Problem with AMD 6970

[Argentina94]

Hello all,

I purchased an oem 6970 months ago from a seller who had 2 in crousy ssfire and installed it in my Q9550 setup to great results. In the meantime, I'd been busy with other builds and seldom used the PC.

Recently I decided to conect the PC to my plasma as a dedicated media PC and at first everything seemed fine until I installed an old game and noticed it stuttered a bit, thinking that was odd.

After going back to the desktop, at one point my screen shifted half way across and then reverted. After restarting, display would not come up, then it would.

I would then get some artifacting in Windows but no green or pink, only as if Windows itself corrupted or something. I tried safe mode and thinking everything was ok after many attempts, got a little artifacting as though windows was corrupt in safe mode.

At no point ever during the BIOS screen would any of this happen, only in Windows. I tried different drivers but after I got a small issue in safe mode, removed drivers as a possible cause.

I removed the card and installed it on another AMD build on a different monitor, but the same thing would happen. Removed drivers and reinstalled the 4890 I had on that build, no issues.

Now, when I first got the card, I put the PC through 3DMark06, Vantage and Prime to test the cpu overclock, never a problem. After installing the PC to my TV, again no worries but a week later this happened. Goes without saying that I have yet to work the card.

It's just that I don't see how I could have overheated the card at anytime and worked flawlessly when I got it up till now, almost like for no apparent reason whatsoever.

Any thoughts or ideas?

 

[DrAwesome109]

I hate to break it to you man, but it looks like you bought a broken card. Why do you think the guy you bought them from was selling them? It wasn't anything you did, it was the previous owner.

 

[Argentina94]

I hate to break it to you man, but it looks like you bought a broken card. Why do you think the guy you bought them from was selling them? It wasn't anything you did, it was the previous owner.

See, the thing is that the seller was close to my house and I picked it up at his house. He was very helpful and even emailed me 2 days later asking if I was satisfied.

Like I said, after buying it I installed it in my build with the necessary drivers and ran 3dMark06, vantage and a few other applications flawlessly with no issues. In all, the card has roughly 24 hours use by me with no issues and according to CCC, card idles at 54C and 70C under load, which seem normal to me.

Catalyst put the card at 900mhz core and I lowered it to 890mhz.

Regardless, I figured if the card was faulty I would have seen it during one of the graphics tests I put it through when I first bought it, not just now.