testing a GTX 670 for defects?

[Yoorah]

Hi there!
First of all, I apologize if this is a silly question or if I'm posting in the wrong place.
I'm planning to buy an ASUS GTX 670 DC2 and the first thing I want to do when I get it is test it for artifacts/errors, similarly to how you can test your CPU/RAM with Prime95.

So, which tools would be best for this task?

I've heard that EVGA's OC Scanner works well, as you can leave it running and it will log errors it encounters (or the lack of thereof, hopefully!). But can it work with non-EVGA cards? I've also took a look at the interface and there seem to be different types of tests...

I also see people running Unigine and checking for glitches manually, although this seems less accurate and more inconvenient.

I heard Furmark is not good as running it for longer periods of time can damage the GPU.

Is there a way to test just VRAM to ensure that all chips are good? Running Unigine isn't guaranteed to test every VRAM chip and I'm not sure if OC Scanner would either.

Any tips/info would be much appreciated, thanks in advance.

 

[digitaldurandal]

Play your games on it.

 

[Yoorah]

I don't know if I have any suitable games at the moment! And I'd like something a bit more thorough. Not all games show defects when there are some.

 

[3DVagabond]

This is a good question. Do we, as consumers, have the tools to do our own QC check to verify that our cards are operating properly?

 

[Jaydip]

Yeah they are called games 3D But honestly u can try various benchmarking utilities.

 

[2is]

As others have said, play your games. You must have them or why get such a nice gaming card. You can also download some benchmarks and loop them.

 

[bmadd89]

Test with 3dmark11, furmark and unigine. Each of them max out the GPU and all seem to put a different level of stress on the cards. Let it loop for an hour or so on each benchmark at your target temp (70c for the 600 series i believe) and if it runs fine with no artifacting your good to go.

If you want really game play to test you can use Crysis 1 or the stalker benchmark to test

 

[3DVagabond]

Yeah they are called games 3D But honestly u can try various benchmarking utilities.

His point, which makes sense to me, is do we have anything (or multiple things) that is/are designed to actually test all components and software on the card to make sure it's OK. Something that does the same for a VGC as memtest does for RAM. No game that I know of or benchmark does that. You'd think the industry would come up with something?

 

[2is]

memtest only pretends to test your ram. If your ram is messed up enough to throw an error in memtest you'd have known there was a problem well before running the test. I'd say playing a game is a more reliable way to test your card than memtest is at testing memory.

 

[Jaydip]

His point, which makes sense to me, is do we have anything (or multiple things) that is/are designed to actually test all components and software on the card to make sure it's OK. Something that does the same for a VGC as memtest does for RAM. No game that I know of or benchmark does that. You'd think the industry would come up with something?

The problem is that the chip makers mostly uses automated tools for the qc purpose.Those tools are prohibitively expensive and will require special skill set to run them.So for the common folks games and the benchmarking tools are a good alternative

 

[bononos]

Hi there!
First of all, I apologize if this is a silly question or if I'm posting in the wrong place.
I'm planning to buy an ASUS GTX 670 DC2 and the first thing I want to do when I get it is test it for artifacts/errors, similarly to how you can test your CPU/RAM with Prime95.

So, which tools would be best for this task?

I've heard that EVGA's OC Scanner works well, as you can leave it running and it will log errors it encounters (or the lack of thereof, hopefully!)........

Never used the OC scanner but the occt gpu stress test has an artifact/error checking capability and it is free. Both of them are suitable for your needs. Games are quite hopeless for error checking since eyeballing is tedious and something really bad has to happen.