somebodyspecial
Honorable
eirikheggelund :
Swordkd :
Could the motherboard or Psu be feeding too much power to the card and essentially causing it to burn out? I once had an issue where my windows install would slowly degrade and I'd experience bsod's with increasing frequency. I finally bought new ram twice and the problem would go away for a bit, but would show up again. Turns out the motherboard was burning out the Ram sticks. Just a thought.
I don't know. But I doubt it. I have a pretty new Asus Maximus V Formula motherboard. The power supply, a Corsair AX 860, is even newer.
New doesn't mean NOT malfunctioning (or at least it may be not compatible). I had a pc business for 8yrs and happened upon a PSU (sparkle, came in enlight's etc at the time) that was blowing specific AMD boards (msi) because it was delivering improper voltages for that model. I blew 3 boards in 3 days...LOL. I went to Supercom (one of my vendors at the time, along with ASI etc) and found a 1/2 dozen people in line returning them After some troubleshooting with a PHD PCI and a multimeter we came to the PSU as the problem on the 3rd board, which worked fine with everything else, other boards etc as I had many builds in the wild with them. Supercom and Enlight got together and worked it out after that (don't sell a model X psu with Y board, until a new rev was released a month later). Also this didn't manifest itself until you turned it on-off a few times. I built them running from the first boot generally and really only shut down to box it up after a 3day burn-in (ghost the OS, then copy quake2 (no win install, just a folder I can delete at the time) and burn-in for 3 days, 2 days gaming 1 day prime95 etc). I literally had the first one die upon delivering the box to a customer. That kind of sucked I was there explaining "it worked just two hours ago, I swear"...ROFL. I was on the phone two hours before discussing software installs and finishing up a few things on the phone with them. So having it not boot upon delivery was a little embarrassing 🙁
It wasn't an MSI problem either (new model, but not their fault), but rather a PSU problem, which eventually ended at Sparkle's door. They blew well over 120 boards between all of us in a week at one location, never mind across the states. Most of the rest of the local competition had no real troubleshooters. They had $8/hr HS kids back then, whose idea of troubleshooting was replacing parts until it worked, with tons of RMA's weekly - not even a burn-in at most places, so they kept doing it the whole week with a few returning dozens as they were a lot bigger than I was. A stack of 40 dead boards on the counter at your vendor (of your same model#) should be a light bulb moment for anyone
So your parts might not be bad, but they can still be incompatible which can kill the parts. It was only the ON-OFF part that was killing it and pretty much in 3 boots (none of them made it to 4, one died at 2). Google the two model numbers and you might see others and comments about compatibility. I would check card/psu, card/mboard. Nothing else in there can really kill the card like this, at least that I have seen in practice and radeon 7970's don't die 3 in a row normally. Drives, memory, other cards generally don't cause this type of crap. You could have bad quality on a run of cards though. I used to buy Matrox G200 20 packs and got a pack with 4 bad ones that could not push 1600x1200 at 75hz on a 21in (my tester just for this reason, after discovering this - an accident as I was testing a batch of mitsubishi 21 91txm's for ProE stuff that day- AWESOME monitors back then - but could give you a hernia picking one up...LOL). The cards worked fine if you dropped it down (shoddy ramdac or something). Other than that they ran fine. I normally would get ONE or NONE with any issues in any 20pk (but these all had the same issue). Matrox sent me new ones direct (nice!) after some Lvl3 troubleshooting with a tech to prove I was correct. Whatever...LOL - I knew why they thought all people were ignorant; no surprise there based on what I saw happening in line weekly at my suppliers.
Just more data for you to ponder...But if they have an issue you'd think the tech would know this when you call them up. Then again their ignorance, even about their own products, wouldn't surprise me either 🙁 My vendor rep called me for video card advice for others all the time (it got me good pricing even as a little guy, so no problem from me)...ROFL. But he did know I catered to gamers and high-end workstations running proe, solidworks, cad etc, which the 91txm monitors were for. So maybe it was wise on his part calling me back then. This is why I say google the models as google doesn't forget ever, and knows about every complaint made online 😉 I used to live on forums trying to figure out what NOT to sell next. Compatibility was a huge issue back then though. Good luck.