<play taps>RadeonHD 5770 dead at ... ~10?

[momaka]

Originally Posted by eccerr0r

hmm... there were a few more V3900's at the local shop, but I passed on them as they had low profile brackets. Hmm. Wonder if I should get another one or not.

Depends on the price.
HD7570's usually run for about $14-15 shipped to your door on eBay... and sometimes slightly less ($11-13) if you find an auction and think it's worth your time for the few $ in savings.
With gas prices what they are right now, I wouldn't drive too far for a small item like that (not unless combining multiple errands in one trip.)

BTW, speaking of HD7570... go for the Dell-branded ones, as they usually come with GDDR5 RAM instead of DDR3. Look for a Dell P/N sticker / square QR code on the PCB.

Originally Posted by eccerr0r

Tried running some 3d graphics on the V3900 and so far it's less than 50°C on the stock HS/F... whether it will stay this way I don't know...

Run the highest "typical" load you expect to put though these cards and run it for 30+ minutes. Let GPU-Z log temperatures. Also keep in mind your current ambient room temperatures - if they are 10C lower now than they would be in the summer, then 50C will become 60C in the summer. Simple as that... well, unless the fan ramps up to keep the temperature lower. So this applies for constant airflow, at least.

[eccerr0r]

Well these are V3900's so not sure. I just wish that it had full height card edges... Maybe I should just get a few of these cards just to swap them out as they fail... three bones a pop...

These V3900's are pretty close to what I was seeing on my 5770, I'm surprised...not quite there but close. The 6450 was really bad.

[momaka]

Originally Posted by eccerr0r

Well these are V3900's so not sure. I just wish that it had full height card edges... Maybe I should just get a few of these cards just to swap them out as they fail... three bones a pop...

For $3 a pop, I'd grab a handful. That's a good price. The V3900's go pretty much for the same price as the 7570 on eBay.

Being half-height doesn't worry me - I have plenty of "blank" case shield covers. A few minutes of drilling and dremel usually gives me what I need.

Originally Posted by eccerr0r

These V3900's are pretty close to what I was seeing on my 5770, I'm surprised...not quite there but close.

Yup, they are pretty good for what they are.
Only if you're gaming and want higher resolutions, that's when the 5770 will outshine them significantly, due to having 16 ROPs. Otherwise, on lower resolutions, those Turks cores are pretty well-balanced between ROPs, TMUs, and shaders.

[eccerr0r]

Hmm...if only the back shields of ATX boards were easy to jury rig...

And cross firing these...

[eccerr0r]

Well, got one of the half height card plate version as a spare, and also picked up a crap Nvidia card which appears mostly new so I'd suspect it still has a full life ahead (at least the fan/heatsink looks really clean). There was a GTS250 there too that I passed since it was chock full of dust and I suspect it's at least about half way to dead based on how much dust my video cards collected before dying. That would have been a fairly nice card for graphics if it were almost new like these V3900s and the crap nvidia card, not to mention it had a standard (double) card back... sigh.

[momaka]

Originally Posted by eccerr0r

... I suspect it's at least about half way to dead based on how much dust my video cards collected before dying.

Well, if you're letting your cards collect dust, then that would explain why they are dying. Just sayin'

GTS250 has a G92b core... which can be surprisingly tough. But they do indeed die from over-temperature. And moreover, it's a 150W TDP card - gonna be making you crank up the AC more in the summer, which translates to higher costs. And in terms of performance, the v3900 is only roughly 30% slower than the GTS250 (though this can depend on what you are doing with it, of course.) So all in all, they are nice little GPUs.

[eccerr0r]

Well it was an estimate aggregate number adding up each time I cleaned out the dust. This GTS250 did not look like it had been cleaned. Now the Radeon X800 I have (was given to me by a friend) ...is tough to clean and prior to cleaning it was about as bad as the GTS250...

Now, the GTS250 vs the HD5770 ... ?

Anyway, apparently the back plate of my HD6450 matches that of the V3900 so I'm very willing to shelve a HD6450 for the V3900 ...

[eccerr0r]

Speaking of failures, if you had one of those miner or high end cards but ran nothing but 2D apps on it, would it last longer before failure? One could assume yes as the die doesn't get as hot, but perhaps the weak spots are exercised regardless of application.

Then again the fan still can get clogged and the gpu can still overheat. Maybe filters should be standard issue...

[eccerr0r]

Ahh... my nvidia GeForce 8400GS gets to 73°C! It has a "passive" 2-slot wide heatsink with no fan...
Ugh! needs a fan, making it even wider... ugh. Maybe another post in the ghetto mods thread...

[Dan81]

If it's G86 core, forget it. Not even copious amounts of cooling can prevent it from failing. I've had a Gigabyte branded 8400GS with a rather big passive cooler and not even a 12cm fan strapped to it could save it from dying.

[eccerr0r]

It's a GT218 at least, I guess...

[momaka]

Originally Posted by eccerr0r

Ahh... my nvidia GeForce 8400GS gets to 73°C! It has a "passive" 2-slot wide heatsink with no fan...
Ugh! needs a fan, making it even wider... ugh. Maybe another post in the ghetto mods thread...

LOL.
Maybe do a "side fan" cooling mod - that way you won't be blocking (and even providing cooling to) cards in the other slots.
Case in point with the above picture: providing cooling to a passively-cooled Sapphire Radeon 9600 card. Of course, that one is easy - heatsink fins are cut both ways, so a fan loosely blowing air over it is enough. Now if the heatsink of your 8400 GS has fins running the other way, this probably won't work then. Either you'll need to duct the air over the fins... at which point, you might as well just install the fan onto the card... or attach the fan "behind" the card to blow air across it.

Originally Posted by Dan81

If it's G86 core, forget it. Not even copious amounts of cooling can prevent it from failing. I've had a Gigabyte branded 8400GS with a rather big passive cooler and not even a 12cm fan strapped to it could save it from dying.

Big fan doesn't always mean good cooling. Sometimes using a smaller fan and forcing the air to go through the fins is more optimal. It depends on the heatsink, really.

Also, G86 cores are "small" in terms of surface area, but still have the complexity of an 8000 series card, and thus have many "layers" to them. As such, they still tend to get lousy temperatures. I have an ASUS 8500 GT with a pretty decent-looking passive cooler... but even with an 80 mm fan blasting air at full speed right onto the cooler and through its fins, the card still reaches 60-62C under full load (with 25-27C ambient temperatures, though.)

That aside, you actually CAN prevent these cards from failing, but you just have to get a new one and do the cooling mods ASAP, right out of the box. If it's a 2nd hand card, it's probably already running on borrowed time... though keeping it cool will/can extend that quite a bit. I just had a flaky GF 6150 chipset die on me this week after nearly 7 years now. Granted I didn't use this PC very regularly... but I did do enough gaming on it to say that it hasn't had a care-free life. The GF 6150 chipset in it is still a virgin, though (no reflows/reheat attempts), so I'm gonna pull it out on of these days and try that. It's already way past EOL as it is.

Originally Posted by eccerr0r

Now, the GTS250 vs the HD5770 ... ?

5770 all day any day.
Yes, the GTS250 has 256-bit RAM... but it's gDDR3. So the 5770 still ends up beating it there... and in almost every other aspect too. Only on the texture rate, GTS250 is slightly better, but that won't make up for the rest.
And again, it's a hotter card (extra 50 Watts at max load, and probably more in idle, due to being a larger GPU chip.)

Originally Posted by eccerr0r

Speaking of failures, if you had one of those miner or high end cards but ran nothing but 2D apps on it, would it last longer before failure? One could assume yes as the die doesn't get as hot, but perhaps the weak spots are exercised regardless of application.

Unfortunately, I think with modern cards, it's the latter: doesn't matter much if you stress them or not - they still fail. Of course, "mining" and high 3D usage seems to accelerate the failures even more... so in that regard, YES, running only low-stress / 2D apps / desktop use *should* allow the card to have a longer life. But it seems the silicon "lottery" is even more of a thing with modern cards - that is, some will just be plain losers and die quickly regardless of how you run them, while others will have a "normal" life cycle at "normal" expected use patterns.

In my case, I bought a faulty R9 290 off of a customer in a repair shop a few years back. The person wasn't a computer guy and didn't even know there was a high-power GPU in his system. He simply had bought the computer and picked a more expensive model, thinking more expensive = faster / better built. When a tech asked him if he wanted to buy/get something equivalent to the R9 290 GPU, in case he wanted to game, the customer said they had no interest in gaming and would be content with the onboard video when we told him that was always an option (and mind you, this was before the crazy GPU prices, so an equivalent replacement card wasn't going to cost an arm and a leg, like it does now.) Anyways, I bought that faulty R9 290 card from him pretty much just for the price of the chunky cooler. The card would work on desktop *most of the time*, but would occasionally artifact and reboot. Any 3D load was insta-reboot - clearly a dying GPU chip. And to think this card was used all of its life as a desktop 2D adapter without any load.

On that note, this is why I don't trust any ATI/AMD card from the HD7k series and up (exception being the HD7570/V3900 and 7670, since these are based on an older "Turks" core) - at least on the desktop-side of things. I hear that the HD6k for Mac/mobile is pretty bad too. But R9 and RX series are obviously the worst. I'm regularly seeing gobs of these dead online.

Now sure how things look on the nVidia side-of-things... but judging by all of the threads here on BCN for dead mid/high-end GTX cards, I'd say they are just as terrible.

Originally Posted by eccerr0r

Then again the fan still can get clogged and the gpu can still overheat. Maybe filters should be standard issue...

Still may not help much. Cheap fans are cheap and will fail with or without dust. Only thing a filter would help is the fins on the card won't get clogged with dust.

[eccerr0r]

hmm...maybe have to collect more v3900's and drop these 8400GS and NVS310... Wish I hadn't bought the HD6450. GRR. Just that I needed a card then, badly... but now I could have gotten a V3900 instead.

[eccerr0r]

The 8400GS is a low profile card too, so it still kills the adjacent slot if it's full height...

however if the pciex16 slot is next to the memory controller... then maybe we're talking about something...

[eccerr0r]

Hmm... "new" in the collection: A Radeon R7 250. Now this may start to get up to the speed of the HD 5770. Or not? Testing will tell, once I get the drivers squared away...

I suspect this board will die young, alas the V3900 will be ready to be swapped back when that happens.

[eccerr0r]

LOL yup, this R7-250 I can get to 65°C under load where the V3900 gets to only 50°C. Now...what to do to get the R7-250 to last longer... and yes this thing indeed is noticeably faster than the V3900.