radeon 3870) and two issues with bad fans (Sapphire ATI cards, a 9600XT and a 2600XT).

Not sure if it counts for anything, but I've still got a working 6800 and an 8800GT (XFX alpha dog).
 
Personally, I think the first rev of the 8800gt's ran too hot with the single-slot/small fan combo. I think the failures were quite high, which is why they revised the design for a considerably larger fan.
 
...lol...really?

do you still have it? Try baking it and see if it works :D

Lol I loved that card to death like many with a 9800 pro did. I figured that card needed an extravagant way out so one night when I was wasted I just demolished it in the street.
 
geforce 4ti - broken fan
radeon 9800 pro - worked for 3 years then fan bearing died
Geforce 6800 - woked flawlessly
Geforce EVGA 8800GTS - worked great but stepped up
Geforce EVGA 8800GTX Super clocked- worked for 2 years had to underclock bc of NVDISP error, evetually had to bake
ATI 4870 X2 - ran hot always had to ramp up to 80% fan to keep temps down until one day kept blue screening and found out dust clogged up the heat sink fins, cleaned up worked again. Got scared of diamond 1 yr warrany expiring so i moved onto.....

XFX 5870: 1st one had fan issues making noise so i got scared and returned to frys.
2nd being RMA'd as we speak due to no display output issue.

way things are going i might go back to nvidia at some point to try them out again lol
 
My first computer came with a Cirrus Logic that had 512k of memory on it, my first "purchased" card was a S3 64, I've had a ton of video cards in my day...

With that in mind the only video cards I've had fail on me were ones with fans, some of my older(freakn old) cards are still running today, the ones that failed were my 4600Ti that would never overclock (2+ years usage), and a 6800GT with bad memory and not being the core(1.5 years usage).

Over all I think they are keeping up ok with stability even with the massive heat these are putting off, thats one of the biggest hurdles they have to put up with. One its super hard to mount an after market on this thing then a CPU ... Two, its facing twords the GROUND and normally not with alot of airflow when compared to a CPU. In my opinion these GPU makers have done a great job over coming their hurdles for our quality.
 
Lol I loved that card to death like many with a 9800 pro did. I figured that card needed an extravagant way out so one night when I was wasted I just demolished it in the street.

For future reference, baseball bat in a field somewhere. Just saying...
 
I think the surprising thing is how often they DON'T fail. What are we talking these days, 1 BILLION transistors per card?

i was thinking the exact same thing the other day. it is truly a miracle each and every time my PC even boots up!
 
I'd like to see how many still have working 8800 GTX/Ultras.

*raises hand*

BFG 8800 GTX OC still going strong in my GF's 'puter.

I've actually never had a video card fail on me *knock on wood*

The closest thing I've gotten is when the stock fan died on my Radeon 9800 Pro and I had to replace it. That card still works as far as I know. I think I even have a GeForce3 and a Voodoo3 2000 PCI that still works.
 
everything dies sooner or later, fact of life. if 3 years passes and it dies, its time to replace it anyway.
 
I'd like to see how many still have working 8800 GTX/Ultras..
Original 8800GTS 640 here, it may not be a GTX, but it was released at the same time using the same core. Running strong since fall 2006 when I got it, no issues.
 
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