[Investigation thread] How reliable have your graphics card been?

[Phazoner]

I was discussing in another thread that I won't recommend Sapphire because it has been the less reliable brand for years and I feel like they keep being the most unreliable because of the number of failure cases I've seen in forums, but it could be just for coincidence.

SO we can all collaborate and tell how well have the graphics cards behave to us. For a more reliable "study", we have to avoid speaking about used, second hand graphics cards, only cards that you have had in your hands fresh new, or that you got from someone close which usage before being in your hands is well known. AND there aren't valid failures because of accidents (splitting water on the PC, burning it because of a bad overclock or overvolt, etc). Refurbished cards aren't valid.

So there's a little scheme to speak about your cards:

Brand: [EVGA/Gigabyte/...]
Brand: [AMD/Nvidia]
Model: [Nvidia EVGA GTX 1080 FTW Gaming/AMD Sapphire Dual-X R9 270x OC/...]
Purchase approximate date:
Failure approximate date (if failed):
Intended use: [Multimedia/Gaming/Rendering/Mining]
Approximated daily use on load: [Hours for Gaming/Rendering/Mining], [Hours for Multimedia]
Extended details: Did you overclocked? How hard? Did you change the cooling system? Was it originally bought by a familiar or friend and what use did they gave to the card?

Thanks in advance for all your contributions. Let's make graphics card choosing better! 😀

 

[Eximo]

Interesting. I have had my hands on a HD4850X2 that popped, but as far as I know Sapphire was once the go-to ATI/AMD supplier. Certainly more popular back in the day. Which may be why you have seen more failures, they used to be very common until the other vendors started picking up the AMD cards. Also available in stores like Best Buy as practically a house brand.

Brand: Sapphire
Brand: ATI
Model: HD 4850 X2 (Dual GPU)
Purchase approximate date: 2008
Failure approximate date (if failed): 2012? (I would have to find the pictures I took to get a timestamp)
Intended use: Gaming, Multimedia
Approximated daily use on load: 8+
Extended details: The card did have fan failure, but that was due to aggressive cleaning and a blade fell off. I repaired it for my friend by strapping a pair of 80mm fans to it. Improved temperatures until it eventually popped a year or so after that. I still suspect one of the GPUs was fine and the other was prevent start.

As for other GPUs, no failures so far. These would be my daily drivers through the years. I don't game as much as I used to, but back in the day we were probably looking at 4+ hours a day, now closer to a few hours a week.

Paradise Pipeline 64 / Voodoo 2 2000 / Voodoo 2 2000 (SLI) (94/95/96)
Voodoo 3 3000 (99)
Elements Geforce MX 400 (sitting in a box, but it is my AGP spare)
MSI Geforce FX 5200 (sold so I know don't know what happened to it)
PNY Geforce 6600 (2005)
Voodoo 5 5500 (2006, from ebay, for my retro box)
EVGA Geforce 8800 GTS 640MB (Still in active use in a glorified web browser, was the temp card to replace my friends 4850X2 as well) (2007)
BFG GTX 285 (Still operable, one DVI port is questionable, mostly plays classic titles though) (2011)
ASUS GTX 580 SLI (Sold in working condition after many years of daily use, water cooled at one point) (2011)
EVGA GTX 980 Superclock SLI (Sitting with my i7-4770k) Water cooled (Purchased launch, other card some months later)
EVGA GTX 1080 Superclock Water cooled (Purchased launch)

Also some non-primary cards used for multimedia in my HTPC:
ASUS HD6670 - (Sold in working condition) (2011)
EVGA GTX 750Ti - (Sold in working condition to an acquaintance for Rocket League and CS:GO) (2014, to make my 4K tv work)
EVGA GTX950 - (Sold, active use for daily WoW play) ('upgrade' to make the 750Ti available)
EVGA GT1030 (B stock, fanless) (Upgrade to make the 950 available) (Very recently)

 

[Peter Martin]

all the one's I've gamed with lasted as long or longer than one pc, and often they were sold to upgrade. since the old days when graphics acceleration was new! 3DFX I/II cards all the way up to more modern cards. Since I have given up on pc gaming so I don't bother but this is an interesting question as so many seem to have problems with high end cards and such. My high end video cards from AMD and NVIDIA were both excellent in performance and longevity. I do not OC anything on my rigs, I buy faster hardware if I want to go faster.

 

[USAFRet]

In 30+ years of building PC's, I've never had one fail.
Ever

 

[Peter Martin]

I think a lot of people are smoking their systems and then like to blame the hardware. I had one MSI card I bought and it was replaced by Newegg as fast as they could ship a new one, that's it. so, sometimes, they fail. But that card never worked on the new build at the time, it was bad from start or got damaged in shipping. The new one worked great for a super long time, pc is given away by now

 

[Eximo]

I think a lot of people are smoking their systems and then like to blame the hardware. I had one MSI card I bought and it was replaced by Newegg as fast as they could ship a new one, that's it. so, sometimes, they fail. But that card never worked on the new build at the time, it was bad from start or got damaged in shipping. The new one worked great for a super long time, pc is given away by now

Or just smoking in general. Dust build up and lack of maintenance are the killers of computers. Waiting for my first vape goo computer...

My friend was cleaning the fans on the HD4850X2 because it was clogged and overheating. Broke a fan blade off, and let it run that way until the bearing gave up. One fan wasn't enough. That is when he called. Quick trip to Best Buy for some fans, some m3 screws and washers and it was up and running.

 

[King_V]

I've never had a graphics card fail on any system where I bought the card new.

I've never had a graphics card fail on any system I slapped together from used or spare parts.

I've only had problems with Nvidia cards, but that's specifically with computers that were used and I couldn't account for how much use/abuse there had been. Also, I can't really remember all the systems exactly.

- Nvidia TNT2 (I think) in a Pentium 4 system - card was dead, though the PSU had also been toasted. Everything else fine in the system. It was around 8 years old when I got it.
- Nvidia TNT (I think) in another old system, still worked, but on Windows Desktop, text was slightly fuzzy (another PC when plugged into that same (CRT) monitor, at the same resolution, had no issues). I want to say late P3 early P4 era machine.
- Nvidia 8800 GS in an HP slimline sl3300t - E2200 CPU. The card was toast when I got this PC (in 2017). Pulling the card and using the on-board graphics revealed that there were no other issues with the system.

All of these I've had in working systems and they were fine
- ATI Rage128 - came free with an old PC
- ATI 7250 - I purchased used on ebay
- ATI HD4850 - Original card in a Dell XPS 630i that I received, PC was a Q9550 from 2008 or 2009, card still worked, and played Borderlands 2 decently
- EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti+ 3GB w/Backplate - Nvidia 660Ti chip.
Received used approx late 2016 (?), put in my son's PC (mother's house)
Moderate-heavy gaming. Still in use.

Purchased new:
1 - STB Velocity 128 - NVidia Riva 128 4MB chip.
Purchased 1997-8, moderate usage for a few years, then minimal use.
Gave away PC in 2003

2 - MSI Radeon 9550 DirectX 9 RX9550-TD128 128MB 128-Bit DDR AGP - ATI 9550 chip
Purchased February 2005.
Light to moderate use and gaming.
Mostly idle by 2012. Still working when last checked in 2017, pulled from system. Still have it.

3 - SAPPHIRE Ultimate Radeon HD 6670 1GB 128-bit GDDR5
Purchased March 2012
Moderate gaming. Moved to my son's PC (his mother's house) in early 2015.
Pulled in late 2016 when I got the aforementioned EVGA 660Ti+. Still works, still have it.

4 - Sapphire Radeon R7 250 1GB GDDR5 Low Profile - AMD R7 250E
Purchased January 2015
My son's previous PC at my house. Later on his newer PC. Moderate-heavy gaming on alternate weekends.
Still working. Pulled when my son got his new PC. Used until February 2018. Pulled, still works, still have it.

5 - GIGABYTE Radeon R9 285 GV-R9285WF2OC-2GD 2GB 256-Bit GDDR5 - AMD R9 285
Purchased January 2015
Moderate gaming. Moved to my son's new PC (my house) February 2018. Heavy gaming on alternate weekends. One of the fans rattles a little at high speeds. Still in use.

6 - Nvidia GTX 1080 Founders Edition
Purchased new in February 2018.
Light gaming, on a 4k ultra-wide, regular desktop use. (obviously) still in use.


So, TECHNICALLY I can say the only failed (or, in one case, working but fuzzy) cards I ever had were Nvidia. However, they were in that state before I got them, so it can't be considered a knock against them, especially given that one of them was in a system with a burnt out PSU. The 8800 GS is the only one I can really call a failure - the previous owner was only using it for light desktop use.

 

[Gam3r01]

7 years building PCs, no failures.
Several Sapphire, MSI, XFX, and EVGA cards.
Sapphire ran the coolest and quietest of the bunch.

 

[Phazoner]

Really lucky guys around hahah, honestly I've seen a a really few graphics cards broken. A friend broke his 560 recently but it had so many years of usage which I really can't blame it. Most of the PC failures are PSU but I used to read that graphics card are the second les reliable component in a PC, but I'm starting to doubt it 😀.

PS: Much less users contributing than expected 🙁

 

[King_V]

Might be partially because once a video card has come and gone, most people don't think about it. Or, maybe having only had one or two systems (among the younger users or newer to building PCs in general), don't have a lot to draw on.

Some of us are obsessive, though!

Then again, with the stuff I collected used over time, well, the stuff I have dates on was only because I could go back to Newegg and Amazon and look up really old orders.

Oh, I can also throw in at least two S3-based video cards (not with 3D capability), as well as another ancient ATI or two, also pre-3D. Used when I got them, (well, one S3 came new with the Pentium 133 Dell I had), but basically mid-90s era stuff. None of them failed (though one S3 tended to have artifacts when I overclocked the PCI bus from 33.3Mhz to 37.5 Mhz).

I don't imagine anyone's that concerned about 25 year old graphics cards, though, lol

 

[Eximo]

I don't imagine anyone's that concerned about 25 year old graphics cards, though, lol

I was just sitting down and running some numbers to see if I could come up with a comparison of the RTX launch prices with what we could buy back in the day. Apparently we have almost exactly 50% inflation from the year 2000. So $500 equals $750 today. But GPUs tended to be cheaper back then too. With the launch price for things like the TNT2 at $299 ($450 today) So really I think most of us starting buying high end GPUs right around the time they reached a low point in price/performance in the late 2000s and it is just now readjusting because they are pushing the technology so much.

Then I thought about power consumption figures. Those old GPUs didn't use much juice and to keep up the performance improvements while maintaining sub-300W parts is actually amazing.

I might need to pick a closer date to get a more feasible comparison. Not going to go out and buy an RTX card, but it does show you what lack of competition can do.

 

[punkncat]

Been upgrading and building my own since late 90's and have yet to have a GPU failure. Most of those have been AMD HD series up to the GTX960, which was the first new purposely purchased NVIDIA card I got.
Aside from that I have had PSU failure, mobo failure, RAM failure, and of course HDD failure.

 

[Obakasama]

Never had a graphics card fail on me:
MSI HD4830
MSI GTX 750 ti (my little work horse GPU)
KFA2/Galax GTX 1070 ti
All bought new for gaming purposes and ran at stock. And probably a few others which came in a prebuilt PC which weren't intended for gaming.

I have had a graphics card dead on arrival though which was a Zotac Nvidia GPU. Can't remember the model though.