- Apr 29, 2013
- 17
- 0
- 10,510
Hey all. I've just installed my new GPU, the ASUS HD7970 Matrix Platinum, and I'm having some issues with it. We'll call them... extreme teething problems. Straight out of the box, I've been having issue after issue with this card. I'd love to get it to work, because it really is a monster - glitches and problems aside, it looks stunning, runs nearly silently and FPS-wise is an absolute demon for performance. It's factory overclocked to 1100Mhz (clock) and 6600Mhz (memory) which could be causing the problems. Which brings us on to the issues...
To open, my system specs are:
CPU: FX8350 @ 4.4Ghz (CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Evo cooler)
RAM: 8Gb Corsair Vengeance
Mobo: ASUS M5A97 LE R2.0
PSU: 600W CoolerMaster Silent Pro
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Initially, I was experiencing issues with texture flickering and some weird, black "artifacts" in BF3 and Skyrim. After updating every driver I could, these seem to have been reduced or removed, to give way to another issue. Textures would stretch across the skyline in BF3 after about 20 minutes of gaming - not consistently, but frequently. Artifacts and weird graphical glitches would appear on my second monitor, in Windows (somewhat reducing my assumption that it was a game-problem) 7 itself. For BF3, the card is operating between 60 and 80% load on my monitoring tools.
I'm faced with one of three problems, as far as I can tell from extensive googling:
1) The card is overheating. I'm reading about 57-61 degrees of heat in GPU Tweak at peak BF3, which doesn't seem high, but only one of the two fans is actually doing anything (at about 40% speed, set to hike up if the card gets over 60 degrees.) However, this is only a single area, so it's possible another part of the card - possibly the VRAM? - is overheating elsewhere on the card. As I mentioned, it's a physical monster - 3-PCI slots wide?
2) The card isn't receiving enough power. I won't lie - my PSU is a little below the recommended supply, but it's from a good brand and receives high ratings for efficiency. Research and reviews pre-purchase suggested that it would be fine, but I realise the card is stock-clocked to ludicrous proportions and is likely power-hungry as a result. However, I didn't want to put down money on a new PSU (my budget is constrained, and the card itself took a big whack out of it) if that isn't, in fact, the issue.
3) The card itself is simply unstable at stock overclock. In which case, I'll return it - I could lower the clock but, at the end of the day, I paid for that extra performance and I'd expect to be able to benefit from it.
I'd appreciate any suggestions. I haven't spent a massive amount of time with the card to run all the experiments I should've done or tested it with a lot of games, but this is seriously concerning me. Thanks in advance, sorry for the wall-of-text.
To open, my system specs are:
CPU: FX8350 @ 4.4Ghz (CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Evo cooler)
RAM: 8Gb Corsair Vengeance
Mobo: ASUS M5A97 LE R2.0
PSU: 600W CoolerMaster Silent Pro
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Initially, I was experiencing issues with texture flickering and some weird, black "artifacts" in BF3 and Skyrim. After updating every driver I could, these seem to have been reduced or removed, to give way to another issue. Textures would stretch across the skyline in BF3 after about 20 minutes of gaming - not consistently, but frequently. Artifacts and weird graphical glitches would appear on my second monitor, in Windows (somewhat reducing my assumption that it was a game-problem) 7 itself. For BF3, the card is operating between 60 and 80% load on my monitoring tools.
I'm faced with one of three problems, as far as I can tell from extensive googling:
1) The card is overheating. I'm reading about 57-61 degrees of heat in GPU Tweak at peak BF3, which doesn't seem high, but only one of the two fans is actually doing anything (at about 40% speed, set to hike up if the card gets over 60 degrees.) However, this is only a single area, so it's possible another part of the card - possibly the VRAM? - is overheating elsewhere on the card. As I mentioned, it's a physical monster - 3-PCI slots wide?
2) The card isn't receiving enough power. I won't lie - my PSU is a little below the recommended supply, but it's from a good brand and receives high ratings for efficiency. Research and reviews pre-purchase suggested that it would be fine, but I realise the card is stock-clocked to ludicrous proportions and is likely power-hungry as a result. However, I didn't want to put down money on a new PSU (my budget is constrained, and the card itself took a big whack out of it) if that isn't, in fact, the issue.
3) The card itself is simply unstable at stock overclock. In which case, I'll return it - I could lower the clock but, at the end of the day, I paid for that extra performance and I'd expect to be able to benefit from it.
I'd appreciate any suggestions. I haven't spent a massive amount of time with the card to run all the experiments I should've done or tested it with a lot of games, but this is seriously concerning me. Thanks in advance, sorry for the wall-of-text.
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