Gigabyte 7970 RMA

[Fire$torm]

FYI For anyone that owns a GPU:

Other then top/upper tier models (for most vendors anyway), many of the heat generating components on a GPU's PCB (Printed Circuit Board) are not heatsinked. This is more evident on most open style designs. Their coolers are designed to just blow air over the bare part. But since this air passes through the GPU heatsink before it reaches these little guys, it's already quite warm. IMO this method of cooling circuit components is intentionally done to increase vendors profits. First it reduces parts cost of the finished product and more importantly, shortens the life of said product. Aka designed obsolescence.

Common components/chips that are left bare include VRAM, VReg, PWM Power controllers and MosFets (or other SM high current transistors). To get an idea of what these things are/look like, check out this Extreme Systems post ---> http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...ghtning-Review

There are steps anyone can take to help extend the life of their GPUs. Use IC heatsinks! For PC hardware, these heatsinks usually have names like VGA RAM Heatsinks and the like. You can find them at most of the mod etailers like FrozenCPU and Preformance-PCs. eBay has a ton of listings though many sellers are in Asia. I've also seen listing on Amazon.

Arctic Cooling made a series of small heatsink kits VR001~VR005. Unfortunately it looks like Arctic Cooling is getting out of the cooling business. Many of their GPU coolers are impossible to find of late. I purchased an Accelero Twin Turbo II last December. Almost a dozen sites had this item in stock. Now they all list it as backordered or discontinued. Same for other AC products. If you troll the Net you might get lucky.

[conf]

They accepted my 7970 though its 1 year and 11 months old.
Think its on the way to Asia and I will get it back in around 3 months.
Maybe I have also luck and they change it to a new one like 280x.