Maximum PC

Alright. This discussion is mainly regarding graphics cards, both the GPU and fan assembly. But i'll include CPUs as well.

So, there's no denying that every machine that undergoes use will be used up at some point. However, in the computing world, hardware longevity has to factor in very specific things that only pertain to computer systems.

I'm starting this discussion because the 4850 i bought several years ago ran into a fan problem.

For the sake of common sense, i want to ask these questions.

First off, graphics card fans. DO they HAVE to wear out? I mean... i imagine it differs for every specific model, even if it is the same card. Perhaps a PowerColor card will have a ball-bearing fan assembly as opposed to...say, an HIS card with an inferior fan?

I don't like the idea of spending $200+, or over $300 on a card... maybe even MORE, and having the fan crap out.

Ideally... these things should last forever. Could someone shed some light on this?

My second question; The card itself. I mean... I've encountered many old cards that still run to this day, and are approaching the 10 year mark in since their purchase.

Although they're cards like the Radeon 9250.. which, admittedly don't run nearly as hot as modern cards. Nor are as complex.

Still, though. The whole process of contraction and expansion come into play here, with GPUs. Cards become hot, they cool down. Overclocking is also something take into consideration, of course. But i don't see the need for speculation, there. A high overclock will always mean more demand for superior cooling. I'm applying this question to CPUs, as well. Say you've got a Phenom 965. And you just apply a light overclock to it. Errrr... 200MHz from its stock clock of 3.4GHz.

I think it's safe to say there should be nothing to worry about, as long as it's got a reliable source of power.

An extreme overclock, on the other hand. With no aftermarket cooling. That oughta do the trick of ensuring your hardware won't last a lifetime, no?

BUT. Say you have that same, extreme overclock. With the right cooling. Problem solved...? Or are temperatures not the only thing to consider. Perhaps electrical flow/voltage through the actual CPU itself makes a difference, by default. Or is temperature the only culprit?



This is also my OCD asking this question. Because.. i REALLY don't like the idea of buying a card, and having it just DIE one day. When it never ran into any extreme operating temperatures, and especially if it was never overly overclocked .

If this is your mindset, then you should ask yourself about the concept of life and death. Nothing lasts forever. Now with that in mind, let's answer those questions.


Do they have to wear out? Yes, of course. Everything wears out over time. However, certain drive mechanisms in fans wear out faster than others because the primary factor in failure is friction. It's also a question of how loud do you want the fan. For instance, sleeve bearing fans are quiet, but they have the shortest life span (my ass pull guess is 50,000 hours). Ball bearings last longer, but they are also louder.

And of course, everything ideally should last forever. But unfortunately, this isn't a perfect world.


Temperature is a big factor in the life span of a part, because it plays a big role in the ultimate reason why electronics die: electromigration. Basically the electrons are constantly wearing out the conductor, it eventually breaks like say... the Colorado River making the Grand Canyon. But IC manufacturers are well aware of this.

Mechanical stresses due to thermal expansion/contraction can happen but a properly designed circuit board will have no issues with this.


If this is your concern, you should never buy anything ever again. Everything will die one day.

Not really the answer i was looking for... First sentence, completely useless, but ok...

You're taking it literally... If i get a GTX 650... and expect it to last in a system that would be used my entire life. No, that's not what i'm talking about. Just... a normal amount of usage that a card would go through.

You use it for an entire generation, say.. 6-8 years.

And for whatever reason; doesn't matter - you put it back into a system 20 years into the future. Ideally, it should work... without any problems.

Some people on here have 7+ year old cards that still work. Nasty's got two 7800GTXs.

Also, as for the ball bearing coolers... they last practically forever, no?

Consoles work virtually forever... And by "forever" i mean; as long as you live...

I've got a Pentium 3 chip that's over 10 years old. Still working.

I'm just beginning to suspect they're being cheap with graphics card coolers.

You do realize that manufacturers are under no obligation to ensure the part "lasts forever". In the US, consumer electronics have to last, at the minimum,1 year for some percentage or so of the people who buy it (there's some minimum requirement of failure rates before a class action can occur). And hell, some QA gives it a pass sticker if it lasts more than a week, especially on electronics designed for younger children. Anything beyond that just makes it more expensive, sometimes prohibitively so.

Don't like it? Well, you can stick with old hardware if you want. Or you can just buy a expansion slot fan or an aftermarket cooler.

Fans die because they are bargain basement design motor/bearing wise and price per unit. I had one die on my 7800GTX and called the manufacture for a new one two years later. They no longer made the card or had access to replacement fans, so I took the old assembly off and screwed on a 80 mm fan on that is still working today...it also runs 4 C cooler than the factory fan.

The noise reason is a little more involved than a plain bearing verses a ball bearing. It is how close the fan is placed next to the cooling fins. The problem is when each blade passes a fin, air is compressed between the blade and fin when they are parallel, as the blade moves on it makes a popping sound as the compressed air is released...multiply that by six blades time rpm and you wind up with a high pitched whine. Ideally the blade should be placed one blade length away from the fins and the compression problem is gone, of course this is not practical in a pc due to room.

Nasty

Haha. Yeah. You told me about that. Great improvisation, Nasty.

But yeah... i mean. Ideally, I'd like to buy a card... and have it last as long as i use it. Especially if i spend over $200. Even moreso if it's over $3-400. They really need to give us quality fans.

Now correct me if i'm wrong, though. You have the same card. Is it a possibility that another carrier/manufacturer makes a better cooling system?

Also, in terms of a card actually DYING. Assuming it's been looked after. That shouldn't be a problem? Even with a steady, stable overclock with a nice case air flow.

Overclocking will kill ALL components as you are warned by the manufacture that this will happen in the manual. Components have a life-cycle of built in obsolesce so you have to buy a new thingie every so many years or they will go out of business. The car industry is a good example of that mentality, and it spills over into everything else today. Computers more so because more complex programs are written every day and the hardware is just not fast enough to efficiently run it. Games like the Crysis series would be a good example here. If everything lasted forever, we would still be back in the stone age and nothing new would be forthcoming....ever.

Nasty

I've been building my own systems since the 386SX came out. In that time I've had exactly one video card fan fail on me. That was back in the early to mid '90s. Don't remember any closer than that.
Maybe I was lucky that way in only having one fail.
The one that failed? The fan blade portion separated from the rest of the fan. It fell down into the sound card that was under it.
The video card still worked. They didn't require much power back then. A single 4 pin Molex to run it.
These days my video cards have fans only until I can slap a water block on them. I don't have to worry about them fans failing anymore.

I would argue is because a lot of so-called software engineers, don't really know how to software engineer. CryEngine 2 ran pitifully on systems of the day because it was badly coded. Crysis 3 runs a whole lot better because they must've taken the time to refactor a lot of the code for efficiency, to run on a hardware over 5-6 years old at the time of release.

It's easy to write sloppy code, especially one that just eats resources, when you have the mindset of "I have unlimited resources, why the hell should I care about using a 32-bit value when a 64-bit one works just fine?" But try working on a hand grenade simulator with 8KB of ROM space and 512 bytes of RAM.

And I would argue against the car thing, because I have a 11 year old Honda and the worst that's happened to it is the battery blowing out a cell. I'd say it's more like people can't be half-assed to do regular maintenance or they just routinely wreck their cars.

I actually talked to a person who's son worked in the car industry. He quit because he was told to design the equipment he worked on to last 50,000 miles and no more. He had to actually build hardware to prove it would die when he said it would. As a result of that mindset he quit the car industry and went into aircraft design. There they told him if he could design it to last forever to do it. A real good example of that mindset is the B52. In front of one plane the air-force took a picture of grand father, father and son that flew the very same aircraft...now that is longevity!

Japan still has honor when building equipment of all types, where the US don't....thank you Corporate America! BAH HUMBUG!

Nasty

PS, ya gotta read this, this proves you can make things to last many lifetimes:

http://KILLMEPLEASE.com/focus/f-news/592400/posts

The only piece on the car I've seen this happen on, because it was so heavily advertised, is shocks. And what part of the car industry? The OEM? Because if it's an aftermarket party, I'm not buying it. After all, California has mandated that all hybrids have at least a 100,000 mile warranty on the battery. Given an average annual millage is around 12K, that's 8 years and some change.

In any case, as a case in point of "why the hell hasn't this died yet?", I found that my laptop from 2007, a Dell Inspiron 1520, still works. Which is amazing considering it's in a subtropical environment (and the place is not five minutes from the beach, and the windows are open frequently) and it has a 8600M GT, which is supposed have a soldering defect and die sooner than it's supposed to.

On an aside, for some parts, it doesn't really make sense for the company to have say, a lifetime warranty. I noticed EVGA has killed life-time warranties on their parts. As much as I want to say "what the hell?"... Well, what if my GTX 560 Ti dies in 3 years? They've stopped making them and they've probably sold the last of their stock. Very good chance I can't get a replacement. And legally that warranty is only good for the product I purchased so...

Very good chance I can't get a replacement. And legally that warranty is only good for the product I purchased so...[quote][/quote]

The engineer worked on durable parts on the cars, any part they tossed his way he had to set the break point at 50,000 miles. Batteries may be warrantied for 8 years or 100,000 miles but the rest of the car is not, most warranties read 3 years or 36 thousand miles.

Just google a few car manufactures and see.

Nasty

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12040753/ns/business-consumer_news/t/whats-life-expectancy-my-car/

I'll leave it at that. It depends on a lot of factors and honestly, I find it hard to believe in such a thing as "built in obsolesce" for anything. The only such case I'm aware of is Capcom's suicide battery on their arcade machines, but that wasn't so much "built in obsolesce" than "you're our bitches now"

I'm late on my reply (very late) but - um... Yeah.

I've been eyeing the Z77 MPower from MSI, and i absolutely love that board.

Annoying as it is... on the box, it says: 40-year life span for office use. 8 year life span for gaming...

That's ridiculous... that's just over a generation of games. And today's systems have plenty of jam in them that'll last a long, long time.

At least if they said "8 year life span if you're a neglector who just lets their system sit without absolutely ANY maintanence". Sure... i'd say that's pretty impressive. But if you take the time to dust the thing out, and put SOME effort into maintanence... why wouldn't it last and become "ancient"?

8 years is ridiculous. Game consoles last longer than that. And that's a big no-no for the PC platform in terms of gaming. And, in general.

Plus, boards like that have solid caps. Which i hear are far superior than traditional-style caps on boards.


Can we just safely say that a system can become very old, ancient, however you want to refer to its old age - by simply carrying out regular maintanence, and not carrying out neglect?

I just don't like the idea of getting, say, that Z77 MSI board and having it fail on me right at the 8 year mark.

It'd be disappointing with a GAME CONSOLE. Nevermind a PC.

Oh, and also... i really don't want to bring back the car talk. But Nasty was right. They DO make SOME parts that purposefully wear out at a certain time.

Cars like Toyotas and Honda last long because of simplicity of engineering and design.

The more complicated and over-engineered a car, the less reliable it generally will be.

Perfect example : BMW engines.

Disastrous... and over-complicated. Not to mention very low tolerance for modification... But, yeah. We can't get too carried away with car talk. I just had to say that. I'm a car guy, so i couldn't resist.

This isn't a "we all die at some point" discussion. I paid premium for a card and the fans simply suck balls and die too quickly.

eVGA will cover them, but the entire card needs RMA'd when the card isn't faulty. You get back the same card, the same fans, and those too will fail. This is an ongoing ordeal with them on an SC 560Ti, while other brands of that same genre are doing fine. Asus 660Ti? New, but lived longer than that crap eVGA 560Ti. I started a post on this a while ago and am on my THIRD eVGA 560Ti SC due to nothing else than shit sleeved fans.

I have many old cards running and the fans are still working just fine. Some companies use very shitty fans and leave us in the dark about them. That's the point. I paid a premium and decent fans should be assumed. I got a great card up until the shitty fans failed...3 times! Do you think the warranty department is looking at this or just keep replacing them?

Asus, XFX, VisionTek, Sapphire...that's the ones I see with fans that work. eVGA, MSI...work on it. Your card is not borked, your cheap fans are. 3rd eVGA 560Ti SC...it just sits here on the desk pondering what to do with it now. I'm actually just thinking about beating it with a hammer and be done with it. It's fans are dead too, they don't fix the problem, and I'm not spending $80-140 to put an external cooler on it myself.

Things just don't die. Some things are pure shit when it comes to hardware. A warranty is pure shit if you get shit in return as well. Fix it!

I have two XFX 7800GTX video cards running in this rig. One of the fans failed. I called XFX and told them my problem. They didn't have any replacement fans for it because it is so old. So I removed the whole fan assembly and left the heat sink in place. I took a 80 mm fan, which had the same foot print as the heat sink and screwed it in place using 4 sheet metal screws. The mounting holes in the fan lined up with the slots between the fins and the screws bit into the sides of the fins and held it secure to this day. All I had to do was solder the old connector to the fan wires and plug it in. The assembly ran 4 C cooler than the old fan assembly! So you can save things with a little effort. It was a cheap fix as I had the fan collecting dust on the self downstairs in the cellar.

Nasty

I'm surprised nobody's ever though to buy one of these: http://www.vantecusa.com/en/product/view_detail/101.

Just take off the heatsink shroud and have a it. Or make a cardboard vent.

THIS!

THANK YOU!

I'd hate to have to repeat what you just said, but, that basically summarizes what i'm saying here. With graphics cards. And with hardware, in general.

Yes, things wear over time. But, things like graphics cards, processors, and motherboards should last a lifetime.

It makes absolutely no sense to have a $300+ card (or even MORE THAN THAT) have a fan failure. MSI is apparently leading in terms of cooling assembly, because of their exclusive TwinFrozr design.

I still have a Pentium 3 system lying around. Processor still works... so does the whoopty-ass motherboard. And everything else in the system.

You see, a HARD DRIVE is a perfect example of something that can be seen in that light. Something that wears out, and you simply don't complain. It's a piece of hardware that has one main moving part. It's expendable, at the end of the day. But even then.... something like a Velociraptor LASTS. It damn well better.

I hate to be the jackass again, but I don't think price should automatically count when "paying a premium" when you have set price points for a certain part. Example: say we have graphics card X where the MSRP is $300 for the reference model. If Company A is selling it for $260 right off, I'd probably be weary of that, because where are they cutting the corners? I'd expect that to poop out prematurely. If Company B is selling it for $350, then it better last until I'm done with it.

But if it's just the fan... I'm sort of perplexed anyway about what's to complain about. Sure it sucks because you have to find something else to replace it with. But I put up something that costs $20 that along with some elbow grease, will fix the problem. The graphics card isn't dead, and you don't need to replace the entire thing because the fan died. If something that was actually vital to making the video card work (i.e., if it's missing, it won't work period) died, then I could understand.

I guess my tolerance to this sort of thing is on an extreme end. At best/worst all I'll do is give the company the finger and tell people to stay away from it.

I can go along with that, but only to a point. It's viable that a card that is normally $300 be sold for $275 and the fans are fine. It's also viable to say a $350 version of that same card linage has fans that shit the bed in 3 months.

I'll give my EVGA GTX560Ti SC as an example. The fans die, fine. I think like you and I'll just replace them for $18 or whatever. You can't. I have not found a single fan that has the mounts or anything I can work with that I can replace them with even with a LOT of elbow grease. The "y" mount on these (and many other brands now) are just non-typical. I've got the right mm fan, the mounts just can't work at all. I now have $18 in fans I don't think I can ever use and in a drawer.

I mentioned Asus as being good, but I just lost one of two fans on one as well lately. It's another sleeved fan you can't get to the bearing just like the EVGA I'm having trouble with. These are not cheap cards, but they use cheap fans that WILL fail. I go to RMA the card and eVGA is fine with it, but ASUS says I modified it and is void. Yeah, I tried to oil your piece of crap fans...that's not modification.

It happens far too much dude. A fine piece of silicon fails because of a shit fan that never should have been used in the first place. And I don't buy the hype over fancy cooling names. Asus has that and it's weak link is the fan. eVGA loves their SC models, but the weak link is the fan. MSI...not sure. Is it ball bearing or double ball bearing? <- that matters. I'd pay the $15 more for a video card w/ double ball bearing fans instead of the stupid OEM overclock and shit fans. Hell, strike a deal with Panasonic or something...but you can put durable fans on these cards for sure.

Alas, this is the world of testing as well. They test cooling and dB levels and give a review in a few days, but they don't have the card long enough to vote it down when the simple fans shit the bed in a few months.

I haven't had a single recent card where the fans were even decent. The Alpha fans on my 1999 P3 are still spinning. All of my PanaFlo are still spinning. I forget the call letters of all the old video cards out there that the fans are still spinning. My $300+ video cards of late? Ron White: "Just can't make it on this equipment". It's just idiotic to have to RMA a working card for shitty fans. It's more idiotic to request an RMA, be denied, and have to pay more for fans or an aftermarket cooler when THEY should have done up front and out of the box.

It happens. Not many have a GTX560Ti just laying around with a beer on it because no one cares about it; let alone a 660Ti sitting in packing peanuts because it had shitty fans too. Not with all the older stuff still able to run now and run a few more years. The economy is not an excuse...put a fan on these things or don't.