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Is it possible for EVGA to do this?

EVGA has great support, why they asking you that question I don't know. Tell them I want a RMA. good luck
 
Monitors typically have a screen-on-time value in their menus, for instance, so I don't think it would be that crazy for a graphics card to have a run time value stored in its bios somewhere. Not sure why it matters though
 
They probably do have access to overall run time as a crude raw number. I don't see why it would matter though. Every time you start your PC your graphic card is essentially run. As far as more detailed info I don't think they have such information, otherwise it would clearly be braking privacy rules and protections and could amount to spying.
 
Nvidia driver Telemetry magic? Phones home every minute that you NV-based GPU is running, with embedded serial number, and that info gets passed on to your GPU IHV too, for warranty-enforcement purposes? I could see that happening.
 
mnewsham said:
Hard drives keep track of on-hours, start up count, etc.
Why wouldn't a GPU be able to?
Click to expand...
Where will they store that data? They have a small memory footprint to store their internal bios, probably extra free space for certain updates or fixes. They probably do have some basic info on the card running, but I don't think it amounts to extensive data.
 
HDDs manage room for power on hours, I don't see why graphics cards wouldn't have a small space somewhere to store some sort of data about power on hours.
 
I don't see a problem with them wanting this info. As said above HDD companies do it. EVGA might be able to store this info in a chip on the card and then use the data to analyze the average run time before failure. This is good data for them.
 
Guru said:
Where will they store that data? They have a small memory footprint to store their internal bios, probably extra free space for certain updates or fixes. They probably do have some basic info on the card running, but I don't think it amounts to extensive data.
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It takes very little space to record how many hours the card has been used. Have you seen how large video cards are compared to say, a usb flash drive? You don’t think they can find a spot for a few extra bytes of storage on that gigantic PCB? Likely integrated into the bios chip itself. That’s literally the easiest hurdle to overcome.
 
Who is telling you this? EVGA? ...and why? My understanding is that they have a three year warranty on most of their cards from the date of manufacture, which is recorded in association with the serial number. Otherwise, the card is warranted from the date of purchase for the original owner. Why the number of hours the card had been used is relevant isn’t really clear. Why EVGA would disclose their knowledge of this is even more odd, given that it presumably has no bearing on whether or not they would provide warranty service.
 
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nitromullet said:
Who is telling you this? EVGA? ...and why? My understanding is that they have a three year warranty on most of their cards from the date of manufacture, which is recorded in association with the serial number. Otherwise, the card is warranted from the date of purchase for the original owner. Why the number of hours the card had been used is relevant isn’t really clear. Why EVGA would disclose their knowledge of this is even more odd, given that it presumably has no bearing on whether or not they would provide warranty service.
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Without more info from the OP the only thing that comes to mind is EVGA attempting to state the card was used for something, possibly mining, that potentially violates the warranty. It just seems like such an unusual request.
1) As for hours on my computer doesn't get turned off any more so that would basically be 95% of the time since I bought this particular card and would show.
2) This seems uncharacteristic of EVGA, I prefer their Nvidia offerings compared to the competition and have never had a bad experience with their support.
3) Anyone ever read through their warrantly? Is there a no compute/mining clause?
4) It could be possible to save data on usage in a rather small footprint.
Really wanting to know more from the OP.
 
Just speaking from a technical perspective, the EEPROMs used on a graphics card for the firnware, COULD contain usage stats counters, but given the limited total number of re-writes of those kinds of memories, I kind of doubt it. Mostly likely, usage stats on graphics cards are thanks to NVidia's driver telemetry features that they added a while back, and they may be sharing that info with ISVs.

Edit: Just that fact that "They're watching you (compute)", is a bit unnerving though. I'm sure Windows 10 is probably worse somehow, though.
 
If EVGA are monitoring such stats, you can rest assured it's more than simply "power on hours" they can just as easily check the duty cycle of the card. We, as end users do it all the time with applications like MSI Afterburner and EVGA Precision. Even Task Manager measures it now to a certain extent.
 
It would make sense to record power-on hours to be able to refuse RMAs on cards that were abused 24x7x365 for mining. That's not normal home use for a consumer product so it would be fair to say the card becomes out of warranty after x,000 hours of use (excluding sleep states).
 
DaveSimmons said:
It would make sense to record power-on hours to be able to refuse RMAs on cards that were abused 24x7x365 for mining. That's not normal home use for a consumer product so it would be fair to say the card becomes out of warranty after x,000 hours of use (excluding sleep states).
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It's quite normal for a home computer to remain powered on actually.
 
2is said:
It's quite normal for a home computer to remain powered on actually.
Click to expand...

You're right, some people do leave their PC on 24x7 and have also disabled Windows sleep.

So if the manufacturer wanted to avoid false positives for miners they would need to track the GPU state not just the power on state, That's what I meant by "(excluding sleep states)" - blanked screen and possibly also enabled screen but low power desktop display / ~0% load.
 
DaveSimmons said:
It would make sense to record power-on hours to be able to refuse RMAs on cards that were abused 24x7x365 for mining. That's not normal home use for a consumer product so it would be fair to say the card becomes out of warranty after x,000 hours of use (excluding sleep states).
Click to expand...
There is nothing about mining that inherently voids a warranty nor should there be, unless you're also taking steps like altering the card's BIOS. Mining is a perfectly valid use case that card makers have made a mint off of the past couple years. AMD and Nvidia intentionally enable and foster OpenCL and CUDA compute capabilities on their GPUs in order to increase sales of their GPUs, and mining is one result of that.
 
Feld said:
There is nothing about mining that inherently voids a warranty nor should there be, unless you're also taking steps like altering the card's BIOS. Mining is a perfectly valid use case that card makers have made a mint off of the past couple years. AMD and Nvidia intentionally enable and foster OpenCL and CUDA compute capabilities on their GPUs in order to increase sales of their GPUs, and mining is one result of that.
Click to expand...
To say nothing of the fact that XFX RX 570 cards, are even ADVERTISED to contain a "mining BIOS" in the secondary BIOS switch position. Trust me, it works pretty well.
 
VirtualLarry said:
Nvidia driver Telemetry magic? Phones home every minute that you NV-based GPU is running, with embedded serial number, and that info gets passed on to your GPU IHV too, for warranty-enforcement purposes? I could see that happening.
Click to expand...

I was amazed and appalled when my colleague had to log in to some nvidia program to see some special settings.
But it was for some user specific stuff. Evidently, it is not needed to run just drivers and the basic configuration program.
 
That's a crazy story. WTF is evga getting happy about.. BS video cards dont give you how long you have used it for. Evga is drunk or the person you spoke with was drunk. You can RMA them anytime but first buy a temp card from Fry's or your local store.. good luck
 
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