- Apr 21, 2012
- 4
- 0
- 10,510
Hi, I'm having trouble getting a 7950 that I got back from an RMA working.
I originally bought an MSI HD7950 Twin Frozr 3GD5/OC, which worked great until one of the fans became noisy. No problem - I sent it off to Scan (UK hardware supplier) with an RMA. Scan sent it to MSI, who chose to send me back the 'Boost Edition' of the same card (http://uk.msi.com/product/vga/R7950_TF_3GD5OC_BE.html#hero-overview). I thought I had got a free upgrade until I discovered this issue.
When the card is placed under any kind of load (I've been testing it with Kombustor, as well as a few games), white squares will appear accross the screen, leading to a display driver crash. Generally after that the computer will become unresponsive and require a hard reset.
Once in a blue moon, usually immediately after reseating, the card will work and I might be able to play a game without it crashing. I've tried swapping the motherboard to a new ASRock mobo (thinking it was a dodgy PCIe slot in my old Gigabyte mobo) but the same symptoms persist... if I can even get the card to display anything. Usually when I boot the PC I'm presented with two bars of static accross the screen:
Strangely, when the case is lying on its side the card works as before, but the display driver crashing persists. From messing around in MSI Afterburner I've found that reducing the core and memory clocks slightly (I took them down to stock 7950 levels) helps to alleviate the problem somewhat, though not get rid of it entirely.
Here is a list of things I've tried so far, aside from swapping the mobo and playing around in Afterburner:
- RMAing the card back to Scan. They claimed that they tested it extensively and found no issues.
- Reinstalling Windows and drivers. Also tried various versions of Catalyst.
- Swapping out both the 6 and 6+2 pin power plugs for adaptors to see if one of them was faulty.
- Moving the plug for the PC to a different wall socket to see if it was the socket causing the issues.
- Prime95 and Memtest to check the CPU and RAM.
This has me scratching my head. It has to be a problem with the graphics card, right? Is there anything I'm missing?
My specs are as follows:
ASRock z77 Pro3
Intel Core i5-2500k @ stock speed
MSI R7950 TF 3GD5/OC BE
8GB Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9B Vengeance Dual Channel RAM
OCZ ZS Series 650w PSU
2 1TB HDDs/1 500GB HDD
OCZ Agility3 128GB SSD
Windows 7 Ultimate
Sorry for the long post... hope you people can help.
I originally bought an MSI HD7950 Twin Frozr 3GD5/OC, which worked great until one of the fans became noisy. No problem - I sent it off to Scan (UK hardware supplier) with an RMA. Scan sent it to MSI, who chose to send me back the 'Boost Edition' of the same card (http://uk.msi.com/product/vga/R7950_TF_3GD5OC_BE.html#hero-overview). I thought I had got a free upgrade until I discovered this issue.
When the card is placed under any kind of load (I've been testing it with Kombustor, as well as a few games), white squares will appear accross the screen, leading to a display driver crash. Generally after that the computer will become unresponsive and require a hard reset.
Once in a blue moon, usually immediately after reseating, the card will work and I might be able to play a game without it crashing. I've tried swapping the motherboard to a new ASRock mobo (thinking it was a dodgy PCIe slot in my old Gigabyte mobo) but the same symptoms persist... if I can even get the card to display anything. Usually when I boot the PC I'm presented with two bars of static accross the screen:
Strangely, when the case is lying on its side the card works as before, but the display driver crashing persists. From messing around in MSI Afterburner I've found that reducing the core and memory clocks slightly (I took them down to stock 7950 levels) helps to alleviate the problem somewhat, though not get rid of it entirely.
Here is a list of things I've tried so far, aside from swapping the mobo and playing around in Afterburner:
- RMAing the card back to Scan. They claimed that they tested it extensively and found no issues.
- Reinstalling Windows and drivers. Also tried various versions of Catalyst.
- Swapping out both the 6 and 6+2 pin power plugs for adaptors to see if one of them was faulty.
- Moving the plug for the PC to a different wall socket to see if it was the socket causing the issues.
- Prime95 and Memtest to check the CPU and RAM.
This has me scratching my head. It has to be a problem with the graphics card, right? Is there anything I'm missing?
My specs are as follows:
ASRock z77 Pro3
Intel Core i5-2500k @ stock speed
MSI R7950 TF 3GD5/OC BE
8GB Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9B Vengeance Dual Channel RAM
OCZ ZS Series 650w PSU
2 1TB HDDs/1 500GB HDD
OCZ Agility3 128GB SSD
Windows 7 Ultimate
Sorry for the long post... hope you people can help.
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