Are GTX 960s known for being faulty?

[Archbishop Cactus]

About two months ago I had some trouble with a new GTX 960 I had just bought, where my computer restarted a few minutes after booting it up with the new GPU and then it didn't recognise it anymore. To this day I still don't know what the issue was. My motherboard only has PCI-E version 2.0 with a GPU that has 3.0 but backwards compatibility exists. The PSU has more than enough power and I removed all of my other graphics drivers so that they didn't interfere.

However, when I looked towards the PC Master Race subreddit and saw a thread about the 960 not showing an image on the monitor containing several other complaints about the card not working, I started to get increasingly suspicious that it was the card that was at fault and not my computer or the way I put it all together. The thread can be found here and my username is Steel_Stream in case you want to read the comments as well. I must have spent about half an hour writing to everyone that was on the thread, but few replied to me.

I'd like to know whether there is a notoriety on GTX 960s for being faulty, incompatible or shoddy in any way. Right now my best two explanations for what happened are either that it died from too much strain in the first few minutes because I launched Fallout 4 straight away or that the cards in general are faulty. I do want to buy another card with the money I got to keep from refunding the 960 and I'm quite hesitant to do anything because I'm afraid that the same thing will happen again, and if it does, I might not be as lucky as to be able to get another refund.

My specs are the following:

HP Pavilion p6-2489ea

Joshua-H61-uATX motherboard
i5 3350P CPU
8GB RAM
GT 630 GPU
Corsair CX750 semi-modular PSU
(I also have an r9 270x and a HD 7870 that my friend kindly gave to me. If I learn more about my problem, I'm going to try using one of these cards on my computer to see if it works. Hopefully it won't get damaged.)

In summary: I'm calling to anyone who has ever owned a GTX 960 to report if they've had any issues with it or if they know about anything that could help me and anyone else that has had problems with these cards in the past. I should also clarify that the one that I bought was an Asus Strix.

(Thank you to nostall for moving my thread to the right place.)

 

[Zerk2012]

Their a ton of people using those cards with no problems.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

I have one in my son's rig a MSI 960 , runs flawlessly.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Sometimes you get a dud, it doesn't necessarily mean that the product suffers from widespread faultiness. And if you search the internet for some issue you're having, you're virtually guaranteed to find others who have had the same issue, regardless of what issue you've had or what product you're using.

 

[JUICEhunter]

I'd say if you've had 2 gpus that failed on 2 working systems you'd be justified in your thinking but with just one gpu/system you should probably try a 2nd. That being said 960 isn't that much faster than the 270x/7870, did your friend have a crossfire setup before upgrading?

Don't worry about the PCI-e 2.0/3.0 part of the mix, I've been running this 780ti which is also a 3.0 GPU on 2.0 slot for years with no issues. Benchmarks are just as good or better (with my oc) than what I see on-line with newer systems.

 

[Supermuncher85]

Running fine here, needed a bios update though. Check your motherboard vendor for update.

 

[Archbishop Cactus]

>but with just one gpu/system you should probably try a 2nd
Today I switched out my old GT 630 for the HD 7870. Strangely enough, exactly the same thing happened with it as with the 960, which probably means that it wasn't the card that's faulty. Once again I'm back to square one with what to think of the situation that I've been having.

>needed a bios update though. Check your motherboard vendor for update
Unfortunately there's no more support for my motherboard, and BIOS updates stopped being released quite a while ago. The BIOS is also very basic as it only gives a few toggle options and not anything regarding specifically what PCI slot to use. The only option that could help was turning integrated graphics on and off, and of course I didn't do that because at the time the computer just hung on the loading screen with the HP logo and nothing else happened. I only managed to get my computer back to normal by resetting the options in the BIOS.

Since it's seemingly quite possible that the GPUs aren't faulty, what I need to do next is the following:

1. Do a clean reinstall of Windows 10. It's very probable that the problems are due to the operating system, as Windows 10 is known for having a crapload of bugs and incompatibilities with hardware and drivers.

2. Figure out a way to get the system to run off integrated graphics until the drivers for the dedicated GPU can be installed. When I installed the 630 again after not being able to get the 7870 to work, the display resolution was somehow lower than it should be, but it showed up as the normal resolution in the settings. I looked towards Device Manager and the computer was using integrated graphics. The GPU was plugged in, the fans were running, but the PC was not using the GPU for video despite the HDMI cable being plugged into it. This makes me think that if I can get another card in after a clean reinstall of Win10, I could somehow get it to only use integrated graphics until I install all of the drivers needed.

Also, I just realised that what I've typed in has deviated a whole lot from the original question. I think I'm going to change the aim of the thread more towards seeing what I can do with the situation and hopefully finding a solution to the problem that other people might be able to use. If anyone thinks that this is a bad idea and that I should just open a new thread or something like that, please say so. I'll be posting updates on what's happening in a few days, since I don't want computer troubles getting in the way of my exams.

Okay. So, clean installation of Windows and running off integrated graphics at first before the drivers install. Actually, should I maybe install the drivers for the new GPU, uninstall the drivers for the old one and then install the new one? I'm not sure if that would work or not. If it did, it might be a way to get the GPU to work right off the bat.

 

[gokitty199]

i havent read the replies yet but, possible bad psu?

 

[Archbishop Cactus]

>possible bad psu?
Not at all. My PSU works with the rest of the computer and the fan of the GPU spins momentarily before it stops, so it's getting power. Best bet is some software issue rather than something wrong with the hardware, which is naturally much more difficult to identify.