Date:
Thursday , May 25, 2006
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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GeForce 7900 Inferno – Burn Baby Burn

It seems that the demon art of vendor overclocking is pushing many GeForce 7900 video cards beyond their abilities and into an early grave. It's one thing when you overclock the card, and another when it comes out of the box overclocked with a warranty.

continued...

BFGTech

We spoke with Scott Herkelman over at BFGTech, who just happens to be a gamer himself as well as part owner of the company. Asking if they had seen RMAs on the rise on the 7900 series he explained that the return rate had moved up somewhere between 3% to 5% on those cards. Obviously after that statement we wanted to know what they saw as the problem. The first thing he mentioned was that BFGTech is seeing some "bugginess in the drivers" that he thought was impacting the returns. He also went on to say that, “almost all the cards we get back work.” Scott thought that cooling was an issue in that many folks were putting these cards into cases that were not cooled properly for such a large heat load to be dumped inside.

BFGTech introduced overclocked NVIDIA video cards to North America on the large scale and being first has taught them some lessons and has left them in a seat of advantage. Scott explained that BFGTech “set the bar” and the others that have come behind them are being forced to beat their OC points to be more competitive and in that process were possibly trying to push the overclocks too far. This of course jives with what NVIDIA is telling us and also backs up the failures documented in forums all over the Net.

BFGTech has not changed what they do internally in terms of RMA process or qualifying their video cards. We had the honor of RMAing two “bad” 7900 GTX video cards from BFG a couple weeks ago and we called in on a Sunday and got new cards by Friday of the same week. So in the middle of all of this, it seems that BFGTech's processes are working fine if there is in fact a 7900 issue that needs to be handled.

EVGA

EVGA is seeing things much different than BFG on how to handle this situation. Joe Darwin of EVGA admitted that they are aware of problems being had on mostly the high end 7900 series of card and it does seem to be something to do with EVGA’s overclocking of the card. While EVGA would not share any RMA numbers or percentages with us, they have revamped what they are doing for their customers that are having issues. They are using a much tighter quality screening control on the overclocked 7900 video cards going out the door. They are also going the extra distance to talk to the persons returning cards with issues and seeing exactly what problems they are having with them. Say if a customer has issues with Oblivion and needs to RMA their card, EVGA will make sure and run extra cycles of Oblivion on their new card to make sure all is well. So while Joe would not be specific beyond what I have written here, he did seem very sincere in the fact that they had heavily beefed up testing on all overclocked cards leaving their warehouse. If in fact these GeForce 7900 GPUs do not have the headroom for overclocking that the previous versions widely had, a more diligent screening process should be able to find the GPUs to fit the bill...hopefully.

Another problem that we discussed was people having to RMA their cards more than once. Joe pointed out that EVGA very much wanted you to return your problematic EVGA 7900 card to EVGA, and not the retailer. This way EVGA could make sure you get exactly what you paid for. EVGA was even going as far to cross ship cards to make sure that their customers have as little downtime as possible. This is of course a great service to many that is appreciated and please notes that a credit card would be needed to do this.

One interesting thing that was brought up in conversation was what applications where having trouble. Again, F.E.A.R., Oblivion, and 3DMark06 were mentioned, and obviously these applications are pushing even 7900 cards very hard. Joe mentioned that he had seen some people with the theory that 3DMark was breaking the cards. In some circles folks that had issues with the 7900 had only had problems after running 3DMark06's Deep Freeze test. While I am not a synthetic benchmark fan, it sounds a bit far-fetched to me, but interesting nonetheless and maybe something to keep in mind.

UPDATE 5/30/06

EVGA Came forth with more information concerning this issue.

EVGA would like to thank its forums members for posting system specs and the details about the issues they are having. EVGA takes these matters very seriously and is looking into all post to extract the data from them.

Below are some key facts regarding this issue that we want to share with everyone:

EVGA’s 7900GT Series total RMA rate is from 0.04% to 1.9% per different SKU’s (which includes cards that had no problems found)

19% of the users who requested a 2nd time RMA out of the all RMA still experienced either the same issue or new issues unrelated to the VGA card itself.

EVGA will continue to perform better product quality control ensuring a reliable and stable product. At the same time we are also improving our technical support skills marking sure to provide a better customer service experience with EVGA’s product.

EVGA has observed some users pushing the card to an unreachable amazing clock speeds and causing the GPU and/or memory to fail permanently and this has gotten our attention.

All over-clocking exceeding our product preset clock/memory speeds out of the box is NOT recommended. Some users may be able to over-clock with higher speeds, but this may lead to hidden issues like artifacting or random lock ups. That is why we have created several different clocked products for 7900 series.

We encourage EVGA customers who have problems to contact our technical support staff first to get the problem fixed ASAP. Our support number is 888-880-3842 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

Thank you to all the the moderators and members’ continuous support to our community.

Joe Darwin

jdarwin@evga.com

End Update

XFX

XFX is the “new comer” to North America in this high performance niche although they have been in the business for a long time under the “Pine” product name. At XFX we spoke primarily with Ryan Dumas, XFX Technical Marketing Manager.

I have seen some ugly claims directed towards XFX in the last week or so. Two of those claims being that they shut down their technical support forums because of the negative feedback in them and also that they were not processing RMAs due to having no stock to work from. XFX refutes both these claims and shares some plausible explanations. First, the forums were closed due to the simple fact that they were becoming too resource-needy to manage efficiently with their new support ticket system in place. The 5 techs on staff are needed to answer the phones (Yes you can call their hot line for direct support from an in-house staff. Check the “contact us” menu item at their website.) and work on support tickets. As for them not processing RMAs they explained this was very much not the case and seemed to think that I may have read about one isolated incident. So to recap, you can call XFX or use their online support ticket feature to get help for a 7900 issue if you have one.

Asking further about specific XFX RMA procedures, there is no doubt in my mind that XFX is going to take longer to process a RMA than any of the companies mentioned here. In a best case scenario, with 3 day shipping figured in, I would guess you would be lucky to see your card back you in two weeks. I did call their tech support line and had about a 15 minute wait for a tech, so they do at least answer their phones during business hours.

Asking if XFX had seen any unusual returns on the cards, they did think that there had been a wave in the last two weeks or so, but only contributed for a 0.5% rise in overall RMAs. They were sure that they had seen an influx of 7900 series problems and were “working very closely with NVIDIA” to make sure the problems got solved. They did explain that they too, like BFGTech had not changed testing or qualifying procedures for overclocked video cards.