Whatever you do, don't buy an XFX Radeon graphics card (at least not the R7950 DD 3GB flavour) - mine died in spectacular fashion last night after 2 months of service...
I have hardly been stressing the damn thing (work away a lot and the PC is at my mum's so doesn't get used when I'm at home) and while playing a quick game of Bioshock Infinite last night the following chain of events occurred:
1. I heard a clicking sound from inside the PC.
2. Clicking progressed to a grinding within seconds
3. PC went off (panic time!) - this happened before I could do my usual "reach around the back and hit the power switch" method of saving myself from expensive hardware failures
4. I opened up the case to investigate
5. The offending graphics card was so hot I couldn't actually touch it and was ticking (sound of something contracting as it cooled)
6. waited until the card was cool enough to pull out and found that one of the fans had shattered
7. temp installed an old PCI-E R370 card I had laying around to make sure nothing else was fried
8. PC booted up fine
Upshot is I'm now running with my old Geforce GTX460 until I hear back from Scan on an RMA - hoping they can swap the POS card for a better (non-XFX) one now...
A cursory googling leads me to believe this is not an isolated incident with this particular card - looking at other people's experiences it would appear that the cooler has a nasty tendency to warp (which in my case I can only surmise caused the fan to hit the shroud and disintegrate).
PC won't POST with the card in there so I would assume that something is shorted out (caps all look good but I haven't bothered investigating any further as it's under warranty).
All PSU voltages are within spec so I know it has to be the card itself (and it's rock-solid stable again now with the geforce in there).
I have hardly been stressing the damn thing (work away a lot and the PC is at my mum's so doesn't get used when I'm at home) and while playing a quick game of Bioshock Infinite last night the following chain of events occurred:
1. I heard a clicking sound from inside the PC.
2. Clicking progressed to a grinding within seconds
3. PC went off (panic time!) - this happened before I could do my usual "reach around the back and hit the power switch" method of saving myself from expensive hardware failures
4. I opened up the case to investigate
5. The offending graphics card was so hot I couldn't actually touch it and was ticking (sound of something contracting as it cooled)
6. waited until the card was cool enough to pull out and found that one of the fans had shattered
7. temp installed an old PCI-E R370 card I had laying around to make sure nothing else was fried
8. PC booted up fine
Upshot is I'm now running with my old Geforce GTX460 until I hear back from Scan on an RMA - hoping they can swap the POS card for a better (non-XFX) one now...
A cursory googling leads me to believe this is not an isolated incident with this particular card - looking at other people's experiences it would appear that the cooler has a nasty tendency to warp (which in my case I can only surmise caused the fan to hit the shroud and disintegrate).
PC won't POST with the card in there so I would assume that something is shorted out (caps all look good but I haven't bothered investigating any further as it's under warranty).
All PSU voltages are within spec so I know it has to be the card itself (and it's rock-solid stable again now with the geforce in there).
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