Sapphire HD 7970 GHZ Edition malfunctioning - which AMD?

.morph3us

Good people of polycount,

i have bought myself a new workstation, unfortunatly i have a lot of problems with my Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. First my pc broke down a couple of times, when i stressed it. I tracked it down to temperatures and resolved the problem by adjusting the fan I mounted.
Everything went fine for 3 hours of modeling until i suddenly had a black screen. After a minute or so the music stopped playing as well and i had to hard reboot. Just to get to the next black screen after boot up.

Long story short...

I installed the card in my old workstation and it doesnt work there either.

The initial idea of buying a radeon was that i actually quite dislike nvidia's policy of dividing into consumer and workstation cards.
Also, the only geforce card that also has 6 gb of vram is the titan, which costs 1000 €. DO i really need the 6 gb? Should i go with a gtx 780?

I do rendering with vray, postproduction in after effects and photoshop, i would like to get into sculpting now, because it was way too laggy before the switch. Also, i fear that the next years will be meager, so as long as i now have money, i wantto invest into proper equipment.

Or should i try the next 7970? Maybe its only this one thats faulty?

P.S.: Has anybody got a good hint how to remove GLUED heatsinks? For my custom cooling system i needed to glue some parts onto the card directly.

Thanks

Snader

Have you gone back for warranty? That's the first thing you should try.

Wait. I just read you swapped out the fan(s) of the card. That voids warranty, so you're SOL. And no, you don't glue stuff. You use thermal adhesive. This is probably why you had issues too. Were there problems before you changed the fan(s)?

.morph3us

I didnt use it much without fan. And it shouldnt have anything to do with the fan at all, because it worked perfectly well for over three hours. The black screen seems to be a common problem, there are loads and loads of entries on google.

I already have an informal ok with someone i spoke on the phone to.
I still have the old fan and cover here.

Wiki says you can use the term adhesive and glue interchangeably. My bad, i am a non english native. This "glue", that is actually how it is called on the tube, came with my fan kit. But really, i dont think its any of that. I checked the temperatures while the accident happened. I was at a cool 59° C that is totally fine!

So i will get my warranty hopefully. The thing i wanted to know more precisely was, if people would suggest to try another radeon or switch to geforce, but which one should i take, then?

almighty_gir

well if it's under warranty you get a replacement and don't spend any extra money, so do that.

failing that i wouldn't invest in the 700 series of cards just yet, wait for their prices to drop.

.morph3us

okay. will return it and hope the next card is better... i hope its gonna be stable. will stick to my gtx 260 till then.

amd is really expensive and doesnt provide the same power, but radeon is unstable. I can choose between a pound of sh** and a pound of sh**... -.-
I hope i can hand back my custom fan, too. Or next time i will go to a hardware store next to me and ask them to strap it on properly.

oXYnary

To be fair. Sapphire does offer budget cards. So their manufacturing process might not be as stringent as one of the more top tier brands.