Hello,
on January 27th I bought a brand new Gigabyte R9-280XOC 3Gig Rev2.0.
I installed the card and made a fresh Windows7 install with everything else.
The system, all benchmarks (Heaven, FurMark, Combustor) and games ran fine.
Two weeks ago I started to notice a high pitched/high-frequency sound coming from my PC that got way louder under load...some kind of chirping/whining. After testing the components I determined the PSU to be the problem due to the sound clearly coming from there. An RMA has been ordered and is on its way...but Corsair told me that the PSU should still be fine to use without any limitations.
Now...a few days ago I had three or four occasions where artifacts/graphics glitches appeared in Diablo3 (flickering black squares, weird polygon shapes) after a longer time of gameplay and started to wonder where they came from. They appeared and I tried to take screens but the artifacts are not visible on any of the screens...upon reentering the game all was fine again...
Drivers are the latest BETA Drivers 14.2(1.3) but I also tested 14.1 and release 13.12.
I decided to run the Benchmarks again to see if I could determine if these artifacts/glitches could be reproduced anywhere else. As a reminder...the card is not even two months old...it runs at STOCK! 1100MHz core and 1500MHz memory...no overclock!
I ran Heaven again for several passes -> rock solid 1100MHz @67°C without any issues, no artifacts visible... (moderate chirping/coil whine from PSU)
I ran 3DMark again for several passes -> rock solid 1100MHz @65°C without any issues, no artifacts visible... (moderate chirping/coil whine from PSU)
I ran Furmark BurnIn and got this:
http://oi58.tinypic.com/10onrsg.jpgI'll explain the readings:
1.) yellow square: Furmark BurnIn starts...1100MHz and rising temperature...the FPS curve is not steady because of the rotating donut but thats okay...
Several seconds after starting Furmark the first small drop in core clock occurs...after that they get more frequent and continue to jump up/down but they constantly get lower...and with lower clock, the fps are getting lower, too.
2.) red square: I tried setting the powerlimit to +20% to see if that would keep the core clock stable...and as a result: it did...1100MHz with increased FPS as can be seen at the top. Temperature did climb 1-2°C but never reached 80°C.
3.) green square: I reset the powerlimit to +0% (standard) and as you can see the core clock immediately started to go down aswell, so did the FPS.
Here the core clock dropped to an all-time low during load of merely 601MHz (101Mhz above idle clock)...
During the whole FurMark burn-in test the chirping/coil-whine got _extremely_ loud...the loudness matching the FPS curve (higher = louder) and i started to think that it actually came from the GPU this time...but there were no artifacts visible...
I went on to test games then, to see if the clock jumping and/or artifacts would occur there, too...
-> TombRaider set to Ultimate with _everything_ set to the max...100% GPU load but rock solid 1100MHz core clock @ constant 70fps with temps not going above 63°C...so to see if temperature was the problem, I set the fans to 25% and watched the temps climb...clock stayed steady and even with 25% fan speed temps did NOT reach 80°C...(max 78°C) and no artifacts visible...
-> WoW steady cloc, no artifacts visible...
-> D3 steady clock
-> EvE-Online steady clock, no artifacts visible...
-> Skyrim steady clock, no artifacts visible...
So it seems the clock problem only occurs during Furmark/ATI-Tool/Combustor runs...everything else seems to be fine...artifacts have (until now) only appeared in D3...
So I'm asking myself the following question:
-> is the core clock behavior normal? I know that there is a thermal limitation (80°C i think) but i never ran into that...so it HAS to be the power limitation...but why only in Furmark/AtiTool/Kombustor...is the increase in power drain THAT much higher compared to normal games?
-> how likely is a defective card? I'm mostly playing D3 but have tested other games (albeit not as long as D3) as told above...
-> It seems the 7970s and many other R9-280Xs have similar problems but mainly in BF4...some say it's a driver issue...others say defective card...so I'm unsure how to proceed...
If you have taken the time to read all this, thank you...if you have any helpful information you could share, thank you even more
