My 6950 is TOAST! :( (Updated with XFX response)

[tincart]

To the issue of warranty fraud: It raises prices for everyone else. It should never be a consideration.

 

[Makaveli]

Return fraud is not cool.

Good on Thilan for keeping the card for his own mess up.

^^^ This

When people screw up their cards and RMA they bring up the cost for everyone else.

+1 to OP for taking the hit on this.

People that mod cards mess them up and RMA them are scumbags!

 

[thilanliyan]

That sucks. Did you offer to pay for the repair and XFX still refused? If that is the case I'm going to reconsider XFX for my next card.

I'd be heartbroken to see my new card go out like that

Yeah I asked if they would repair it for a fee but they said no. The guy said it's not economical for them to do that.

 

[yottabit]

Yeah I asked if they would repair it for a fee but they said no. The guy said it's not economical for them to do that.

That's silly.. I bet they don't even have a repair department then. I mean, how expensive does the card need to be before it's economical to repair it? I wonder if they would have said the same thing were it a 6990. Haha

Props on trying though, I'm sure there is someone here who would pay decent money for it

 

[sxr7171]

I bet the cost to have a technician fix the card would be more than replacing the card. So even if they offered you a fix for cost it would likely price out more than the card itself. The decent thing for a manufacturer to do in this situation is to offer you a card at cost after verifying that your card is indeed broken. A flat fee would work. Just like Apple, Shure and others would do.

XFX has pretty decent reputation and if they want to keep it that way they should start offering flat fee "repairs".

 

[Castiel]

That's a lot of balls. Where did he get them all?

Now that I know this I am keeping my balls far, far away from him.

I bought mine from walmart

 

[3DVagabond]

Yeah I asked if they would repair it for a fee but they said no. The guy said it's not economical for them to do that.

I don't know where you live, but that's probably against consumer laws. Imagine if car companies only repaired under warranty and made you buy a new car if the repair wasn't covered.

 

[Xpage]

what GPU cooler did you use? I am debating which one to use on a 6950 I ordered?

 

[badb0y]

what GPU cooler did you use? I am debating which one to use on a 6950 I ordered?

Thermalright Shaman

 

[BladeVenom]

nevermind

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

What car companies will fix your car for free if you wreck it?

I think he was referring to people who pay for repairs outside of warranty, but what if the car company refused to even do it for a fee and tried to make you buy a new car?

 

[thilanliyan]

what GPU cooler did you use? I am debating which one to use on a 6950 I ordered?

I'm using an ancient DangerDen Maze4 Acetal GPU block cooler.

 

[BladeVenom]

I think he was referring to people who pay for repairs outside of warranty, but what if the car company refused to even do it for a fee and tried to make you buy a new car?

Your right. He said fee not free? It was too early in the morning for me.

 

[drizek]

I think he was referring to people who pay for repairs outside of warranty, but what if the car company refused to even do it for a fee and tried to make you buy a new car?

THey do it all the time. When your car gets "totaled" they will refuse to repair it.

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

THey do it all the time. When your car gets "totaled" they will refuse to repair it.

Are you talking about the insurance, or the dealer? Surely a dealer will repair if you pay?? Either way, it's a bad comparison because even if the dealer won't fix it there are plenty of other shops that will. Unlike video cards where there aren't a lot of repair places with the expertise to do it.

 

[bryanW1995]

I bet the cost to have a technician fix the card would be more than replacing the card. So even if they offered you a fix for cost it would likely price out more than the card itself. The decent thing for a manufacturer to do in this situation is to offer you a card at cost after verifying that your card is indeed broken. A flat fee would work. Just like Apple, Shure and others would do.

XFX has pretty decent reputation and if they want to keep it that way they should start offering flat fee "repairs".

Does anybody else offer flat fee repairs on video cards? This is just a bad deal all around, but trashing xfx isn't the right answer here.

 

[bryanW1995]

I don't know where you live, but that's probably against consumer laws. Imagine if car companies only repaired under warranty and made you buy a new car if the repair wasn't covered.

are you serious??? Car companies don't have to fix anybody's car for any reason if we don't feel like it, even if the car is under warranty. There are no consumer laws that force a company to fix a broken item. There are plenty of economic incentives in most industries, but honestly I've never heard of any gpu vendor partner (or amd/nvidia/etc) fixing a physically damaged video card. Maybe Michael Westin could do it though...

 

[BoomerD]

Not repairing video cards is pretty common. I had a PNY 6800GT go bad a few years ago and PNY also said they couldn't offer repairs for the card.

Keep in mind folks, the factories are in China. Most of the companies only have sales offices and warehousing here...and repairing a video card COULD be considerably expensive by the time you pay a tech to troubleshoot the entire card to see what may be bad. In the OP's case, it's probably pretty straight-forward...damaged chip, but with the millions of transistors on cards nowadays, trying to find exactly what's bad could take hours or even days...
MOST electronic components no longer have serviceable circuit boards...something gets toasted...replace the entire circuit board, not just a transistor or relay.

Comparing it to an automobile is silly. An auto is a collection of thousands of individual replaceable components. If your engine goes bad...it MIGHT be repairable...or not, depending on what failed and how much damage was caused, but if the circuit board for your dashboard goes out...they usually know exactly what failed...and replace that circuit board...the entire thing, not just some tiny electronic component.

 

[bryanW1995]

and going further down that path, auto dealers and manufacturers spend a LOT of money training each year, mostly to deal with new technology in the newest vehicles. my dealership spent over $50k last year just on service training for example. Those board partners are just so specialized these days that it isn't cost-effective to maintain a service division.

One other idea if you know anybody who works for a board partner is to see if they'll take it to one of the engineers to work on the card as a side job. just from reading your posts here I can't imagine that it would take a qualified technician more than a few minutes to find out if it was fixable or not, and if so how much it would cost. In fact, you might check with ryan smith, I'd bet that he knows a few people who might be able to point you in the right direction.

 

[zod96]

I'm lucky. I work in a big electronic company where we have solders and tons of parts for stuff like video cards. I remember screwing up a third part cooler install on my 4890, I broke a capacitor on the board. Lucky I brought it to work, looked up the cap in our system and we had it, gave it to one of our soldering ladies and they took the old one off and re soldered the new one and all was well

 

[Xpage]

thanks for the replies. It seems I could use my current chipset cooler mcw30 on the gpu but i'll probably bite for a universal water block, maybe the mcw80, as I saw it on sale at a site for $45, just not sure if it will fit a 6900 series, seems the mcw60 will fit on it, so I would assume the mcw80 would since it should be backwards compatible. Anybody using this block at all?

 

[littlezipp]

thanks for the replies. It seems I could use my current chipset cooler mcw30 on the gpu but i'll probably bite for a universal water block, maybe the mcw80, as I saw it on sale at a site for $45, just not sure if it will fit a 6900 series, seems the mcw60 will fit on it, so I would assume the mcw80 would since it should be backwards compatible. Anybody using this block at all?

Running 2 MCW80's on my crossfire 6950's right now.

Tip - Use the included Geforce 200 kit screws to fasten the backplate back on (backplate screws into oem cooler and you have to remove to install the MCW80)

 

[Xpage]

Running 2 MCW80's on my crossfire 6950's right now.

Tip - Use the included Geforce 200 kit screws to fasten the backplate back on (backplate screws into oem cooler and you have to remove to install the MCW80)

Awesome, thanks for letting me know. I also got some miniblocks for the ram and such, never played with those before, i should be alot of fun. I'll post pics in a thread when I am done sometime this week or weekend when everything arrives

 

[Martimus]

That's silly.. I bet they don't even have a repair department then. I mean, how expensive does the card need to be before it's economical to repair it? I wonder if they would have said the same thing were it a 6990. Haha

Props on trying though, I'm sure there is someone here who would pay decent money for it

If it were a 6970, then I would have bought it from him and fixed it for myself. As it is, I am not interested in a 6950. I could maybe fix the card for him though, although I would need to get a quote to see how much those chips are. I don't even know if I can get one by itself, I may have to buy it in a much larger lot. If that is the case, then I wouldn't do it.