Possible issue with 7950. RMA?

[internetlad]

Hey guys. I picked up a 7950 right at the end of the January, had it shipped in around the 1st of February, and have been gaming with it happily since.

Now that the new card smell has worn off, though, i'm beginning to notice some concerning things, and i'm wondering if i'm just being paranoid about my new 300 dollar card being a dud, or if these are legitimate issues I should be concerned about.

I first noticed pretty minor issues across a couple different games (Far Cry 3, Sleeping Dogs, XCOM) minor graphical glitches. Most all of it will be quick flashes of strange stuff on the screen, and it only happens once every several (2-4) hours of gameplay. The only constant one was if I moved my cursor to the bottom left corner on XCOM and near the center of the screen, it would tend to flash a grey line across the screen.

Next I noticed that cut scenes in games. Pretty much any game, look very choppy. In-game it seems smooth, but in cutscenes, no matter what's happening in the cutscene, you can notice, especially during camera pans, that movement is not smooth. It seems like the video will "catch" or "lag" a bit every couple hundred milliseconds. I don't think this is low FPS because I can play the actual game fine, and the cutscenes don't seem to have a low FPS, just this strange "catching" action.

Lastly, I tried overclocking my card, to see if giving it some extra horsepower would change the issues i'm having (either for the better or worse) and something odd happened. I used Unigen Heaven and Furmark 3D to check FPS and look for artifacts.

It seems when there is an overclock on the card, even only 25 MhZ on the GPU, it causes this weird "Catching" action to get considerably worse as the card warms up. Generally the temp on this card will top out at about 50 degrees celcius, with the fans running at 40%, which seems to me like a totally acceptable operating temperature. I haven't dared to switch out the TIM as that would void my warranty.

At stock settings, Furmark runs fine and I got a 40FPS on Heaven with everything looking fairly smooth (there was some FPS drop, which was noticable and noticeably different from the "catching" action that I see during other parts of the game) But as soon as you introduce a light overclock, furmark will start to have that catching action too. The higher the overclock, the worse the catching.

IIRC I tried it up to 1400/1100 from the stock of 1250/925 in Heaven, and something odd happened. ALthought my framerate was TECHNICALLY higher, the game was considerably laggier. On the pass by the airship you could notice that some of the objects that were moving past the camera quickly were simply not moving smoothly. On stock they were fine.

EDIT: I should also mention that I've seen no artifacting, no permanent odd visual stuff, nothing outside of 3D games, and no strange shutdowns or GPU blackouts. Just the strange frame issues and odd graphical flashes.

So, what's up with this? Any ideas? Any way I could fix it?

I'm using the latest non-beta drivers and currently running at stock settings.

CPU:i5-2500k (stock)
RAM: 8GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 (probably at 1600 but i'm not positive)
GPU: Sapphire 7950 3GB
Case: Fractal Design R3 Mid-tower case
One SSD , one Maxtor HDD
Antec 850w Quattro Truepower

Old card was a 4870. The drivers were uninstalled before installing the new ones for the 7950.

Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance and sorry for the wall of text.

 

[SPEED94]

The symptoms you are saying is quite unusual for a new card especially HD 7950...my hd 7850 is 3 months old and runs all games you mentioned at high with no problems.I use a 2500k at stock too. i AM QUITE satisfied with it . yours should be much better.Maybe its like hitting the stone in the dark , you should take the issue seriously if it isn't a driver error.