Alas, poor 280X, I knew him well...

[Fardringle]

RIP my Gigabyte R9 280X.

It served very well getting me to the 50M milestone in MilkyWay doing about 450K per day, and I was about to retire it from my home PC since having it and the GTX 1060 both in there was producing way too much heat and using too much electricity. Then I read a note saying the 280X is pretty good at Einstein as well so I fired it up early this week to get Einstein to 50M as well. After a couple of days running to get the credits going (waiting for wingmen for validation) it was looking like the 280X would average close to 700K per day, which is pretty amazing for an 8 year old card!

Sadly, I came home from work yesterday to find my PC completely crashed, and the monitors connected to the 280X blacked out completely. I rebooted with the GTX back in the machine and connected to one monitor and the PC came up with everything on the one monitor attached to the 1060, and the Windows device manager says that the 280X doesn't even exist any more. Removing and reseating everything didn't make any difference, so it looks like the 280X finally crunched its last work unit.

 

[Icecold]

You could try baking it in an oven.

 

[Fardringle]

I have the GTX 1060 running SRBase for the FB sprint for now. I might try baking the 280X after that, since I don't have another computer that it will fit in for testing.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You could try baking it in an oven.

or just taking it out to the range, if you know what I mean...

 

[Assimilator1]

Baking 1st, range if that doesn't work 2nd
Actually, a 3rd option, ebay it for spares or repairs, maybe a miner whose good with electronics could fix or use it?? (seeing as it's a good DP GPU).

Fingers crossed, for baking, otherwise RIP old faithful 280X.

 

[Fardringle]

I decided that I didn't want to try cooking the graphics card in my gas oven, so I finally got around to melting it with a high temp heat gun at work yesterday. I put it in a spare test system at work and it actually booted all the way into Windows and passed a couple of quick diagnostic tests. I waited until the start of the PrimeGrid City Run so I could dump the tasks that my GTX 1060 had been working on, and just pulled the 1060 out of my main home PC and installed the 280X in its place. It has been running at 100% for about an hour so far, doing 2 Einstein tasks at a time and seems to be working OK so far.

The AC in my house is misbehaving right now so it's pretty warm inside until I can get it fixed tomorrow, and the 280X is still only just barely peaking over 80C under full load and mostly staying closer to 76C. I'm taking that as a good sign and hopefully it will play nice for a long time to get me some stats milestones in Einstein! And if not for a long time, then at least long enough to make it to the end of the Pentathlon.

 

[Assimilator1]

Nice! , hope the recovery is long term!

 

[Fardringle]

Nice! , hope the recovery is long term!

Me too. I had only just learned that it does really well on the Einstein project a few days before it stopped working, so I'm happy to have it back in service, even if it doesn't last. But having it stay working long term would definitely be preferable!

 

[Fardringle]

Apparently I'm not a very good necromancer. While I did manage to bring the dead back to life, it only lasted for about 12 hours, and the dearly departed has been returned to its grave.

Oh well, it was a fun experiment, anyway, and was interesting to see that it does have the potential to actually work some of the time.

 

[Assimilator1]

RIP

 

[Icecold]

Apparently I'm not a very good necromancer. While I did manage to bring the dead back to life, it only lasted for about 12 hours, and the dearly departed has been returned to its grave.

Oh well, it was a fun experiment, anyway, and was interesting to see that it does have the potential to actually work some of the time.

Yeah, the 'video card in the oven' trick has a way higher success rate than the 'dead hard drive in the freezer to recover data' trick.

 

[Hans Gruber]

I have my 7950 still running today in an old i5 machine. I got it in August 2013. The fans still work, it still OC's and has been completely trouble free. 3GB of ram back then was ahead of its time. The 280X is the turbo charged version = to the 7970. of the rebranded card if memory serves me correct.

Nothing says I will miss you old friend like a hammer through the heatsink.

 

[Fardringle]

Yeah, the 'video card in the oven' trick has a way higher success rate than the 'dead hard drive in the freezer to recover data' trick.

I have successfully used the frozen hard drive trick as well. Didn't have much luck freezing a drive and taking it out and putting it back in a computer. But hooking up drives to a USB/SATA adapter and then sticking the drive in the freezer with the cable running out and connected to a laptop does actually work some of the time since it keeps the drive cold.

As long as the drive is only mostly dead and not all dead. "There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do."

And in the case of hard drives, that 'one thing' for me frequently involves opening the case and pulling out the rare earth magnets.

 

[Icecold]

I've tried the hard drive trick at least a dozen times and never had any success, but those were with drives that were most likely totally dead.

 

[Endgame124]

I've tried the hard drive trick at least a dozen times and never had any success, but those were with drives that were most likely totally dead.

I’ve had some luck. Most recently Pulled data off a 36gb raptor with the freezer trick (ie, it’s been a while since I’ve had to try).

Some drives of note: IBM Death… errr Deskstars with the dreaded click of death were not recoverable. when those puppies were clicking im pretty sure it was the head slamming against the platter.

Sea gate barracudas way back (early 2k) would pickup a whine and would work until you turned off the PC. Once they cooled down they seemingly seize up - however, you could toss those in an oven and as long as you powered them up still warm they would work until they cooled off again.

 

[Skillz]

I have my 7950 still running today in an old i5 machine. I got it in August 2013. The fans still work, it still OC's and has been completely trouble free. 3GB of ram back then was ahead of its time. The 280X is the turbo charged version = to the 7970. of the rebranded card if memory serves me correct.

Nothing says I will miss you old friend like a hammer through the heatsink.

You running that i5 and 7950 in the Pentathlon for us?

 

[Hans Gruber]

You running that i5 and 7950 in the Pentathlon for us?

The sad thing about that i5 and 7950. I turned the 3570K down from 4.5ghz to 4.3ghz over a year ago. My GTX 970 is going to be retired and that card was what replaced my 7950 that still works like brand new. I have zip lock bags sealed with all my old graphics cards down in the garage. I have all the ATI cards back to the 9700pro. I have the original Geforce 256 somewhere. That died on me. A Ti4200 that had capacitors leak on me. I have never had any other cards fail on me but Nvidia. The 970 is dying a slow death. It won't pass gaming benchmarks anymore. But it works for gaming.

I bought a new Dell for $650 with a SFF 1660 Super 6GB of DDR6 memory coming in the next few weeks. The 1660 Super is the hold over card until the prices for GPU's drops or the next generation stuff comes out. I will give it a year, maybe a little longer.

 

[Shmee]

So sad. Still, those Tahiti cards last a long time, and are still capable today. Same with Hawaii. I have a Sapphire 290 Tri X that still works, minus a dead fan I think. I am currently cleaning it up to sell.

 

[Icecold]

The 7950/7970/280x was one of the best cards ever released. I have a 7950 I bought years ago used for like $75(probably in this forum's FS/T subforum) that is still a decent GPU for how old it is. Hawaii and Fiji have held up really well over time too.

All joking aside on the pentathlon though, those older AMD cards actually run the next Pentathlon project Einstein@home really well, so it's nice to see the older AMD cards still be competitive in stuff. What better way to test it to sell than run some computing on it for a week? (this is the DC subforum so I figure recruiting for DC challenges is fair game ) The Pentathlon is the biggest DC competition of the year.