ASUS Matrix HD7970 Platinum Ltd Edition (1100mhz) - take 2 (do you have a bad card?)

[STEvil]

EDIT - DO YOU HAVE A BAD CARD? POST YOUR INFO HERE PLEASE.



My Platinum Ltd Edition card was having errors and running extremely hot right from the day I received it and the only way to get them to go away after the first day was to downclock significantly. Being the busy person I am I didnt have time to RMA it right off the bat, so I figured i'd let it settle for a day or two until I could get around to it. Two nights ago I could hear a buzzing noise in my case then heard a "pop" (like something hitting a fan) shortly after and my system froze within a couple seconds. Apparently one of the heatsink retention screws with springs on the back of the card had come lose and jumped up and bounced off a system fan..

I removed the card and began tightening the screws on it but then stopped as every screw I checked as lose. EVERY screw, even the post-type screws that the spring heatsink screws go into were lose. I decided I may as well reseat the heatsink since nothing ended up being tight anyways and when I removed the heatsink there was a piece of plastic stuck between the unisink. It was directly over a couple memory chips. The plastic is marked with "remove" and appears that it goes on the thermal pad material during shipping. I didnt take a picture of it still under the heatsink as I thought it was just a smaller piece of something originally and didnt anticipate it actually being over top of the memory chips as it was..

The thermal grease application on the core was overly thick and due to the poor screw tension had baked and become hard further reducing thermal performance..

Suffice it to say the lack of assembly quality control and the premium paid for a "hand picked" and "limited edition" part will weigh heavily on my final rating.

Performance is as expected now that the heat issues are fixed..

On the software side of things the GPU Tweak software has two significant bugs that I have found so far. First is that after a period of time it seems to lose many of the sensors and you cannot simply restart the program to get them back, you must restart your system. The second bug is that if you have an AMD card and an nV card installed the software will default to control of the nV card only and cannot seem to detect the presence of the AMD card at all. While this is not a problem for everyone it does reduce the functionality of the software should you be attempting to use it in a system running GPGPU enabled programs such as World Community Grid. ****update - GPU Tweak also loses control of the GPU voltage eventually****


My rating is based on purchase price; it is $0/$500.

Here are some pictures from my phone while I was rebuilding the card. I had not actually decided to make this a review until I removed the heatsink and found the poor TIM type, application, and realized what the plastic had been insulating the memory chips.

Heatsink TIM pattern



GPU TIM pattern



Plastic piece. Rotate it 25-30 degrees left in the image and that is about how it would have been under the heatsink.



Memory thermal pads. You can see the slight lines on an angle left from the plastic..



Zoomed a bit closer and added a negative color filter to make the platic material outline clearer to see..

[bluestang]

You replaced the stock TIM then also? If so, with what TIM did you use?
Thanks for the write-up!

[STEvil]

Theralright generic, didnt have anything special around unfortunately.

[Alex-Ro]

Stock thermal paste is ty,just replaced it with artic cooling mx-4 and from 43 degrees in idle and 73 load went to 38 idle and 64 load.Btw anyone knows why 2d speeds are always 500/1650?Is the ulps disabled by default in bios?

[bluestang]

More than 1 display? Then 500 is idle.

I'm due for a PC dusting aver the holiday break. I may take my card out and replace the stock TIM with some Arctic Ceramique I have extra.

[Alex-Ro]

No,only 1 display,only one dvi port used.

L.E edit yes was running that bios for multi-display,pulled the switch and now 300,thanks

[STEvil]

update - added another bug to the list..

[bluestang]

Man that stinks. Hope you get it worked out to your liking OC wise. Have you tried Sapphire Trixx? Also, isn't there a modded version of the Trixx program done by stasio (I think) that helps with OCing even more??

[STEvil]

I'm going to look into trixx... the asus gpu tweak program is almost useless

[st0ned]

Doesn't MSI AB work with it ? It is for me the best OC tool out there. Only problem is the "low" limit of 1.3v on 7970 cards against the 1.375v on trixx. Though these values are for reference cards, I have no experience with MATRIX.

[STEvil]

Trixx limits to 1.257.. MSI doesnt let me change voltage at all.

EDIT

If I run Asus GPU Tweak and MSI Afterburner at the same time then GPU Tweak doesnt crash anymore and all of the sensors work. Voltage control is all broken still, though.

[st0ned]

Maybe they don't fully support the MATRIX. Did you try the 4.4.0 beta of trixx ?

[Alex-Ro]

GPU tweak works flawless on my hd7970 matrix,what problems do you have exactly?

[Ket]

I had similar poor build quality with my TwinFrozr, card ended up dying at random so it may be a wise decision to send the card back for a replacement.

[STEvil]

Maybe they don't fully support the MATRIX. Did you try the 4.4.0 beta of trixx ?

4.3.0 first, just tried 4.4.0b and nothing new.

GPU tweak works flawless on my hd7970 matrix,what problems do you have exactly?

GPU Tweak crashes or sensors stop reading (unless I run MSI afterburner at the same time), all voltage control options are broken or go missing shortly after startup or do not show up on startup at all most of the time.. among other things

I had similar poor build quality with my TwinFrozr, card ended up dying at random so it may be a wise decision to send the card back for a replacement.

GPU has a hard time being error free at stock settings.. I think the original TIM and loose heatsink install might have partially cooked the GPU, or the plastic on the ram hurt the ram chip that it was mostly covering..

Another bang-up job by Asus..

edit

yup, its going back..

[docwhom]

Thank you for the heads up on this Asus Premium Product. I was going to buy one, but now it looks like "better go elsewhere" to find a decent product.

Amazing, asking for that amount of money and getting a sub-standard piece of so-called air-cooling. Is that the norm now......shoddy coolers with suspect heatsink paste? Especially love the the amount of paste squeezed onto the gpu, anyone bothered to tell Asus to hold back on that amount. I remembered when I was in high-school you had to have used almost a quarter/half of the paste tube to spread that amount everywhere, and it shows the absolute noobness of the installer.

I'm still glad I've got my Zotac 460 which is still plugging away, although I do need an upgrade soon, but the complete lack of anything resembling "QUALITY" in the video card world is absolute dismal and depressing.

[Leeghoofd]

My Plat sample card just locks if I run voltages above 1.3vGPU lol (via ASUS GPU tweak tool). I can only adjust via the voltage buttons on the card and must be happy with 1200-1250MHz core speeds for 3D benches on air sigh... Then you see review and other cards pass 1300MHz with ease... it's hit and miss it seems... Some are great, some average and sometimes sadly you get a dud...

[STEvil]

And I missed my 30 day return period to NCIX.... dammit.

Leeghoofd - You may want to visually inspect the heat plate on the rear to see if it is contacting any capacitor legs or the legs that come off the back of the +/- buttons, mine looks like it could be, or would very easily if any amount of flex happened to that plate upon installation...

[l0ud_sil3nc3]

Think mine will work





shipping damage ftw!

[dernettemann]

damn, thats suck

[STEvil]

Hm... looks like Asus may have know about the poor mounting system they're using for quite some time: http://www.behardware.com/news/lire/24-02-2012/

[STEvil]

UPDATE

I've had the new "hand tested" card in my system to test for a couple weeks now.

I am not impressed.

Issues:

1 - The screws were not all tight, again.
2 - When the temperature probes gets above about 70c artifacts begin to occur when using stock fan profile.
3 - Rear plate still comes very close to capacitor and overclock buttons on the back of the card. I will see if I can find a feeler gauge to measure this.

I have two 120mm fans aimed at the card and one on the back of my PCI area evacuating air to keep the card from getting over 60c currently.. with a fan profile that goes to 100% fan duty cycle at 65c. Seems a bit excessive to me to have to do this to keep the card from artifacting.

[ElectricElf]

So both the 7970s and 7950s have issues with the Direct CU II series. Any idea if it's just the 7900s or whether this is a wider problem?

What is causing the screws to loosen? Is it the weight of the heatsink? Or the fact that the weight is just distributed to the right side?

There are also reports that the 7970 Direct CU II has high VRM temperatures:
http://forums.overclockers.com.au/sh....php?t=1020682

Edit:
Reading the link I just posted, Asus denies this. Perhaps the VRM temperatures are related?

[STEvil]

The loose screws is just poor quality control at the factory as is the heatsink tilting. Nothing wrong with the 7900's as a whole other than Sapphire and Asus screwed up.

I'm looking into getting a shim or alternate gpu cooler..

[ElectricElf]

I was thinking about getting this card. This thread and the other information on the web makes me hesitant right now. I didn't want the MSI version the 7970 BE because it didn't have a DVI-Dual Link, but it looks like I may end up with little choice.

It's interesting that it's only the 7900 Direct CU IIs that are affected. It could be a bad batch of screws or a specific part from Asus? I thought that the Direct CU parts were pretty standardized. But so far, I haven't heard anything about the 680 Direct CU II or 670 Direct CU II having any problems; their owners seem to be unhappy about Nvidia's voltage locking more so than anything else.