another dying 7950gt agp in New Zealand

[antdavison]

ticket is 116023

had this card for less than one month, but used for only the last two weeks as i was rebuilding my godson's computer.

bought to replace my ageing matrox parhelia, which is set up for surround gaming and 3x 20"4:3 dell LCD's, or to connect to my Acer 1080p HDTV. Probably have 70 games running over 3 screens, maybe more, but the parhelia is only hardware-dx.8/openGL1.3, and hasnt played new releases for a couple of years now, but still a good effort by matrox.
i have a new matrox triplehead2go digital edition sitting in a box, ready to connect the 7950gt agp to my dell LCDs

after a week of burning in and then running the bundled GhostRecon Advanced Warfare, it started artifacting in that game, textures turning black, the posterizing to primary colours, then freezing and rebooting, then progressing to corrupted post and windows boot screens.

now it will corrupt in windows within about 5 minutes or less, commonly going to black screen with lots of dots over it when i run 3d applications

pulled it out, reinserted my old matrox parhelia, and reghosted the system back to just before i uninstalled the parhelia, which has been stable since i first bought it 4 years ago

bit unhappy as i had previously upspec'ced the power supply to an enermax 620w liberty, added 2x iRam-pci cards and 2x iRam-boxs to give me a 16gb raid-0 ram drive for fast game access, and because im building a virtual 3D New Zealand developed within Nasa WorldWind, and need fast texture access as it uses literally millions of little jpeg tiles.

I had done all the metal work to add 3 extra 50mm fans proximate the 7950's exhaust, and just about to punch the chassis to evacuate the 7950gt's hot exhaust from the case, close the case up, return it to its rack and connect up the triplehead2go

gpu tempertaure from cold starts at 45˚C, settling down to 50˚C at idle, running at 65˚C - 70˚C under a 3D load

serial number sticker says it is version.1, manufactured 2007.april

i am more intested in the cards features (2x dual link dvi ports, 512MB texture memory, openGL2 and hardware dx.9 support) rather than pure speed or framerates, so would be happy to underclock it if this would work, but dont really want to spend weeks detuning the thing to get it stable, as it should run well straight out of the factory and the user should be confident that it will run for three or so years without issues... otherwise why manufacture something that causes grief both for the user and manufacturer

i look after 40+ graphics computers for New Zealand's biggest television broadcaster, and have been doing 3D computer graphics, and building machines and providing technical support therefor since the early 90's, so am not a newbie

started a ticket and currently awaiting a response

maybe i will have to watch dvd's for a month rather than playing games or developing high res 3D landscapes .... great card while it lasted though ... loved HalfLife2 at good frame rates at 1920x1080p

antdavison, tvnz

[antdavison]

reinstalled the bad xfx 7950 agp over the weekend and shot some digital pictures showing the artifacting which i can post if anyone an host them for me (i scaled them down to about 50kb/image) - i shot heaps of pictures, but have scaled down about a dozen to 400x300 pixels with as total of 600kb

symptoms

after a couple of minutes within any 3D application the graphics start to corrupt, many times the textures show little primary coloured squares, then the geometry corrupts and shard like artifacts appear and some textures posterize to single colours, then the screen gets covered with little squares, and the application freezes, and a power off reboot is required.

The post screen and subsequent windows boot willl then be graphically corruptedwith either odd foreign characters on coloured blocky backgrounds or hundreds of little split up lines, but the machine will boot and run, unlike other posters who have reported a total system freeze.

this is repeatable and happens in all 3D applications if have tried, ie Nasa Worldwind (DirectX), HalfLife2, Call of Duty, Battlefield 1942, etc.

All these applications ran fin for about a week, until i installed and ran the bundled game Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter. After about 1/2hour of playing that game it started artifacting and corrupting ... perhaps that game is pushing the card hard, overheating its memory chips, and from there causing this problem to become permanent

any ideas would be appreciated

hi from New Zealand

[xfxsupport]

At this point I will have one of the support staff email your RMA form for your area so we can help resolve this.

[antdavison]

thank you, you are very kind ... :-)

last night i was mucking around with another couple of 50mm fans and found i could lower the idle temperature 2°C if i directed their output at the half side of the card nearest the molex connector ... that is blowing down (i have a desktop case) over the heatsink and halfway over the fan into the proximate vacant pci slot. Placing fans over the dvi half of the card didnt do anything, because of the direction which the card's fan itself rotates.

question : if i were to carefully remove the aluminium "grab bar" from the top of the card and drill and tap 4x 4mm holes along the molex/heatsink half of the bar so i could hang a couple of downwardly directed 50mm fans across the heatsink and 1/2 of the fan would that void any warranty on the card

[antdavison]

starting to feel a little abandoned after a week of hearing nothing from XFX, nor received an RMA form. I have a ton of programming to do after Xmas, and have totally lost confidence with this card despite XFX's claims, and i quote ...

"Instead of having to buy a complete new PCI Express gaming rig, XFX offers a full range of high-end AGP gaming graphics cards to keep your system up to date. With the worlds largest range in AGP available through XFX, it’ll be hard not to find the perfect one to fit your gaming lifestyle. The 3dmark 03 testing shows that XFX AGP video cards are drafting behind XFX PCI Express. Pick one up today for your AGP system and forget about having to set up another rig"

Such statements on XFX's website and the Bjorn3D review of this card (which was the basis of my purchasing decision) are misleading and deceptive.
We have a phrase in New Zealand consumer law called "fit for purpose" ... this card purports to be a high end gaming and 3d card, but the reality is mine corrupts in windows and then during post after using any 3d application for 5 minutes, despite complying with the requirements of adequate powersupply and airflow. If i dont get a RMA form soon i guess i will just give the XFX 7950 agp to my aged mum who will spend endless hours playing freecell and solitare on it ... what a joke ... high performance gaming

Because i need to have my home computer in one piece to program on i have ordered a gainward 7900gs+ from the uk ... it will require a further free vacant pci slot, and rearrangement of alot of my internal components because its airflow is quite different, and i will end up losing one of my iRam pci cards, so thats another us$300 defecit, unless i can find a go-ramdisk somewhere and they sell for around us$180-200, then there is still the us$300 xfx card, and i have yet to pay the courier cost of the defective card back to the US, so i am down hundreds of us dollars, and had only a week of satisfactory performance.

thinking hard about trying to turn a stream of negatives into something positive ... would xfx replace the card with a different model of equal retail value. maybe i could get a pci-e card use it one of our work computers, as the pci-x duallink parhelia's the engineers are buying at the moment dont have anywhere near the performance of the older agp parhelia's, and is something that might be helpful in debugging ... but these computers run 24/7 365 days a year, so any XFX card that cant do that is useless to us.
otherwise are the revision 1.1 variants of 7950agp's "fit for prupose"

mr.moderator ... if you are out there, please give me your advice on where i should go from here


hi from the southern hemisphere

[Miker]

Doing anything to the PCB will void the warranty.

They will most likely be willing to trade for something of the same value.

An AGP 7950GT is not the card you want if reliability is a need. This card is the best AGP card in the world, I own one, and when it works 100% I have yet to find a game (other then crysis) that I can't run at max settings.

[antdavison]

thanx for the reply mr.miker

what i meant in a previous post was to mount some fans on the black aluminum grab bar itself so they point into the void where the cards fan sucks the air into the heatsink ... wouldnt dream of attaching any fans onto the card itself .... holding a couple of fans above the grap bar on the molex half of the card did show a noticable 2C drop in idle temperature.

last night the card was idling at 47C, but only let me play around with nasa worldwind for 5 minutes, til it started artifacting and froze, and required a power off - hit the big power - button reboot

the next hottest component in my rig is the harddrive closest to the XFX's exhaust which sits at 34C idle, everything else including the 3 other drives, and the cpu idle at between 25C-32C

after the power-off reboot i went to bed frustrated and crying - lol

really dont want to spend my life flogging this dead horse, nor haunting these forums everday, i got heaps of other things to do, i just want to get the cover back on my pc, put it back in its rack where it belongs, connect up the triplehead2go splitter, then do some serious 3d programming, photoshop retouching of aerial terrain textures, and maybe blast a few aliens or nazi's for relaxation

you are very lucky to be able to play those games ... are you able to play GRAW .... thats when mine flipped out, until then it was quite happy playing all the old games i have ... mafia, call of duty, battlefield 1942, gta vice city, etc .... the only ones that ran like dogs were the unreal engined games, but that is most likely a software / LOD issue which i can tweak

once it started artifacting in GRAW which was bundled with the card, thats when everything went wrong, and those artifacts became present in all the otherwise stable 3d app's, and also in the post and windows boot screens ... so something must have cooked on the card

been looking for XFX alternatives, but the graphics card part of XFX's site was been "temporarily unavailable" for the last couple of days, so dont yet quite know what to ask for

[Miker]

Try a PCI slot cooler, see my 7950GT AGP user guide XFX Graphics Card Tech Support. I play Doom3 at 1280x1024 everything maxed too...

[antdavison]

no room, have 2 iRam pci cards, a tiny low profile sata raid card and a combo gigE/usb/firewire card + a vacant pci slot next to the 7950agp .... you faq is great, but i think the important thing is to get the hot air out, which my 3 x 50mm do. They mount between a couple of harddrives and a piece of 2" x 8" brass i got from the model shop directs the exhaust up towards the fans, so the airflow is pretty smooth, with no nasty sharp 90 degree changes in direction which airflow hates

surely one vacant unobstructed pci slot next to the agp slot is enough, otherwise they would have shipped the card with a 120mm fan and a funnel - lol

seriously, too much turbulence can cause more problems than it solves, thats why putting couple of 50mm fans blowing air across the heatsink and into the right hand side of the 7950's fan lowered my idle speed by 2C, but blowing across the other 1/2 of the card does nothing

however your 40C is very impressive but isnt it winter in your part of the world, it never snows where i live, just rains alot ... also here its close to summer and we have no ozone
I made a mosfet-PWM to control them and two 50mm fans i popped in the floppy drive hole which cool 2 of my hd's to 27C and 29C, the hd which gets the least cooling and is closest to the 7950 exhaust idles at 34C, but does not go beyond 38C at load

at 12v they run very noisely, 10v much quieter, 8v quiet, and still evacuating quite alot of warm air, with my hottest drive running only 1 - 2C hotter than when running the fans at 10v - 12v

can show you some pictures if someone can host them for me

[Dalicious]

Having exactly the same problem after 2 weeks of smooth sailing :( card bought in Australia.....

[antdavison]

HongKong RMA form and number #MD13591B5 received today ... thank you

any ideas on what i should ask XFX to trade for ... ideally something that will run 24/7, pci-e okay, hyper gaming performance not required, but dual link dvi is, similar retail value (their gaming cards part of their site is still unavailable)

also arrived and installed today was the Gainward 7800gs + (with a 7900 chip & 512mb) ... nice 3mm fat copper heat spreader covering the gpu, agp2pcie-bridge and vram chips, and double slot heatsink ... fan is big at around 70mm, slow running and very quiet

[A-L-E-X]

Just curious, what kinds of settings do you play Crysis on? At 1280 by 1024 can you get mixed medium and high settings?

Doing anything to the PCB will void the warranty.

They will most likely be willing to trade for something of the same value.

An AGP 7950GT is not the card you want if reliability is a need. This card is the best AGP card in the world, I own one, and when it works 100% I have yet to find a game (other then crysis) that I can't run at max settings.

[A-L-E-X]

Crossing my fingers here, but my card has so far reached the three week mark and not a single problem on either dvi port. I have Version 1.1 !



HongKong RMA form and number #MD13591B5 received today ... thank you

any ideas on what i should ask XFX to trade for ... ideally something that will run 24/7, pci-e okay, hyper gaming performance not required, but dual link dvi is, similar retail value (their gaming cards part of their site is still unavailable)

also arrived and installed today was the Gainward 7800gs + (with a 7900 chip & 512mb) ... nice 3mm fat copper heat spreader covering the gpu, agp2pcie-bridge and vram chips, and double slot heatsink ... fan is big at around 70mm, slow running and very quiet