Ah yes. The famous fire prone 900 series from EVGA. Exactly the same way died my EVGA GTX 970 FTW. Forum was full of posts of 900 series cards doing this after 3+ years.
Those evga 970s had basically no vrm cooling. I’ve repaired two of them recently that had the same mosfet blow. This affected the ftw, sc, and ssc. Later revisions added a plate that contacted the vrm and memory chips to help dissipate heat.
Elden Ring is such a weird example of a game that’s incredibly well optimized for lower end hardware but then has stuttering issues no matter what hardware you use. (I know a lot of this is fixed)
Just upgraded from the 970 and it held itself admirable for the last 4 years for me. Only upgraded because I was upping the resolution in my setup. As for the GTX970 blowing up, I remember Buildzoid commenting a lot of these EVGA GTX 970 were having similar problems. Maybe it's worth investigating.
I had that same model of 970 and a 780 lightning before getting my r9 fury and was really surprised by how well they overclocked, used it for vr for a few months before upgrading to an r9 fury and was immediately screwed by the lack of hdmi 2.0 and have been stuck with 60hz vr since lol. Regret upgrading for sure
Don't sleep on the 970. Was the best high tier card I've bought before they released the 10xx series. Changed out of it due to lack of vram for VR. Honestly would've kept using it if it wasn't for it's 3.5GB memory. I have an RTX 2070. According to this video, it just seems that I love buying cards that eventually may kill themselves. Seeing that 970s explode but mine still works :3 And the RTX 2070s had a outbreak of "micron memory disease" moments (ppl reported their GPUs dying like it was judgement day)
I've personally held 2 other 970's of the same make and model that died in this identical manner. Same exact module as well. If you do research it's apparently a fault that even if repaired, will happen again over time. You just got terribly unlucky guys.
I bought a GTX 960 SSC 2GB card in 2016. When combining it with a modern CPU, that card actually performs quite a bit better then on contemporary hardware. If you can live with 1080p settings in mid to high, most games are still very playable. I have not tried the latest games on that card, but I would assume the 2GB of VRAM would be the biggest issue there. I do not think that card will die anytime soon but just in case it is still under warranty until mid-2026 :) Some of the 970 cards had issues like that (also the first gen 1080 cards) but I have never seen one catching fire. I would assume it is a grounding issue. Maybe the other case was poorly constructed and did not ground with the PSU? Usually those cards either failed early on or after the base warranty expired. It could be worse, you could have put expensive new hardware in a used and unfixed H1 case.
Same thing happened to both of my EVGA GTX 970s thankfully I still had Lifetime warranty from my GTX 570s and I was able to get RMA and got bumped up to GTX 1060 6gb.
PRO TIP You should have cleaned it and gave it a new thermal paste and pads immediately after it arrived. Considered yourself lucky that it lasted two years.
Ironically that first Elden Ring area is the toughest area in the game performance wise - Ironically no matter what kind of graphics settings you choose and no matter what GPU you own you will get stuttering in that area and many more areas like it! Thank you Elden Ring! And thank you From Software! You've outdone yourselves this time with this PC port! Congrats!
My 970 worked way better than my 1050 and a little better than my 1060 at 1080 res in almost every game around "I think" 4 years ago, maybe longer. I was so pissed because a lot of people were saying how good the 1050Ti was and told me to get the 1050Ti. Even a lot of the benchmark programs showed the 1050 as better but in every game I played the 970 out worked it and was cleaner looking. Now I will say the 970 took a lot more power than the 1050. But that was the only gain I got out of it the 970 was just better. So I stayed on my 970 till I got 1660 super which killed the 970. Now waiting for the prices to come down to more in line with msrp. But that 970 is still going strong in my daughter's PC and 1060 in my wife's PC. They both play shooters like Back 4 Blood and both are going strong. But to be fair they both are running new mid to high level PCs that I built back at the start of covid 19. Everything but video was upgrade. Because of crazy price increases and availability.
It also happened to my EVGA GTX680 Superclocked. Since I had a GTX1050Ti to replace my old GTX680 due to its 2GB VRAM (while waiting for GTX1070 on the used market until COVID happened), I just stored it on my cabinet full of old consoles and PC parts. More than 2 years later I decided to sell my GTX680 instead of keeping it so I tried testing it on my gaming rig. At first boot attempt the blower style fan suddenly ramped up at max RPM (i know how a max RPM on my GTX680 sounds like) then 3 seconds later it slows down to the usual idle temp speed (about 30%) but didn't boot. 2nd attempt, no boot but the fan doesn't ramp up like the first boot. Still the same at 3rd boot. From that point on, I should have decided to stop and check the card, remove the shroud and heatsink/fan assembly, and inspect the whole card if there's something funny going on with the electronic components. But no, I did turn on the PC for a 4th boot attempt. Then voila! GTX680 just had a fireworks display for me to witness.
Interesting. My EVGA GTX 970 SSC is going strong 7 years later and I'm the second owner. I even daily it with a decent overclock. Tons of time on Warzone especially. Really hoping to upgrade to an RTX 3060 Ti here very soon. Solid budget build other than the mishap!
Enermax makes pretty good PSU's, even their cheap ones. I have used many Marblebron PSU's on builds, no problems at all. The Marblebron PSU wasn't the problem but go ahead and blame it anyway. You should tell people not to buy second hand old GPU's instead of bagging on Enermax.
From the links... CPU $87.89 Heatsink + Fan $49.99 Motherboard $201.99 16GB RAM $79 Case $39.97 500GB NVMe SSD $59.99 PSU $39.99 Total $558.82 GPU $169 Grand Total: $727.82 Price quickly inflated. 😆
I picked up a 970 for 20 bucks due to it crashing. Just needed new paste, was overheating in seconds when launching a game. The paste was so bad the heat pipes were not even getting warm
Nice find. My 970 was in my primary machine until 2020 when I built a new one, it's now in my Linux machine with a Ryzen 5 3600. It's a nice card, mine is an MSI which I think was one of the better ones.
Think Arc A380 will be a better part in the same range but GTX970 is still fine taking FSR into consideration and battle tested. Mind that GTX973.5. is actually above PS4 PRO's GPU and GTX1063 as well. Bless my Zotac GTX970, die another year...
If you don't mind going the used xeon + ddr3 used route you can knock off like $100 off the price (xeon 2650 v2 + chinese machinist x79 board) -and- then take that extra money (about 60 of it) and put it towards instead an amd r9 390 8gb -- which gives rx 580 level performance -and- gives 8gb vram, -and- the build can still be handled by 500w psu (the xeon is a 95w tdp chip, gpu is 275w). r9 390s are all over ebay for around 200-220 AND -- then run it all on linux and use FSR upscaling in gamescope for budget fps gains
The 970 is extremely similar in performance to the 1060 3g. So, not surprised. Oddly enough though, my friend's 970 just died after playing Elden Ring too.
The gtx 970 was a very strange gpu at launch with all that problems on the vram and Nvidia clients wanting their money back it was strange and stupid but today its a very good price for performance.
I still use my 10 years old computer and still no Fire! : CPU: Intel i7-3770K Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD4H Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 750 Ti Power Supply: PC Power and Cooling Silencer Mk III 600W Bronze
So the question is. Did the component die from age or heat? What was the card going at in temps? Could a new thermal paste and a good clean have saved it from DEATH!? OR Not. Apparently as others have commented. It's a QC issue with EVGA.
EVGA products have a history of catching fire. I bought a 1000 watt EVGA power supply and it killed a Red Devil video card that was brand new. luckily my motherboard had over voltage protection and saved everything else. No more EVGA products for me. I went and got a Corsair 1000 watt and it's worked fine for 3 year's. Screw EVGA, their power supply was brand new and almost destroyed a $3000 PC the first time I used the power supply.
Exactly what happened to my gtx 970 FTW edition. Gave it my wife after 4 years with it and after 7 years it caught on fire 🔥 lol RIP 970 FTW 2014 - 2021 🪦
You shouldn't cheap out on a power supply man. i learned that years ago. just don't try overclocking unless you want a series of popping capacitors like i had once. or when i tried running a gtx 280 think it was and it went bang straight away. Years ago. i don't cheap out on power supplies since then. do the 12 x the ampage to get true wattage.
i cant remember if it was the 900 or 1000 series that had a lot of these catch fire... pretty sure it was the 900 but thanks to those we now have EVGA ICX coolers.
ummmm, im playing Elden Ring with an RX 580 8 GB, and 1080p at medium settings with a locked 60 fps.... i mean i did adjust the voltage and frequency curves for all 7 states so my GPU even under torturous blood boiling stress tests never gets above 77.7 °C. even after 18 hours straight.
the 970 is better than the 1060 3gb, which is why you saw it was running really good considering it was older than the minimum spec. the "70" is better than the "60". the 9 and the 10 doesnt matter, they are just the generation of the gpu.
I bought my 970 two years ago from a friend of my brothers and he kept it in almost mint condition and sold me it for a little over 120usd, the only issue it has is what look likr slight water marks on the heat pipes, idk if thatll be an issue in coming years but my max temp on this card is 72 whilst playing bfv maxed out getting around 50 to 60 frames...framerate is 15% behind or so because of the oem lenovo board i sue that has a weird 14pin board power connector
mosfet exploded (this is part of the vrm), normal failure for nvidia cards that are not the 10 series, the fet probably welded itself to the pcb, but if the core did not take 12v to the face you could e-power it
This is incredible... but my only question is whether or not the 30+FPS on max settings could be sustained when even LARGER enemies, PLUS their smaller goons gang up on you. The results HAVE to dip, at least in that case, i would think....
Even if the card was faulty in some way I would still blame the crap power supply as a catalyst that broke the camels back. this is why you should never cheap out on the PSU no matter the budget.
@@UFDTech I know this is old but according to who is it a Tier B PSU? On the LTT forums its a Tier C power supply and in fact its low on the tier C making it almost a tier D. So yeah my comment is really accurate.
