What killed my MSI 280x?

[mrsocksman]

So I bought a card used for mining on eBay and it's broken. Yeah yeah yeah there were bound to be problems but it's still under warranty so whatever; it was almost half the price of a new one. It's getting RMA'd so I'm safe.

The original owner of the card said he tested all of the batch of cards he was selling and they worked fine. When I got mine and installed it it displayed graphics fine, got high fps in the games I tested. No problems when just in windows(idling at 35C) but in 3d applications after the card went up to 99% usage the temperatures would rise to 80C instantly and crash the card. This happened every time I tested and the last time the card made a high pitched sound like a really fast whirring sound and the screen went gray with vertical lines every few mm. After that the card would not display anything, no POST, no beeps. Power is on though, lights light up, fans spin.

As of now I've put my old card back into my system and everything runs perfectly. I'm just curious as to what on Earth happened.

[hammerslap1]

I really dont want to state the obvious but its gotta be the heat

[Briggsy]

I had a 7950 a while back that I pushed too far on the memory, and ended up getting the vertical lines of death. It is now a trophy on my shelf, and a reminder not to push elpida memory too far.

[mrsocksman]

I really dont want to state the obvious but its gotta be the heat

I see that but I was thinking of possible underlying causes, not the direct cause. Could there be anything system specific that would cause it to overheat in my system and not the original owner's? Maybe a motherboard or PSU problem? Or should I just label it an anomaly and move on?

I'll know for sure when I get my replacement card in a few days though.

[tobben]

I really dont want to state the obvious but its gotta be the heat

80 degrees Celsius will not kill a gpu like that, especially not abruptly like that unless he literally fried the pcb or something, let's just hope it isn't a psu issue to the next card will die aswell..

[mrsocksman]

I had a 7950 a while back that I pushed too far on the memory, and ended up getting the vertical lines of death. It is now a trophy on my shelf, and a reminder not to push elpida memory too far.

I heard of vram overheating with MSI 280x's in particular. Maybe I had one of those cards and this other guy had liquid nitrogen cooling.

[MonkeyFace]

This happened every time I tested and the last time the card made a high pitched sound like a really fast whirring sound and the screen went gray with vertical lines every few mm. After that the card would not display anything, no POST, no beeps. Power is on though, lights light up, fans spin.

As of now I've put my old card back into my system and everything runs perfectly. I'm just curious as to what on Earth happened.

 

The high pitched sound is probably a coil whine. It gets worse with increased voltage. It's possible that the voltage setting was really high and killed your VRM 1.  

[hammerslap1]

80 degrees Celsius will not kill a gpu like that, especially not abruptly like that unless he literally fried the pcb or something, let's just hope it isn't a psu issue to the next card will die aswell..

right but that is just what it said last before seizing. when it ramped up to 99% usage in an instant and fried sounds like the exact description of a burnout. as far as a specific reason i can think of a few things.... 1 its a used board you planned on using for mining, probably what the original owner was using it for, you may have gotten it when it was already at it end of life. 2 if the guy had it water cooled and decided to put the air cooling back on to sell it and may have not applied thermal material properly or maybe he pried on something wrong causing problems. 3 maybe you just had really bad luck but i would say you got wrecked by the EBAY monster and your lucky its still in warranty so you get a replacement

[Face2Face]

I had a 7950 a while back that I pushed too far on the memory, and ended up getting the vertical lines of death. It is now a trophy on my shelf, and a reminder not to push elpida memory too far.

Overlcocking your memory without increasing the voltage is not likely to damage the memory. Could be because your memory was defective in the first place? What model?

[Face2Face]

The high pitched sound is probably a coil whine. It gets worse with increased voltage. It's possible that the voltage setting was really high and killed your VRM 1.  

Unless the OP increased the voltage himself, I find that to unlikely. There are many reasons the card could have failed, but without question it had something to do with the fact it was used for mining. Running a videocard 24/7 @ 99% usage will vastly shorting the card's lifespan. If the original owner had also overclocked the card with increased GPU voltage and let the card get in the 85c+ range then it's a recipe for failure. Great thing about MSI's warranty is that it's serial based and last for 3 years. 

[MC_loud]

If he was selling a batch of cards like you said, he probably used them for mining. Should have made sure he didn't flash the bios to a high OC which may have been the cause