I did write a scathing attack on Neog on how it must be their fault and how dare they try and tame such phenomenal cosmic power into a tiny case and other such amdyisms, but i couldn't bring myself to do it. i just couldn't. i knew that before long the joke would become reality and i'd drift further and further into the dark side, that i would become him. it was too much of a risk. I'd hope not, otherwise he'd live in my block and be stealing my internets!
Eh this isn't looking good. The 3rd party won't guarantee the replacement will be new, it may be refurbished, and I have to ship it out at my expense AND it's going to take 3-4 weeks. This is kind of insane. I'm definitely never buying another Sapphire product. This is just too much of a hassle.
It looks like I may have actually solved my issue! A few weeks back I was playing with MSI afterburner and I set an overclock that I felt was OK. I then THOUGHT I reset everything back to default and went on with life. Just for the hell of it, I re-installed the card and ran Sapphire TRIXX software and saw that the OC was still active! Looks like I just had an unstable OC on my card that eventually started showing problems. The part that tripped me up was when researching my issues I was having the EXACT same issues that a lot of people were having with these launch cards so I assumed that i had a defective card when in reality I had just unwittingly left a bad OC
Currently looking into alternate cooling solutions. I may soon get serious about a water cooling loop.
I'd very much recommend watercooling the 290. I've got 3 x 290x's in a dedicated loop and even after a few hours of intense gaming (BF4) they never rise much above 50 deg C. Besides the big temp drop, watercooling has one other major advantage; the almost blissful silence compared to the jet engine racket from the pathetic AMD air cooler. As for the drivers / software, I've not had much trouble at all with them. It took a bit of adjusting to after many years of Nvidia, but I love being able to switch from 1 screen to 3 screens at the click of a button
I'm thinking I might start with a 120mm loop dedicated to just the graphics card then add in the CPU later. Is a single 120mm rad good enough for this GPU?
