HD7950 chooched her last pixel

[Colt45ws]

Yesterday, my PC crashed, and this is very strange as it had been running for over 100 days straight. The only thing that takes it down is a power outage. The way it did was strange as well and kinda pointed me in the direction. It froze and my primary screen, the only display on the AMD, quickly flipping to a solid pink screen. My other two displays, both connected to a Nvidia GT520 remained displaying the last image they had.
I forced it to reboot and it was all good. I even played a light game last night so it would have gotten a bit warm.
This afternoon I sat down and started using it, and it crashed the exact same way pretty quickly, with the exception of my display going grey not pink.
I forced a reboot once more, knowing that now I would have to investigate, but it wouldnt let me put it off at all; when I turned it back on, nothing came up on the screen, and soon enough the Gigabyte BIOS power cycled the PC automatically. It does this when it detects an issue that could be caused by overclocking, and setting itself back to default.
Well, that did nothing, so I went through removing RAM, just to be sure and nothing worked, so I pulled the 7950 out and put back in my old 6950
And it started up properly finally.
I don't know what failed on my 7950, but its unlikely to be repairable I suspect.

RIP
I did just now looking at it remember that it has a switch for a "Backup BIOS" on the card near the crossfire connectors, however Im not going to bother as I seriously doubt thats gonna bring it back, since I wasnt messing with it and it just died.


Im just happy my PC overall just keeps chugging. I estimate it has almost 75k hours on the motherboard. Everything else has been replaced at some point, though the CPU and RAM are getting up there as well, probably about 50k, same as my SSD/HDDs.

 

[danez_yoda]

I stopped upgrading components long ago. With the exception of ssd single components were not the bottleneck. Usually it was the whole system just being too slow.

i cherry pick the fastest components to build a rig and change it out every 5-7 years or so. Parents, nieces or nephiews need computers too. Pappa hats a refresh.

 

[Danno]

I just built a higher end build on pcpartspicker, well north of $3000.
I'll keep my i7 4790K for a while yet.

 

[Colt45ws]

Originally Posted By: danez_yoda
I stopped upgrading components long ago. With the exception of ssd single components were not the bottleneck. Usually it was the whole system just being too slow.

i cherry pick the fastest components to build a rig and change it out every 5-7 years or so. Parents, nieces or nephiews need computers too. Pappa hats a refresh.


Yeah, Im well due for a new machine. First assembled in Jan '10 with a i7-920, and that went a year or two and I replaced it with a 980X.
Well, I think what Im gonna do is do MoBo/RAM/CPU and leave the hard drives alone for a bit. I have quite a bit invested in those. 4x 2TB drives and 4x 3TB drives connected to a Adaptec 6805 controller. So I can just drop the controller in a slot on the new mobo and maintain my arrays.
But, Ive been putting my spending money into other things. It looks like Im gonna have to do something sooner rather than later.

 

[AZjeff]

If that don't beat all, the hard core Crown Vic don't like new cars guy is a computer nerd. Who'd a guessed?

No offense intended, my daughter was building screamer machines when she was 13.

 

[Colt45ws]

Originally Posted By: AZjeff
If that don't beat all, the hard core Crown Vic don't like new cars guy is a computer nerd. Who'd a guessed?

 

[Omahaug]

You said it doesn't output at all now?

Have you ever checked to make sure the fan still spins? Sometimes it can fail in such a way where the fan doesn't spin, then after a while it overheats.
what are you going to do with it now? If you have nothing to lose you can try taking that shroud and heatsink off and looking for obvious signs of failure, like a burned PWM or resistor. They're usually easy to spot, a burn mark and pieces of the chip blown off.

I've had one video card and two power supplies fail due to exploding components.

 

[Colt45ws]

Originally Posted By: NoNameJoe
You said it doesn't output at all now?

Have you ever checked to make sure the fan still spins? Sometimes it can fail in such a way where the fan doesn't spin, then after a while it overheats.
what are you going to do with it now? If you have nothing to lose you can try taking that shroud and heatsink off and looking for obvious signs of failure, like a burned PWM or resistor. They're usually easy to spot, a burn mark and pieces of the chip blown off.

I've had one video card and two power supplies fail due to exploding components.

Yes, no output. And the BIOS thinks the computer is failing to boot from a bad overclock so is self-resetting to default. So its aware something is in that slot that is failing to work.
Yeah, I might do that at some point.
Its very possible the fan quit and it overheated. Its just sort of odd that After the first crash, I was gaming on it just fine, but then the next day Im doing pedestrian web browsing (not even YT!) and it quits completely. One would think gaming would've overheated a fanless 7950 pretty rapidly.

 

[dogememe]

Originally Posted By: AZjeff
If that don't beat all, the hard core Crown Vic don't like new cars guy is a computer nerd. Who'd a guessed?


This made me laugh. He isn't the only Vic guy on here who is a "computer nerd" - I think I still qualify even though I quit my full-time job as a computer repair tech about two years ago.

 

[Garak]

Originally Posted By: AZjeff
If that don't beat all, the hard core Crown Vic don't like new cars guy is a computer nerd. Who'd a guessed?

I'm a pretty big Crown Vic fan, too (Town Car, Grand Marquis, and even the competition)!

 

[Colt45ws]

So I took the fan and heatsink off. Didnt see anything obvious. My guess is it got bit by the curse of the lead free solder and there is a crack in a joint or a tin whisker that has shorted it out. Im leaning towards a crack just as a WAG. I could probably throw the hot air gun at it and see if it comes back to life, but if it did, idk how long it would keep working. It'd be left with harder, more brittle solder.

 

[vwmaniaman]

Did the heat gun on my wifes laptop board. It has been nearly a year now and it is still working. It had no video so used her little heat gun she uses for making greeting cards and it worked great. Her board had dual core and mine was a single core. I go much faster now on this old Toshiba.

 

[AZjeff]

Originally Posted By: Garak
Originally Posted By: AZjeff
If that don't beat all, the hard core Crown Vic don't like new cars guy is a computer nerd. Who'd a guessed?

I'm a pretty big Crown Vic fan, too (Town Car, Grand Marquis, and even the competition)!

You talk the talk (2008 Infiniti?), Colton walks the CV walk. It makes more sense now following the thread, these guys are keeping ancient CVs & PCs running. Props.

 

[nthach]

I stopped tinkering around with custom builds a while ago, I don't game and an Mac does all the things I need to do. Building computers is fun, but unless you need to something specific it's not worth the time or expense for 80% of people out there.

The switch away from leaded solder and with CPU/GPU processes becoming more efficient(on a computational scale) but hotter has made GPU failures happen more and with modern chips needing clean power it stresses the importance for good motherboards with tight voltage regulation and even better power supplies. Modern GPUs and core system chipsets are soldered onto their PCBs with tiny solder balls, in nerd-speak that's a BGA package, so called because each solder "dot" is in an neat grid array. Nvidia had a lot of issues with GPU failures in the late 2000s-early 2010s. Taiwanese/Chinese capacitor syndrome was also a thing in the 2000s.

Recently I revived a iBuypower gaming rig that had a decent AMD FM2-based APU and a high-end Radeon 290 series GPU. The computer was unstable since it was new. Turned out that the power supply, a Thermaltake 650W and shoddy workmanship(and a dog nibbling away on a connector) was the culprit. The graphics card was toast, I put in an NVidia GeForce GTX1050 that had 2/3rd of the power of the Radeon but for playing Overwatch it's just fine. I chucked the [censored] Thermaltake PSU for a EVGA 750W modular one.

 

[Colt45ws]

Originally Posted By: vwmaniaman
Did the heat gun on my wifes laptop board. It has been nearly a year now and it is still working. It had no video so used her little heat gun she uses for making greeting cards and it worked great. Her board had dual core and mine was a single core. I go much faster now on this old Toshiba.

Yeah, Ill probably take it over to the shop tonight and heat gun it just to see if it revives it. If I get another year, that would be great!
Im currently trying to revive another piece of old gear as we speak, a Motorola Astro Spectra. So yeah, I like some old stuff.

 

[Brons2]

I switched away from gaming type custom builds to more multi-core, RAM heavy, big SSD for running multiple virtual machines. Don't have that much time for gaming anymore, I have to choose my time wisely, unlike what I'm doing on BITOG now.

 

[Colt45ws]

Well, I hot air'd it, but I realized after putting it back together there is a small clearance between the factory heatsink and the memory chips. What this means is I have to order some thermal pads to even test the thing, and my idea of just using thermal compound is a non-starter.
Also I was very unhappy today I couldnt play my trucking game even on low it was abysmal. Back when I was running the HD6950, I had two in crossfire, so I would need to get my other one....and I already gave it to my brother. Ill have to do some hunting for a cheap card of similar power to my 7950.
Also, it was interesting that my card isnt the first one of these to do this. I was looking on ebay for another 7950 and found 2 or 3 "Parts only" and reading the desc. of one it had similar symptoms to mine.

 

[Colt45ws]

Purchased a R9-280X off ebay. Appears to be a re-rolled HD7970 GHz edition, so a slight bit better. They were about the same as a regular 280 so I went ahead and took it.

 

[Garak]

Originally Posted By: AZjeff
You talk the talk (2008 Infiniti?), Colton walks the CV walk. It makes more sense now following the thread, these guys are keeping ancient CVs & PCs running. Props.

I bet I have more miles in the Crown Vic (and old Caprice/Impala) platform than he does. Cab driving back in the day does that, not to mention using a Town Car for a personal car for a few years.

Nonetheless, I've come very close to pulling the trigger on a Town Car, Crown Vic, or Grand Marquis a number of times. I've got my eye on a Grand Marquis right now, but they want too much. I missed out on a 1992 Buick Roadmaster a few days back with under 100,000 km. That's my biggest problem. I see one, and it's too expensive. I see one that is priced reasonably, and I hem and haw and before I know it, it's too late. I missed out on two very nice Town Cars that way, too.