Video Cards - Mfr. can detect if it was overclocked?

[tracerbullet]

I have an older GF4ti4200 that will be going to PNY this week, it seems to have randomly died. (This post is not to ask why). I was told by e-mail the instructions for sending it back, and included with that was the message "overclocked cards will not be covered under warranty", and a note that they could tell if a card had been overclocked. Luckily for me it was from my home-theater-pc and actually never has been.

Forgive me if this isn't highly technical, but it didn't seem to fit anywhere else. I'm wondering - is that possible? I guess anything is possible, but how would they know? Something embedded in the card, reading... something? Anyone familiar with the design of video cards, or is it more simple than that?

 

[Mingon]

Supposedly AMD has tester units that can detect if cpu's have been overclocked as well. I dont buy it personally.

 

[Mark R]

They could use the flash memory chip on the card used for the video BIOS. Just have a space which stores the highest clock speed ever reached by the card. If you overclock the card, then the GPU just reprograms that bit of flash with the higher number.

The manufacturer drops the card into a tester which reads the flash - the card doesn't even have to work, just the flash - and the max clock speed ever used is displayed.

I don't know if this is how it is done, if it is done at all, but it's how I would do it. But then, I would also arrange for the card to display a big 'warranty void' message at boot-up if it had ever been overclocked.

 

[Pudgygiant]

I doubt they can, as nothing is physically being changed on the card. It's probably just legal crap.

Now if overclocking killed the card I have no doubt they could look for the frequent signs associated with that, like raised traces and whatnot.

 

[IamElectro]

Originally posted by: Mark R
They could use the flash memory chip on the card used for the video BIOS. Just have a space which stores the highest clock speed ever reached by the card. If you overclock the card, then the GPU just reprograms that bit of flash with the higher number.

The manufacturer drops the card into a tester which reads the flash - the card doesn't even have to work, just the flash - and the max clock speed ever used is displayed.

I don't know if this is how it is done, if it is done at all, but it's how I would do it. But then, I would also arrange for the card to display a big 'warranty void' message at boot-up if it had ever been overclocked.

I would agree on this idea, But doubt that they would go through the expense of doing so. It is most likely a scare tactic.