I guess I'm not having much luck with Nvidia 6xx GPUs...

C

Colonel Sanders

Supreme [H]ardness
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I first ordered an Asus GTX 670 DC2. That card was DOA (confirmed in 2 PCs.) No signal to monitor at all and no detecting in Windows (confirmed by checking via on board video.)

Now I sent that back to Amazon, got a refund, and picked up an EVGA GTX 680 Signature 2 instead. At first all was well. The card installed flawlessly and although I didn't have much time to mess with it last night, I did play BF3 on Ultra for 10 minutes or so and about 20 minutes of Saints Row the Third. Everything seemed fine.

This morning I decided to try a benchmark of Shogun 2. At first I tried the default DX11 - High benchmark (which went swimmingly at 89fps :eek: ) Then I maxed all the in-game settings and ran the game-settings benchmark. Almost immediately I started seeing some artifacting. I thought, uh oh, that's no good. Then I had to head off to work.

When I got home I tried to play some more BF3. It was running great for about 5 minutes then I started seeing some artifacts. Over the next 60 seconds or so they got worse and worse until eventually the screen blacked out and I had to reboot.

After rebooting I went to go found a program to monitor GPU temps. As I was doing this I starting seeing the artifacts in Windows and then I got an Nvidia driver crash/recovery.

WTF. Is this really going to be another faulty card? I'm about to test with Precision X to see what my temps are in BF3 but there's no way they are too high (my ambient temps are VERY cool right now, plus the case sides are off while I've been working on my PC)

Starting to get really, really pissed off here. WTF nvidia?
 
Give EVGA a call and walk through it with their techs. They pick up right away. That's why I buy EVGA, their customer service is the best.
 
Yeah, I can't even run BF3 for more than 3 seconds to check temps now. Just insta-crashing.

I mean I'm sure they will RMA it for me, but now I'm going to have to wait quite a while before getting a replacement card, and I sure as hell am not going to feel confident in the replacement at this point.
 
i'd return it to amazon ASAP

EVGA has been known to return RMAs with refurb'ed cards, amazon is preferable to EVGA for RMA purposes
 
xoleras said:
i'd return it to amazon ASAP

EVGA has been known to return RMAs with refurb'ed cards, amazon is preferable to EVGA for RMA purposes
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This.

Go to Amazon's return system, mark the item as defective, get it exchanged.

If you don't mark it as defective, Amazon will not test the item, and it will get put back into sale as a "Amazon Warehouse Deals" item. I've bought a few items that were DOA.

With Amazon, you have the option of using your credit card to cross ship (order a new one, send in old one as return) and you will end up with a new card. With EVGA, you will likely end up with a refurb that you have to wait for.
 
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Card was definitely defective. I placed it into roomies PC, same exact artifacting & crashing.

I guess I will go through Amazon again, they don't have the Signature 2 in stock though so if I want one ASAP I'll have to "roll the dice" again with ANOTHER brand...
 
Actually there's a thread on here about the super clocked versions being replaced with FTW versions. Sounds like that is the case with the signature in this case as well.

Here are 670s I've heard no problems about:
http://www.amazon.com/EVGA-Dual-Lin...e=UTF8&qid=1340495792&sr=8-1&keywords=gtx+670
http://www.amazon.com/Galaxy-GeForc...e=UTF8&qid=1340495792&sr=8-5&keywords=gtx+670
http://www.amazon.com/GIGABYTE-GV-N...e=UTF8&qid=1340495792&sr=8-4&keywords=gtx+670

I'm sure there are plenty of others that work fine. I've had a Gigabyte 680 and a 670 and I have had none of the problems you are talking about. If they don't have that card in stock anymore, there's probably a reason for it. I would call them and see what they can do for you. Their customer service over the phone has been excellent for me.
 
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Artifacting at stock settings is not a hard problem to diagnose. Either it is a heat issue or a defective card 99% of the time. Furthermore, the problem occurs in TWO pc's.
Also, regarding the faulty signature cards you mentioned - some 670sigs had defects which required a recall. The 680 sig2 have had no such recall. You'll note he purchased the 680 signature 2.

Calling EVGA tech would be worthless, because they will ask him to RMA the card. That would be a BAD idea compared to returning it to amazon. Why risk doing an RMA with EVGA to get a used or refub returned to you? Its better to get a refund from amazon, IMO.
 
xoleras said:
Artifacting at stock settings is not a hard problem to diagnose. Either it is a heat issue or a defective card 99% of the time. Furthermore, the problem occurs in TWO pc's.
Also, regarding the faulty signature cards you mentioned - some 670sigs had defects which required a recall. The 680 sig2 have had no such recall. You'll note he purchased the 680 signature 2.

Calling EVGA tech would be worthless, because they will ask him to RMA the card. That would be a BAD idea compared to returning it to amazon. Why risk doing an RMA with EVGA to get a used or refub returned to you? Its better to get a refund from amazon, IMO.
Click to expand...

Damn, I misread. I kept thinking 670 for some reason. Yeah just contact Amazon, they should be able to help.
 
So I was browsing around some other video card related forums, including the EVGA ones, and found a LOT of threads about issues *identical* to what I had happen to my 680 Signature 2. For example:

since the day one I had issues with it. I thought it was the games, then I thought it was the driver. Tried every option, nothing seemed to work. Week one, tried more games, same thing. Week two, tried to lower the games graphic levels to medium, and still same problem. 17 days after purchase, was playing Bad Company 2, screen blacked out, checked the heat and it was 48c. I started to worry because it never went above 40c. Closed the game since the screen came up blank white after the blackout. Rebooted the PC and guess what! card was completely dead. During the boot screen, read, green and brown colored lines all over the screen. When the windows started very bad resolution, very bad colors.
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This is exactly what my 680 did, right down to the rebooting into a very low res, low color Windows. Now obviously these types of issues are still in the minority, but it definitely seems to indicate some type of common issue with this GTX 6xx cards that a lot of people are running into. Just food for thought I guess.

I am going to try picking up another Signature 2 (from Newegg this time) because I LOVED this card, aside from the defective part... hopefully I'll actually get a good one because the performance of this thing was just unbelievably good.
 
Sorry about the trouble! Hopefully the new one is better- third time's a charm.

After hearing your experience regarding when the card DID work, I can't help but get even more anxious waiting for mine to arrive.
 
Colonel Sanders said:
I am going to try picking up another Signature 2 (from Newegg this time) because I LOVED this card, aside from the defective part... hopefully I'll actually get a good one because the performance of this thing was just unbelievably good.
Click to expand...

Beware, Newegg's return policy and process is nowhere near as good as Amazon's.
 
Starrbuck said:
Beware, Newegg's return policy and process is nowhere near as good as Amazon's.
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I know, Amazon doesn't have the Sig 2 anymore (or any 680 or even 670 that I actually want) so unless I want to wait (who knows how long) I'll have to grin and bare it.
 
If you have purchased your card and it is an EVGA brand within the first 30 days, they will send you a brand new card. After the 30 days, you get a referb...
 
The Cobra said:
If you have purchased your card and it is an EVGA brand within the first 30 days, they will send you a brand new card. After the 30 days, you get a referb...
Click to expand...

I can attest to this. Also my original 680 died after about 35 days and sent to EVGs still got a brand new card I assume because they didn't have any refurbs to give out yet.
 
The number of EVGA defects I'm hearing of from various forums is downright ridiculous. Sure they have great CS, why do they have so many failed cards? Reading the EVGA forum some dude just got a 690 hydro copper block that didn't fit properly, then another guy with a classified 680 also defective, WTF, i'm sure this happens to all MFG'ers - maybe I just hear EVGA a lot because they sell so many cards.
 
People always talk about how good EVGA's customer service is and how they wouldn't buy from anyone else because of it, but they sure seem to have a high defect rate in their motherboards and video cards. I guess if you have a high defect rate, you need good customer service. I like to buy from companies that I will never need to use their customer serivce.

That being said, I did have an EVGA GTX 285 a few years back and it worked flawlessly.
 
Blkout said:
People always talk about how good EVGA's customer service is and how they wouldn't buy from anyone else because of it, but they sure seem to have a high defect rate in their motherboards and video cards. I guess if you have a high defect rate, you need good customer service. I like to buy from companies that I will never need to use their customer serivce.

That being said, I did have an EVGA GTX 285 a few years back and it worked flawlessly.
Click to expand...

I can't attest to their motherboards. However, I can say that my evga video cards have always worked as advertised. One of my 680's did go bad. But I did the RMA and got a new card.

The reason some 680's have gone bad is because of a bad batch. They are working their way our of the system as we speak....
 
Blkout said:
I like to buy from companies that I will never need to use their customer serivce.
Click to expand...

I think customer service is huge especially for video cards. There's a lot to a video card and you can probably find a decent number of reports on most brands, obviously some more than others. I've dealt with Sapphire when I had a 9800 Pro die within a month of ownership, whole process took over a month. Then I had an Asus 4850 that started artifacting, all Asus did was slap another heatsink on it with dried out thermal paste and shipped it back. Temps were higher and same behavior, which it wasn't a heat issue. Thankfully the card bit the dust all together while playing DoD Source. I made a detailed report on everything that concluded it wasn't a heat issue to begin with but they just went through a cookie cutter approach. Second time they sent me another card and everything was good but total time on dealing with it was a little over a month. Ironically I had to use my Evga 7800gt during the rma, it's still going strong in an old system that's pretty much on 24/7.

Guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think there's a video card manufacturer I could say the quote above about. Not trying to say either way if Evga has a bigger defect rate or not than other companies but they do seem to be more involved with the online community than the average manufacturer and looks like they have a pretty active forum where people would feel like it's worth expressing their troubles.
 
I had two bad GTX 670 references before I got a replacement GTX 670 FTW that worked. Both reference cards artifacted.
 
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