My BFG GTX 280 OC Died!

GreenGoose

GreenGoose

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 17, 2004
Messages
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I turned on my computer this morning and I had streaked lines across my screen (the usual: your video card is about to die look). The computer failed to boot all the way into windows with a BSOD. After about three attempts to boot, I stopped getting any video all together. I pulled the card out and threw an old 7800 GTX in and it booted fine.

My BFG GTX 280 OC was 17 days old and performed flawlessly during that time with several hours of gaming each day. I was not overclocking it and have a PC & Power Cooling Silencer 750. Has anyone else had one die? I hope it was just a lemon and not signs of things to come.

I contacted BFG and they quickly set up an RMA. The guy told me that they couldn't do a cross ship because the card was too new and they didn't have any on hand, but then said they would ship out my replacement card the same day they recevied mine. WTF? I shipped it this morning. It will be next week before they get one to me I'm sure.

Fuck it! I guess I'll find a book to read. :mad:



*****UPDATE ON POST #80.
I have had three BFG GTX 280s die. I will be on my fourth one in two months.
 
Wow man, I'm sorry to hear about that. I hope you have better luck with the next one! All of these stories I keep hearing, and the ones about heat + the prices, CrossFire 4870's are looking better and better to me.:eek:
 
I had a bad XFX GTX 280 standard clock. It functioned but it produced a weird jerkiness in games. Sent mine back to Mwave and got a new one, total turn around time was nine days, I did two shipping, had originally gotten overnight shipping and of course they shipped the RMA back via UPS ground.

I've seen a few posts about bad cards, hard to determine if there is a problem or if the failure rate is normal. Certainly for the card to work out of the box and then go bad after a little more than two weeks is a little disconcerning.

Good luck with the RMA and enjoy the book!
 
ZippZopp said:
what motherboard are you using? were your temps high at idle?
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Asus Maximus Formula. To be honest, I didn't monitor my temperatures of the card. I have ample cooling in my case. I ran a 9800GX2 for three months without issue. I had two 8800 Ultras in the same case when I had my 680i.

Of course when it started showing signs of failure the computer was just turned on, so heat couldn't have killed it at that point. Unless it degraded it over the last two weeks.
 
I think that people might be overstating the heat problem as these things are supposed to run a little hot when loaded. There's might be a problem with the cooling but these 3 GTX 280's are throwing out a TON of heat when they are loaded and seemed to be hitting about 90 after an hour of Crysis so I think that at leat mine seem to be handling the heat ok.
 
interesting. i have a maximus formula as well and got my BFG gtx 280 a few weeks ago. i've been participating in the power saving issues thread and it is looking like the gtx 280 on an x38 motherboard doesn't throttle down the clock speeds so it runs cooler. so basically, on my maximus formula I have my card idle at about 67c which is kinda high, at load i'm at no higher than 84 or 85, but it is usually under 80c. maybe high idle temps had something to do with yours failing. hopefully mine holds up, but i'll keep you posted.
 
ZippZopp said:
interesting. i have a maximus formula as well and got my BFG gtx 280 a few weeks ago. i've been participating in the power saving issues thread and it is looking like the gtx 280 on an x38 motherboard doesn't throttle down the clock speeds so it runs cooler. so basically, on my maximus formula I have my card idle at about 67c which is kinda high, at load i'm at no higher than 84 or 85, but it is usually under 80c. maybe high idle temps had something to do with yours failing. hopefully mine holds up, but i'll keep you posted.
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Well, I guess I'll monitor my temperature closely next card. I wasn't too worried about it since I wasn't overclocking it.
 
mine finally comes back from RMA tomorrow. hope it lasts more than two hours like the first.
 
Man that sucks. For a person like me who hasn't built a system for 7 years, I have no hardware compatible to fall back on. All my old hardware is AGP video... doesn't bode well for a PCIe x16 system.

Guess I may be looking for cheap PCIe cards in the for sale section to fall back in case I have to do an RMA with a couple week wait. <shrug>
 
yeah, same here. i have a couple 4850's in my rig right now, but after i sell those off, i won't have a backup either.
 
g1xx3r said:
LOL..Good one!:p
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Well, until GTX 280's start exploding, that won't fully come to pass. But damn, from initial impressions these things sound bad. As implied, I got a 360 in March '06- a gen 2- and it red ringed in four months (this was back when there were only three month warranties, failure rates were "less than 3%" and "reasonable", and when they charged $130 to fix their defective crap) and blew-up a couple of weeks later. Luckily I'm not planning on a new card until August (to go with my new system I'll be taking to college) so it will be interesting to see if this is just a bad first batch due to nVidia's pushing the cards out far too soon in order to compete with the HD 4870 or if it is an architectural problem.

Really would like to go with the GTX 280, especially if it does drop down to around $400 (wishful thinking perhaps, but MSRP is $500 now and we've all seen how low distributors have managed to push prices on nVidia cards) by August. CUDA is definitely on the rise and it happens that the engine Wartide is using utilizes nVidia PhysX (well, it was Aegia when the programmers we just linked-up with started programming the engine, but they've modified it heavily), so given that I'm pretty much building this as a development rig the GTX 280 is very appealing. But I'm not keen to repeat the kind of experience I had with the Xbox 360 (or, as I call it, the XplodeBox 360).
 
can't blame people for hating on the GTX woes. all that should change when they shrink it to smaller fabrication process.
 
In the same boat as you guys; had my eVGA 280GTX SSC die after about 4 days of use. Was using the eVGA 790i board. eVGA replaced it quick enough. All is well with the new card.... so far.
 
my new cards has been back in my rig for an hour. running way cooler and spilling a lot less heat into the rest of the case. i'll post back if i have any more problems.
 
Proxy said:
LoL, remember the 7900's? Although I think that was more related to the type of memory used on them, but still, a lot of duds.
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Admittedly after I got my 6800 Ultra I tuned-out of the gpu world for pretty much an entire generation, lol. Though I ended-up considering a 7900GTX vs. an 8800GTS 320mb Spring '07 and ended-up going with an 8800GTS 640mb Superclocked, lol.
 
Well, after dabbling with my GTX 280 for a good half a day yesterday.... Turns out I get the same overheating symptoms, a pulsing or sticking effect that FRAPS doesn't see at all. Happens after I play Crysis for about an hour. Better than my first card, which would do it after five minutes, but it looks like I'll be RMA'ing another GTX. :(
 
this sounds more like the 680i issue with heat and stuff....sucks that these cards are dropping like flys for some reason though :(
 
I've used my three GTX 280's moderately this past week, a couple of 2 to 3 hour game sessions and a few more 30 minute to hour sessions, Crysis and CoD4 mostly. I had that problem with one of my cards like you and so far I'm actually very happy with how well everything is working. 3x SLI actually is pretty solid (knock on wood ;)). I'm hitting about a high of 90 at load with Crysis after an hour plus straight and it doesn't seem to be a problem.

That issue definately has something to do with the card as replacing fixed it for me, but two cards with that problem in a row just doesn't sound right. Have you seen other reports of the problem?
 
I posted a thread detailing my experience in the main video card section. Kyle and two BFG reps have agreed it is the cards. Just bad luck. :(
 
wadec22 said:
I posted a thread detailing my experience in the main video card section. Kyle and two BFG reps have agreed it is the cards. Just bad luck. :(
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I totally agree with that, its very obvious that it's a problem with the card when you can put another in the same rig and it goes away. Now that's three cards with a fairly essoteric problem, at least I've never seen anything like it. I'm just wondering how widespread it is.
 
Crap, looks like I'll be waiting for my 280 to buy. Looks like another 7900GT fiasco. Look for possible new model #'s....
 
heatlesssun said:
It functioned but it produced a weird jerkiness in games.
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OK, that's really strange, because that's the exact type of problem I was having with the 4870 that I could not get resolved. I was getting jerkiness and "sticking" and bad performance. My wife just sent back the RMA'd card two days ago, and I'm back to my 8800GTX.

I had plans on going with the GTX 280 in a couple of days, but am uncertain... how prominent is this problem? Particular brands?

I usually always go with EVGA, and have only seen one person (on Newegg) complain of a DOA card.

It seems it's not a heat or power issue for the OP, but how common of an occurrence is this actually becoming?

I'll be giving my 8800GTX to my wife, so could always just pop that back in my system should something happen, but I'd be quite unhappy to find, a few days or weeks or even months later, that the 280 died on me for no other reason than shoddy manufacturing.
 
I just got my replacement card today. It's the same GTX 280 OC version I had. So far so good. I'm off to game for a few hours and see what happens. I'll kept everyone posted if this one craps out.
 
After one hour of COD4 my card got to 94C. It seemed to get a little jerky. Is this too hot for a GTX 280?
 
GreenGoose said:
After one hour of COD4 my card got to 94C. It seemed to get a little jerky. Is this too hot for a GTX 280?
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Get Furmark this will show for real if your card has overheating issues. First day I got 105C in less than 4 mins. Now for some unknown reason, my temp stabilize around 97-98C when I try the stability test for 15-20 min @ 675 mHz 1920x1200.

Have Fun.
 
95C is too hot! Your card is throttling. In many threads people are getting around 80-85+. Myself am getting 82-85 in crysis after >1hour of playing and this is with fan set to auto (actual fan speed ~55%).

In furmark i am hitting 87-89 with fan set manually to 100%. As said above, set fan to 100% using riva, evga prec or ntune and run furmark to see what is the max.

Also can tell us more about your case setup & ventilation? There were complaints of the NB on of the 790i boards bwling hot air directly at the GOU heating it further up for example.:confused:
 
After reading this thread there is no way I would consider getting a 280 now... even if Nvidia reduces the prices to 'AMD' competitive levels.

Sounds like a similar issue to what they are having in their 8400GS/M mobile cards.. heating and poor cooling resulting in instability. HP claimed that over 17 laptop lines were affected by poor Nvidia cards..

Is this a repeat for the premier desktop line ? I LOL'd at the resemblance to the 360 console!
 
I have a Cooler Master CM Stacker Case with two 120mm fans in front, a cross flow fan that pulls air over the entire motherboard, one120mm exhaust in rear, one 80mm exhaust on top, and a Thermalright 120 with a 120mm fan on my processor. I should have plenty of cooling; however, after a few minutes of game play, the video card gets close to 100C and everything starts getting jerky. I opened the side of the case and put a large fan blowing directly on it and it makes no difference. It still overheats and is jerky.

This is my second GTX 280 and I am not impressed. My 8800 GTX was much smoother at game play than this thing! This was a trade-up so I can't get my money back. I'll I guess I'll RMA it and sell the new one that comes back. Any other suggestions?
 
I set my fan on the card to 100%. I played 15 minutes of COD4 until it was too jerky to move. The temp was 105C.
 
Boy am I glad I bought the 260, this card runs REALLY cool, way cooler then my last 9800. Im sorry you guys are getting so many problems, I know how bad it sucks RMA'ing over and over.
 
I just spoke with BFG. All they can do is set up another RMA. They did say they would provide a shipping label this time. Big woop! Another week without a video card. I feel sure that the next one I get will be the same piece of hot garbage as the rest of the 280s. :mad:
 
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