New Sapphire Radeon 7950 HD 3gb might be broken?

[gravitybomber]

Hello all, this is my first thread as I've used this site frequently but have not signed up until now. I just got a Radeon HD 7950 3gb from newegg and I cannot tell if I should be exchanging it or not. I love it, I get crazy FPS and can play any game with full graphics no problems. Except one, when I'm playing games it seems I'm getting some varying degree of Z-fighting in each one. The distant textures are buggy, twitch, and move. This only happens when the character moves as it seems fine when standing still. It happens the worst on skyrim, not as bad as I've seen on some videos, but bad enough. Now I had hoped it was just the game so I tried it out on Dishonored, Far Cry 3, and Tomb Raider. Dishonored showed the best results with Tomb Raider closely following, but in Far Cry 3 the trees would look very glitchy when I was moving. Now it also seems that every once in awhile the graphics just glitch out in random spots and with random severity. For example in Dishonored a pipe would turn completely white out of nowhere for a second and go back to normal and in skyrim on each loading screen the graphics glitch out before loading the game and also occasionally as I'm playing. So I'm not sure if I received a lemon graphics card or perhaps there are driver issues. Well anyways I'm really hoping there's a way to fix this before I have to return this GPU, I still have 27 days to do so. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Specs:
Intel Core i7 Extreme 965 @ 3.2 GHz (no overclock)
Sapphire Radeon 7950 HD 3GB Core clock of 925
6 GB of RAM DDR3

Thanks guys!

 

[nikoli707]

what video card did you have before? did you do a full manual uninstall of all the old video drivers? many people and me included do a full manual uninstall of video drivers every single time a new beta or whql driver set comes out. its not that hard and only takes a few minutes, once you have done it a few times.

http://www.overclock.net/t/988215/how-to-properly-uninstall-ati-amd-software-drivers-for-graphics-cards

http://www.overclock.net/t/1150443/how-to-remove-your-nvidia-gpu-drivers

 

[gravitybomber]

I had a Radeon 4850 Hd x2. Not sure if it matters that it was also Radeon. I did not however do a full manual uninstall so I think I will try that. Thanks for your response!

 

[coozie7]

Could just be a driver issue, as Nikoli707 says, you should do a full uninstall/reinstall. Use Driversweeper or Drivercleaner in Safe Mode to ensure ALL the unwanted software and registry entries are removed before the reinstall, though.
Also check the card and its power leads are fully seated and tight, I've had plenty of issues with 'video card problems' that were just down to the card or power leads not quite seating correctly first time.

 

[gravitybomber]

Okay I moved my GPU into another PCI and did a full uninstall of drivers and used driversweeper to make sure. It looks like it may have gotten a little better but there's still some Z-fighting going on. I plan to get a water block for this card soon ( I have my CPU water cooled and had my old GPU water cooled) and I don't want to invest if this card is a lemon. Do you guys have any suggestions or opinions? Thanks to everyone who responded!

 

[coozie7]

Other options include:
Reset the BIOS to factory defaults.
Remove and reseat the memory modules.
Check all the effected games are fully patched.
Update DirectX, this has to be done manually, DX does not update along with Windows-usually.
Use Memtest to check memory integrity.
Check the hard drive for errors and look at its SMART data to see if there is a problem with the drive failing and corrupting stored data.