Seller’s |Note “graphics card loads windows drivers ok and does not crash, if you try to overclock this graphics card it will crash and come up with a watman error. Card run’s fine if you use defaults setting, but this will give a black screen on prolonged gaming on a hot day in the summer apart from that the graphics card is in good physical condition with it’s original box with accessories shown in photo’s.”
Summary
- Visual inspection is superb, like new, boxed, seems really nice looking card!
- Resistances seem OK: Vcore ~1 Ohm, Vmem 33.1 Ohm
- Thermal paste (runny looking) and contact area with heatsink looked a bit poor (not a flat contact point). Will clean that up and repaste.
- Possibly the way the heatsink and paste were and the fault description is consistent with being prone to thermal overload?
- On test, even after a clean and repaste, I am not happy with the thermal management of this card:
- Windows and drivers loaded fine as descibed (good)
- On running Furmark the temperature rapidly started to climb to say upper 40s, but the back felt very hot to me, so I cancelled the test – the fan never engaged.
- Maybe the fan sensor / controllor isn’t working as well as it could.
- After some very light gaming I saw the fans will in fact activate around 55 degrees.
- However, during more stress testing with Furmark, the fans engage and the reported temperature is high 50s max. Whilst the test completed, I found the back of the board especially behind the VRM area was stupidly hot, like burning my fingers!
- Not sure what can be done to increase the cards thermal efficiency? Perhaps reprogram the fan profile to come in earlier? maybe some thermal pads? Perhaps somebody else changed the BIOS and it’s overclocked?
- Just setting the fan manually to 60% in Afterburner allowed the same test to complete mid 40s with less painful temperatures at the back. Setting it to 70%, even better.
Update:
- Some googling reveals this is a very common issue for this strix card https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?93691-ASUS-ROG-Radeon-RX-470-Strix-Gaming-OC-4GB-loses-connection-to-monitor. However, there seems to be a patched BIOS available https://www.asus.com/SupportOnly/STRIXRX470O4GGAMING/HelpDesk_BIOS/
- I will try this when I get a chance. I would imagine some kind of BIOS tweaking might be the only solution apart for tuning with apps like afterburner etc.
Update 26/11/2022 – Testing
I had left this card on one side, but now I’ve seen and fixed a lot more rx4/500 cards, I thought it might be worth taking another look.
Testing
- VRM efficiency appears nice and high ~93 under full load.
- Kombuster seemed fine, although it seemed to think the card only has 2Gb
- 3D TimeSpy scored Good (about average in score)
- Apart from the back of the card feeling hot, the reported temperature never exceeded 55°C under full load.
- The seller mentioned overclocking and sustained running as being the factors leading to a blank screen, possibly there is a VRAM or core issue that emerges with heat? Maybe also in a horizontal mount and an enclosed case?
- Running tserver memory test against the card seemed fine:
./tserver -d=1 -boardtest=memfaAlthough I guess it might fail if overclocked. The full test also seemed to go well:
./tserver -boardtest=quickmfg2Except for the below PCI related error
