Maximum PC

The 1 st Gigabyte GTX 560 Ti has made 2 trips back to the repair center - they only change one fan at a time and wait for the other one to fail. This certainly helps UPS

My 2nd Gigabyte GTX 560 Ti is down due to a fan problem. The fan seems to have stopped turning - only the rear one!
I have asked that they replace both

Now on to my next card...

My MSI GTX 570 is down with another fan that has forgotten how to rotate - back it went!
I am hoping MSI is a little smarter than Gigabyte and changes both fans...

We shall see..

Anyone else having this much hardware fun

Starting a month ago, my sound card (Diamond Xtreme 5.1) would just suddenly vanish at random (anywhere from once a week to twice each day) from Device Manager in Win 7 Pro or XP Home SP3. Booting into the other OS showed it missing from there also. so it affected both OSes. Detecting the card when rebooting or refreshing Device Manager would display either "C-Media PCI Audio Device" or "Multimedia Audio Controller", and manually installing the drivers would just say that the install failed and to install a card. The only way to get it to work properly was to put the card in the other slot, and/or keep rebooting until it was identified properly and allowed the drivers to be (re)installed.

I bought another card from Amazon and installed it 6 days ago. So far, so good. I'm just waiting for the sound to quit again, which will then mean that the 18-month old Asrock mobo's PCI slots or controller is dying.

You should call this hardware gripes.

I installed the old memory that I was using when I originally built my PC and found that at least one of the sticks may be bad. I had swapped that memory with some other memory in the mean time. I have now figured that the old memory may have been limiting my OC, keeping my computer from running smoothly, and causing things to be just not quite right when it was installed. It kinda sucks that the old memory wasn't good because that was when memory was super expensive a few years ago ($120 for 3x 2GB sticks for the cheap stuff, iirc). It's almost not really even worth testing to figure out which stick is bad. Ooh, well. At least I have the better, newer memory in there. I originally bought the new stuff to use in a BIGADV build that I was planning, but has not yet come to fruition and my likely not come to fruition.

I have 13 more sticks of this awesome stuff, so if anyone is looking for 2 GB sticks of memory, let me know. It's low profile, low voltage memory that is very highly OC-able (Samsung 30nm stuff that some people have easily gotten to 2100+ MHz though it's 'rated' at 1600 MHz).

Fixed it!

UPS man dropped off 2 Asus GTX 660 Ti Video Cards today.

Cards are in and Folding!

No Gripes yet!

Great fix!

All the cards I folded with heavily have had a shortened lifespan. Except one major OC mistake they still have lasted for years, but have one by one crapped out.

Maybe the newer hardware and clients have taken care of that, but the common symptom before dying was much higher fan speed and noise, then the other death signs. Were different cards, and brands, all Nvidia though. Yes I kept them clean of dust, but different cards, different machines, same issues a while after I took them out of folding. Way out of warranty as well.

Glad you are back up, nice hardware.