HD7970 crazy artifacting/crashing

[severus]

Hello all, I'm in need of suggestions. I have a HD7970 from Powercolor and as of the past month it's been artifacting and essentially BSODing my PC, although it's not a BSOD. As seen below, this is what happens during 3d applications like games. Simple non demanding games like GW2 cause this issue to happen. I've run Furmark and I notice temperatures climbing up. I think the ram is overheating and causing the artifact. Obviously I cannot RMA the card since I've owned it for almost 4 years now, but do you think that perhaps adding heatsinks to the ram may solve this issue. I've found these heatsinks on Amazon. Perhaps I should give them a try? Ideally I want to get the card fixed and running stable so I can sell it. I wouldn't want to sell it in it's current state or before I at least deduce the issue.

 

[Killrose]

Probably has bad capacitors or something. I've actually replaced some bad Aluminum Polymer caps that have gone bad on vid cards, and am waiting on some to come in so I can repair a HD 6870 that has a problem sorta like yours, But mine shows the video with wider blue lines vertically and spaced apart with the correct picture showing where no line is present. That is not the sort of corruption that is caused by overheated Mem chips in your picture from my experience. I bought a meter to test capacitors which is different than your normal multi-meter, and you usually cant test them while mounted. They are also kinda hard to remove to test because they are usually soldered in to the thickest part of the copper trace on the PCB of the card, so you have to really heat things up to remove them and cleaning the mounting hole is another matter to get the new ones in. I think you would be wasting your time and money with Mem heatsinks.

 

[Insomniator]

Even if you got it stable with some heat sinks, i still wouldn't sell that card without disclosing this issue.

 

[severus]

I plan on informing whoever buys it, but fixing the issue could be the difference between $30 or $75 (they go for about $100~)

 

[jmmtn4aj]

If it never needed heatsinks for 4 years it seems unlikely that overheating is the cause.. On the other hand it could be that existing heatsinks (e.g. the one cooling the gpu itself) have started to come unstuck, much like that hullabaloo over badly applied TIM in macbook pros causing artifacts. This is also unlikely but less unlikely than memory suddenly putting out more heat. I'd try reapplying the paste first, and maybe tightening the heatsink screws if it uses screws (vs pushpins). Cheap fix, especially if you have extra TIM lying around already.

 

[severus]

Baked the card in the oven for 10m. It works perfectly now. Gamed in GTA V for about 30m, played Guild Wars 2 in heavy areas, CS:Go was smooth, as was BF1. I guess some solder got loose. I'm going to buy vram heatsinks for it and test it for another week. If all is well, I will sell closer to my original asking price with notification that I baked the card. No warranty on it anyway, so I think the buyer will know what they're getting.

 

[sxr7171]

Wow great. That's always a cool fix.