XFX 7900GTX issue

[mondogenerator]

Hi, I'm wondering if I should RMA this card. I bought it a week ago from Scan and have been in contact with XFX about graphic artificts and strangly coloured dots appearing when I play IL2:FB/Pacific Fighters (patched to 4.05, yes, Im a die hard) using Water = 3 and Water = 4. These water settings use Vertex Shaders 3.0. It runs fine with water = 0, 1 or 2.

It only happens in this one game AFAIK. I've played about 10 others and pushed the system to the limit and this error hasn't repeated in any other game although IL2 is the only OGL game I've played. 3Dmark 2006 doesn't produce any errors either.

XFX state the card I have isn't one of the examples that has bad memory chips, its too knew to be one but I know others that have eVGA and XFX 7900GTX's that had these issues and eVGA asked them to send the cards back.

Now should I RMA the card? Its brand new and the manufacturer says its not one of the cards with bad memory chips. It works fine in all other games and Il2 apart from if i enable this one (very pretty!) setting.

FYI I've done a complete system reinstall, got the latest drivers for the 7900GTX, Nforce4 based motherboard, got the latest bios and Windows is fully updated. Nothing is overclocked and the 7900GTX runs around 50-60c degrees depending on the game.

System is a 939 pin 3500 64bit chip, Gigabyte K8NXP SLI (Nforce 4 SLI) with 3GB of Corsair XMS DDR400 running in dual channel. No other games have this error.

I'm inclinded to think its the game, although plenty of other people I know who I've spoken to about this can run these water settings fine with 7900GTX's.

Cheers.

[Clunk]

run 3dmark06 and see if you get any of the artifacts on the deep freeze scene. my xfx7900gtx died within a few hours, dont listen to anything xfx tell you as far as batches are concerned, if its broke, its broke. do the 3dmark06 test and see, and then rma it to scan, not xfx

[lukpri]

you can also try running aqua mark3 on it and see if that gives errors too, you can also use riva tuner so you can try modifying settings

[mondogenerator]

3dMark2006 gets a score off 4568 but the first time I ran it no errors, 2nd time I get artifacts on the deepfreeze benchmark and Aquamark03 gives none either, I get score of 63,250, winamp was on though. Its stood up to a couple of long gaming sessions now though so even if there is a small problem its not fatal.

Broke?

I assume Scan will take it back but will they give me another and can guarantee its not one of the bad ones? Will Scan cross ship like eVGA do?

[ExceededGoku]

RMA it and get a radeon ( me = fanboy )

[mondogenerator]

Tweaked the card a little and deepfreeze produced no errors any more.

[Clunk]

the fact that it produces artifacts at all in 3dmark06 seems to suggest that its one of the duffers, mine ran it fine the first time, and died the second time. when you say you tweaked it, did you underclock it?

[mondogenerator]

I didn't underclock it. I changed some of the options on the card via riva tuner so its more down to application control rather than the card forcing itself. Odd how it can fail one out of 3 tests. I'll think I'll RMA it and get another if Scan can guarantee me that it won't be another duff one.

[Clunk]

thats just it, no-one will guarantee any of the 7900gt or gtx will work, and thats why i ended up with a banana shaped x1900xt

[mondogenerator]

Rapidly thinking I might go the same way.

[mondogenerator]

Can anyone from Scan answer this for me please?

[mondogenerator]

BUMP

Can anyone from scan tell me or not that they can replace this card with a fully working XFX7900GTX?

[ExceededGoku]

They really can't guarentee, anyway I thought you could resolve the problem by increasing the memory clock speed (or core clock). If thats the case just edit the cards bios to boot at those settings everytime.

[mondogenerator]

Are you sure? Do you have a link to somewhere which can describe the process? I've looked quite allot online to find out how to do this but to no avail.

It seems very much limited to OGL + Vertex Shader 3 functions.

[Lee H]

If your still having issues with the card, the best process is to contact the returns team Here and they will be able to answer all the questions you have raised.

[mondogenerator]

Thanks, I've submmited a ticket.

I was thinking, could it be my system is underpowered?

I have a 3500 CPU, Mobo, 3GB of RAM, 2 HDD's running in RAID 0, a DVD drive, CD drive, network card, Sound card and GFX card all being powered from a 475w enermax PSU.

I thought that could handle it, maybe there isn't enough juice? Although the system hasn't crashed at all and no games have suddenly stopped running or frozen, apart from when using Vertex Shader 3.0/OGL under certain settings.