Problems with 550ti

EmanuelNorberg · June 9, 2014

My brother's 550ti started acting weird some time ago.
It's a 550ti from asus (non-dc).
Under the first 10 months that he had it, it ran at 70-80C while gaming, so it was pretty hot.
One day when booting, it wouldn't display Aero in Windows 7, so i reinstalled the drivers, it worked for a couple of weeks until it happened again.
I disabled it in device manager, uninstalled GPU-tweak, and then installed the latest drivers, and it worked for a week.
After that it stopped installing the drivers, it just spat it out, and Aero was still unable to run.
In the device manager it said that no drivers were intstalled, and the regular yellow error triangle was there.
It did not run games at all, it ran at a locked 1600 x 1200 instead of 1920 x 1080 in the desktop.
Video playback on YouTube and VLC had tearing and low framerate.

Today i installed the GPU in a different system, same thing, it just doesn't take the drivers.
So the last thing i thought i would do before drawing the conclusion that it's defective was to flash the BIOS of the GPU.
I downloaded the two different updaters from Asus, being careful to choose the correct OS and the non-dc version of the card, I downloaded two in case one didn't work.
The update window ran, stating that the screen would flicker and such, then it closed and an error message said something among the lines of "Your graphics card does not match this version of the VBIOS".

Is there anything else i can try before i just call it defective and buy a new one?
It seems wierd to me if it's a hardware promblem instead of software, since I have not experienced any kinds of artifacts or color glitches at all, exept for tearing and low framerate while whatching videos.

Any help is greatly appreciated.