Damn, I haven't played GW2 since 2014. Gonna have to explore everything 2 years later!

zyther
I received my RMA card on the 20th of August and it has been fine since till last night. When playing WoW. My Screens went black, fans sped to 100% i hit the power button on my pc. and herd the sound of the windows shut down music. I went in and looked in event logs and nothing was listed. maybe a driver fail?

Seems like the same problem I've been having. Half of the crashes, the computer's sound began looping a small section very rapidly. The other half of the crashes, the screen went black and fans to 100% but I could still talk to people in Discord where they could hear me and I could hear them. Even in that situation, there was nothing I could do to bring the screen back and a shutdown/reset was necessary. 

I have my new card now, but with everything that's been happening and a failure to let us know how the problem was addressed or even a definite way for us to check our cards, I'd rather be safe than sorry and just return the RMA and then return the original so I could go with a different brand. 

Customer service is great and all, but it doesn't mean much if the product itself is faulty. Limiting the hardware through a software solution doesn't fix the problem. I have no assurance that is not what's happening, especially considering the number of people who are getting new cards that are only capable of a lower clock speed than their original. An overclock that pushes too high should leave you with artifacts on the screen or a driver crash, not an unrecoverable GPU crash.

Could people post their GPU BIOS version of their old and new cards? If the BIOS isn't the problem, let's rule that out.
 
My old card: 86.4.17.0.80
My new card: 86.4.17.0.80
 
Edit: Ignore this post -- see my post below.

tehbigbug
Could people post their GPU BIOS version of their old and new cards? If the BIOS isn't the problem, let's rule that out.
 
My old card: *to be filled in once I plug it in again*
My new card: 86.4.17.0.80

It'll be great if someone can dump the BIOS of new card and do a binary comparison with old one.

Nereus

Fuhckerschite
I had this black screens to super fans crash about a few weeks ago maybe and it freaked me out. Restarted my PC and it was fine.  Flash forward to today and I was checking out Guild Wars 2 again with a friend. Boom, black screens and omega fans.  Restart PC.  Restart Guild Wars.  Not even 5 mins in, boom black screen and uber fans.  I get pissed and check on EVGA's forums and find this thread.  Now I'm pissed.  How many people are having this problem?  Pretty unacceptable if you ask me.  Am I supposed to RMA or should I just get a new card.

Mine has also crashed several times in Guild Wars 2, and earlier in this thread I noticed a number of people mentioned crashes while playing GW2 (among other games). You will need to contact EVGA and they may run a few tests and likely you'll have to RMA the card, but EVGA have been giving free EAR returns (they ship replacement new card to you, then you ship old card back using supplied pre-paid shipping label). In the meantime, if you go into NVidia control panel and click "help" on the menu on the top of the window, then click "debug mode", that seems to stop the crashes (and also limits the boost to 1860MHz). You need to do this every time you restart your PC btw.
 
EVGA will ship you a new card btw, not a refurbished one. This problem is apparently some hardware issue with a small number of cards shipped from EVGA prior to 8/30/2016. 
 
To contact EVGA, just go to and start filling it out, and one of the following screens should give you a toll-free number to call and they will take it from there.
 

 Called EVGA earlier and got everything set up!!!  No questions asked.  Just had to send a PDF of my Amazon invoice and I'm good to go. New card should be sent here in the next few days. As much as it sucks to get bad hardware, it's rather nice when the company that makes it takes the responsibility and replaces it promptly.  Now if I can just talk em into upgrading it to the Hydro.

Fuhckerschite

Nereus

Fuhckerschite
I had this black screens to super fans crash about a few weeks ago maybe and it freaked me out. Restarted my PC and it was fine.  Flash forward to today and I was checking out Guild Wars 2 again with a friend. Boom, black screens and omega fans.  Restart PC.  Restart Guild Wars.  Not even 5 mins in, boom black screen and uber fans.  I get pissed and check on EVGA's forums and find this thread.  Now I'm pissed.  How many people are having this problem?  Pretty unacceptable if you ask me.  Am I supposed to RMA or should I just get a new card.

Mine has also crashed several times in Guild Wars 2, and earlier in this thread I noticed a number of people mentioned crashes while playing GW2 (among other games). You will need to contact EVGA and they may run a few tests and likely you'll have to RMA the card, but EVGA have been giving free EAR returns (they ship replacement new card to you, then you ship old card back using supplied pre-paid shipping label). In the meantime, if you go into NVidia control panel and click "help" on the menu on the top of the window, then click "debug mode", that seems to stop the crashes (and also limits the boost to 1860MHz). You need to do this every time you restart your PC btw.
 
EVGA will ship you a new card btw, not a refurbished one. This problem is apparently some hardware issue with a small number of cards shipped from EVGA prior to 8/30/2016. 
 
To contact EVGA, just go to and start filling it out, and one of the following screens should give you a toll-free number to call and they will take it from there.
 

Called EVGA earlier and got everything set up!!!  No questions asked.  Just had to send a PDF of my Amazon invoice and I'm good to go. New card should be sent here in the next few days. As much as it sucks to get bad hardware, it's rather nice when the company that makes it takes the responsibility and replaces it promptly.  Now if I can just talk em into upgrading it to the Hydro.

 
 
 

Well, I just put the old card in and it looks like the BIOS versions are the same with the BIOS dumps being the exact same on the byte level too. A CS rep said they were told it was a hardware issue and not firmware. 

I suspect the post earlier about hardware differences was so the tech could see if one of the power connectors had something wrong.

In any case, the Panasonic SP-caps on mine varied slightly. The old had 668QJ while the new has 66WQK. Not sure if that is pertinent, but it was a topic of discussion so I felt I should put it here anyway. Plus, the serial numbers only varied by the last 4 digits.
 
At this rate, I do not have much confidence in this new card. With the old one, it would crash on any of the last 3 driver versions from Nvidia. Someone else mentioned that theirs crashed suddenly after a month of no problems. 

EVGA, we are paying a large chunk of money for this card. If this is the quality of the component we receive, I want to know why and what has been done to fix it. I don't want reassurances, I want facts. I talked to someone through the technical support and they said the Product Team assured the customer service reps that it has been fixed but were given no details. EVGA, your customer service reps need details because your customers need details.

To the customer service reps: I understand that you can only work with the information you are given. Thanks for being awesome. I'm happy to see that all the good things said about the customer service are true, as far as I can tell.

For anyone wanting to know about EVGA serial numbers, here's what I was told by a rep:
"The first two digits correlate to the year, so 16 being for 2016, the third digit designates the product type, 0 being power supply, 1 being graphics card, 2 being motherboard, etc. Then the 4th and 5th number designates the factory is was manufactured in, as far as I know. The 6th digit signifies the warranty length, this particular one being a 3, for 3 years, while 7,8,9 and 10 are the part number. The 11th digit is for the region it's sold in and the last 5 digits are simply the serial number sequence."

Knowing this, chances are good that if the last 5 digits of your serial number on your new card make a number larger than the last 5 on your old card, you have a card made later in production with the fixes.

I hope this helps.

tehbigbug

For anyone wanting to know about EVGA serial numbers, here's what I was told by a rep:
"The first two digits correlate to the year, so 16 being for 2016, the third digit designates the product type, 0 being power supply, 1 being graphics card, 2 being motherboard, etc. Then the 4th and 5th number designates the factory is was manufactured in, as far as I know. The 6th digit signifies the warranty length, this particular one being a 3, for 3 years, while 7,8,9 and 10 are the part number. The 11th digit is for the region it's sold in and the last 5 digits are simply the serial number sequence."

Knowing this, chances are good that if the last 5 digits of your serial number on your new card make a number larger than the last 5 on your old card, you have a card made later in production with the fixes.

I hope this helps.

My RMA is from EVGA TW, so the last five digit are way smaller than my original card.  Surely the region code is different in both old and RMA cards.

tehbigbug


For anyone wanting to know about EVGA serial numbers, here's what I was told by a rep:
"The first two digits correlate to the year, so 16 being for 2016, the third digit designates the product type, 0 being power supply, 1 being graphics card, 2 being motherboard, etc. Then the 4th and 5th number designates the factory is was manufactured in, as far as I know. The 6th digit signifies the warranty length, this particular one being a 3, for 3 years, while 7,8,9 and 10 are the part number. The 11th digit is for the region it's sold in and the last 5 digits are simply the serial number sequence."

Knowing this, chances are good that if the last 5 digits of your serial number on your new card make a number larger than the last 5 on your old card, you have a card made later in production with the fixes.

I hope this helps.

That is not comforting at all... It means that while my replacements come from another factory, both the old and the new cards seem to be from pretty early on in the production process

tehbigbug
Well, I just put the old card in and it looks like the BIOS versions are the same with the BIOS dumps being the exact same on the byte level too. A CS rep said they were told it was a hardware issue and not firmware. 

I suspect the post earlier about hardware differences was so the tech could see if one of the power connectors had something wrong.

In any case, the Panasonic SP-caps on mine varied slightly. The old had 668QJ while the new has 66WQK. Not sure if that is pertinent, but it was a topic of discussion so I felt I should put it here anyway. Plus, the serial numbers only varied by the last 4 digits.
 
At this rate, I do not have much confidence in this new card. With the old one, it would crash on any of the last 3 driver versions from Nvidia. Someone else mentioned that theirs crashed suddenly after a month of no problems. 

EVGA, we are paying a large chunk of money for this card. If this is the quality of the component we receive, I want to know why and what has been done to fix it. I don't want reassurances, I want facts. I talked to someone through the technical support and they said the Product Team assured the customer service reps that it has been fixed but were given no details. EVGA, your customer service reps need details because your customers need details.

To the customer service reps: I understand that you can only work with the information you are given. Thanks for being awesome. I'm happy to see that all the good things said about the customer service are true, as far as I can tell.

For anyone wanting to know about EVGA serial numbers, here's what I was told by a rep:
"The first two digits correlate to the year, so 16 being for 2016, the third digit designates the product type, 0 being power supply, 1 being graphics card, 2 being motherboard, etc. Then the 4th and 5th number designates the factory is was manufactured in, as far as I know. The 6th digit signifies the warranty length, this particular one being a 3, for 3 years, while 7,8,9 and 10 are the part number. The 11th digit is for the region it's sold in and the last 5 digits are simply the serial number sequence."

Knowing this, chances are good that if the last 5 digits of your serial number on your new card make a number larger than the last 5 on your old card, you have a card made later in production with the fixes.

I hope this helps.

Thank you for the info.