Date:
Thursday , May 25, 2006
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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GeForce 7900 Inferno – Burn Baby Burn

It seems that the demon art of vendor overclocking is pushing many GeForce 7900 video cards beyond their abilities and into an early grave. It's one thing when you overclock the card, and another when it comes out of the box overclocked with a warranty.

7900 Problems Not NVIDIA’s

If you are a gamer or hardware enthusiast that likes to spend $300, $400, or even $500 or more on a video card, you likely know that there seems to be some problems brewing over at NVIDIA. Oh wait, NVIDIA does not seem to have any problems, but the guys that are selling their video cards sure the hell do. To be exact, the companies that sell overclocked NVIDIA GeForce 7900 series graphics cards seem to be having the problems, namely BFGTech, EVGA, and XFX. Our NIVIDA video card forums are full of threads talking about 7900 issues and possible fixes. EVGA has gone as far as to directly address the issue in our own forums.

EVGA hears our customer’s concerns loud and clear about the issues on EVGA 7900 series products. We definitely need to improve our quality control and tighten the testing procedure on the EVGA CO, KO and SuperClocked™ product line. There is no excuse for not providing the best quality products to gamers, that’s EVGA’s spirit. We don’t fear the problems or escape from the problems, we are confident the problem will be resolved shortly. Thank you for everyone’s patients and encouragement.

What seems to be happening the most are problems associated with playing F.E.A.R., Oblivion, or using the 3DMark06 testing suite, but issues are certainly not limited to this. 7900 cards have been artifacting and/or locking up while playing games. This sometimes happens when the card is installed the first day, or it might happen a month later. To add insult to injury, remember that these are terribly expensive video cards many times bought two at a time to fill out an SLI dual video card configuration. Obviously anything breaking is not good, but rest assured when it is something as expensive at a 7900 series video card, people get upset. And of course those enthusiasts not only want service, they want answers. So we went looking for some.

Everyone's Onboard

Let it be known that all parties involved, know that there is "an issue" with overclocked GeForce 7900 video cards and they are very concerned with it. None of the companies involved are trying to side step the problem although sometimes reaction time may be seen as slow by the community.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA have specifically pointed a finger to the cause of the issues being associated with the overclocking settings that BFGTech, EVGA, and XFX use. NVIDIA firmly stands behind their stock core and memory clock specifications for the 7900 series and tell us that they are not seeing any unusual problems with 7900 series video cards that are not overclocked. A little over a month ago, PCPer.com discussed the issue as being the vertex shader unit being clocked too high and NVIDIA stood behind that site on its conclusions.

Well today NVIDIA officially got back to me with an answer to all my inquiries on the subject. The short of it is: the GPUs on the cards that were having problems didn’t have the headroom necessary for the vendor’s overclocked specifications. The two most prominent problem areas were the vertex clock (which remember runs 50 MHz faster than the pixel clock) and the memory clock. These GPU subsystems were running far enough out of spec that the chips were having physical issues with stability; causing the random “freezes” we were seeing.

NVIDIA has taken some of the responsibility as they have not worked closely enough with the board builders in explaining how overclocking domains have changed on the 7900 series, and that they would be correcting that. Still overall, the problems lay at the feet of the people that “made” your video card. Interestingly enough, as of writing this, no matter who you got your 7900 series card from, they were still all built by Flextronics in China with the exception of a few VIVO models from XFX, so most of the cards in question are being built to NVIDIA’s demanding specification. Companies like BFGTech, EVGA, and XFX are simply putting their own stickers and maybe cooling on the card then tweaking the BIOS with their own overclock settings.

From what we can tell by feedback in our forums, more problems seem to be tied to EVGA and XFX 7900 series cards than BFGTech cards. Keep in mind that EVGA and XFX are putting out 7900 series cards with higher overclocks than BFGTech.

So after talking to NVIDIA, we called up these three card builders to see what exactly they had to say about these issues.