Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Technical Difficulties

Who would have thought that I would run into difficulties with the USPS? Basically, I had my video card packaged up nicely and taped up. So the card's off towards EVGA's RMA reception office on December 7th. It is now December 13th, with an updated notice on the Delivery Confirmation number indicating that the package has been misrouted. So now I wonder... "How the fuck can you misroute a Priority Mail item?!" I do not know what factored into this mishap. And I am not all that happy that it happened at all. Maybe it's the season. Who knows? All I can do is just sit idly and wait... which is what I have been doing for the past several days since I want my video card back.

Some Google searches revealed that what I have been experienced may be attributed to faulty components on the video card and that the problem may not be isolated to a single company and a single series of cards. I do not know if the card I get in return will fix this definitely. But I do hope that with a few component changes in the card that the problem will go away. There are things that I cannot tolerate and that's having to deal with faulty hardware simply because I stress the card beyond its normal limit. And it's not even overclocking that is killing the card. It's simple and everyday usage as well as keeping the card in heavy load. There's nothing special about it. And I believe that this kind of scenerio can be recreated in QC labs.

I cannot speculate more than this. Without spare hardwares, I cannot run lengthy load tests to see if this is something that can happen to anyone who stress their cards as much as I could.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Of All Things...

Some time ago, I ran into a small problem that grew into a major one. It just happens to be a EVGA GeForce 7900GT card that I got a while back. It was part of their Step-Up program that I partook in to get a model bump and the latest hardware.

After a while, weird things started to happen. At first I thought it was just heat so I did a bit of maintenance on the system and evicted dust bunnies. I fired the system back up and started testing. Eventually the problem didn't go away. Instead, as I play some games and use the card more, the problem got a little worse each time. I then decided to file for a RMA, which I haven't done in a long time. Next to my 21" Viewsonic CRT monitor, I haven't filed for a RMA. So it comes as a surprise that the RMA I'll be filing for is a piece of delicate hardware that I never have trouble handling.

The replacement card came back and I started running some tests on it. One in particular caught my attention, which was Deep Freeze, a scenery test within 3DMarks06 application. The test went by without any trouble. So I thought nothing of it. Days went on by and I continued to use it. That was until recently, perhaps a week or so ago. I saw it started to happen again, that same old problem I had before. A couple of days went on by and I kept a close eye on how the hardware is handling temperatures. Strangely enough, it did not seem like it was heat-related. And I refused to change any speeds within the hardware to determine if it's that. I have paid a good sum to receive this card. And I expected it to work without flaws or malfunction for the life it is being used.

At this time, the card is on its way over to EVGA's RMA reception address, where it'll be put to the test to determine if it's deemed worthy for a replacement. Hopefully the details I have documented in this thread will convince them to send me a replacement card worthy of being put to the test. I still have yet to find the cause. But I did find all of this to be very disturbing. Browsing through other people's thread, I found that I am not alone and some people are worse off than I am, which got me to wondering just what is the common denominator here.

At this time, I am posting this through the laptop, which does not have the greatest in 3D capability nor does it have the memory to do a lot of things. However, it does what it is able to do and it's performing just fine as a temporary system. Unfortunately, it means roughly two weeks of no gaming. For the time being, I guess I can tinker around with the laptop and other operating systems. Now if these other people can send me my free Vista Business license...