Unlucky with video cards?

[mohit9206]

Anyone here who constantly has bad luck when it comes to video cards?
My first card AMD Sapphire lasted 1.5 years before it died, then another Sapphire card lasted 3 yrs before it died and now my latest nvidia gigabyte needs to be sent to rma after just 15 months.
I've seen people still have working cards like 8800gt and others which are 10 yrs old still in working condition but my cards never seem to last despite never touching voltage or messing with anything other than basic overclocking.

 

[Erenhardt]

Change your PSU

 

[sandorski]

Somewhat. I killed my 9800 Pro and my MSI 380 stopped working at about 18 months. However, until my Sapphire 570 comes back in Stock, my old XFX 5870 is back to work and doing fine.

 

[Shmee]

I had a DOA 8800 Ultra from ebay (new at the time) that was kinda a pain to get money back with, but other than that, I would say I have been pretty lucky.

 

[bononos]

Anyone here who constantly has bad luck when it comes to video cards?
My first card AMD Sapphire lasted 1.5 years before it died, then another Sapphire card lasted 3 yrs before it died and now my latest nvidia gigabyte needs to be sent to rma after just 15 months.
I've seen people still have working cards like 8800gt and others which are 10 yrs old still in working condition but my cards never seem to last despite never touching voltage or messing with anything other than basic overclocking.

If you're in India, could it be due to the weather (hot) and unstable power? I usually keep a close eye on temps and reapply thermal paste if needed.

 

[amenx]

What is your PSU? Poor quality PSUs with out of spec ripple can kill components, motherboards, GPUs.

 

[mohit9206]

Change your PSU

What is your PSU? Poor quality PSUs with out of spec ripple can kill components, motherboards, GPUs.

Antec BP450, but all my graphics cards have been sub 75W cards that do not require pcie connection.

 

[Bacon1]

If you've killed that many cards sounds like a power issue or maybe mobo or something else is killing them.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Yes, I seldom get more than a year from video cards, except for a HD 7700 that I am still using that is 3 or 4 years old. Otherwise, they seem to fail mainly to defective fans.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah. I run my PCs 24/7, sometimes crunching DC on the video cards, and thus, except for very recent 14nm cards, that can idle / web-browse passively, the fans also run 24/7 at high speeds, and eventually, wear out and / or get clogged with dust.

It's rare for me to have a video card last more than three years running 24/7.

 

[Guru]

Nah, my FX 5600 lasted for 10 years(not constant use though), my 1650 lasted 5-6 years as well, heck even back in the day my rivatnt2 lasted for years.

 

[.vodka]

• Geforce 4 MX4000 lasted two years, basically a renamed DX7 capable GF2.
  
• Sapphire 9600XT lasted two years, my dad touched it while on a table doing regular maintenance and zapped it. Became a paperweight.
  
• 7600GT lasted three years, sold
  
• Reference 4850 lasted another three years, killed it (shorted something) trying a voltmod to get higher than 850MHz (Pencilmod got me to 800MHz). Did some folding on this one, no problems.
  
• XFX 6850 lasted four years, sold. It could do 920MHz on stock voltage and 1GHz with a simple voltmod. Mined 4.5BTC back then and lost my wallet once the mtgox hack happened. Never bothered again. Kicking myself over those BTC lately.
  
• Reference R9 290 (Sapphire Tri-X) will be three years old this november. Love its software based voltage control.

I clean my cards every two or three months to keep the dust away and airflow high, change thermal paste every six months too. Used AS5 back then, switched to MX2 and finally to MX4 up to this day. Regular maintenance keeps hardware happy unless there's some fatal external event you can't control.

Your power supply seems decent. I'd say you have issues somewhere else... or it could be getting old and out of spec, or the AC available where you are sucks and your PSU can't filter all the crap coming in. Do you usually have hard drives dying, too?

 

[SPBHM]

I mostly sold my cards before any problems appeared, but for a while I felt I was having terrible luck with cards failing, specially geforces from around 2007-2008, but I think those had higher failure rate due to the solder issues anyway, so I'm very impressed with those 8800GTs still in perfect condition.
I have some pretty old cards that still work (but not regularly used) like Voodoo 2, Voodoo 4 and 9500PRO
also my reference 5850 runs almost 24/7 for years now (mostly idling now, burning those 25W) and works fine only problem was the fan which I replaced

 

[ozzy702]

In all my mining over the years, I've had two dead cards out of ~ 50 cards or so and that's several years worth of mining 24/7. You have poor luck, or a garbage mobo/psu. Clean power is important.

 

[casiofx]

Like others suggested, it's better to get a new quality power supplies.

Two years ago I switched my rather crappy Cooler Master Extreme 625 to Seasonic X-850 (running i5 & R9 290), then plugged that CM 625 into my sister's PC which used a even more crappy china power supply, Ended up monthly bills dropped by around 3 dollars and the computers are running more stable. Consider the fact that my $210 (yes parts are more expensive in my place) Seasonic had 7 years warranty, in less than 7 years the savings already paid my power supply in full...

 

[Thinker_145]

My 8800GTS died in it's 3rd year. Then the GTS 250 also died in it's 3rd year. Only the 7850 lasted its entire useful life and I sold it after a good 4 years getting back a third of original purchase price. Quality PSU and adequate cooling was provided to all my cards.

 

[alcoholbob]

Anyone here who constantly has bad luck when it comes to video cards?
My first card AMD Sapphire lasted 1.5 years before it died, then another Sapphire card lasted 3 yrs before it died and now my latest nvidia gigabyte needs to be sent to rma after just 15 months.
I've seen people still have working cards like 8800gt and others which are 10 yrs old still in working condition but my cards never seem to last despite never touching voltage or messing with anything other than basic overclocking.

It's probably some kind of curse. I have never had a video card die, I still have working PCs from the 1990s and early 2000s. I have a similar problem with hard drives, on average my hard drives (external storage ones) die within 18-24 months. I have bought over a dozen HDDs for external storage in the last 10 years. It's kind of costly too because I usually buy the largest HDDs I can, but it seems reliability is bad. I don't have a single HDD older than 3 years that still works.

As a result I've switched to using SSDs for data storage, and collecting 4TB SSDs for storage is costly.

 

[lupi]

Just had 2 nvidias crap out on me. After upgrading my 2 main machines, took out the 8800 and put a 480 in on my mostly htpc machine. Lasted about 4 months then started having thermal issues when using it for even moderate 3d applications. Would last forever in just desktop mode. So went to toss in the 280 I also had and that lasted about 3 weeks till it died after i started some handbrake transcoding.

To make things worse, current price trends for most cards are absurd so just letting the igpu ride out things for awhile.