Nothing lasts forever. Things break down over time, and inevitably everything needs to be replaced. This is something most people grow to accept pretty early in life, but no matter how used to this fact you get, it still sucks when something does fail, especially unexpectedly.
In this case, as the title suggests, the graphics card in my main machine died. Quite the sudden death, honestly, too. A Nvidia GTX 770, purchased in 2014. Yeah, I know, nothing special as far as graphics cards go, even back then, but it was all I needed and was somewhat key to this machine being what it is for me. I’m not some high end PC gamer who needs ray tracing 4k HDR and all that stuff, just some moderate games and enough graphics power to run 2 or 3 displays at once, even though right now I’m only running one.
Yesterday morning before work I was writing up a long article. I didn’t have the machine under any real stress, and it had behaved fine for the entire four, nearly 5 years I’ve had it. In the middle of typing I noticed a bit of artifacting for just a split second. Naturally, this worried me, but it didn’t stay, so I figured it was just a quirk. Maybe Windows is acting stupid again, who knows. Probably just need to reboot, maybe double check for updated drivers or something.
I went to go grab some water and came back to see my machine reboot. Worse, the screen was an artifact filled mess.
As you can imagine, I began to get quite upset. The angry kind of upset. I knew what this meant, but was still hoping it was just a fluke and wasn’t the graphics card dying.
I hard powered down the machine, pulled the plug, and let things discharge. That’s always a good step when you have a hardware problem — unplugging the item and pressing and holding the power button to discharge any stored energy in the system. I’ve solved quite a few issues that way in the past.
I rebooted the machine, and things were fine. Cool. Excellent. Too bad I couldn’t finish the article as I needed to get on to work. Alright, cool, everything seems fine. I went to work, did what I needed to, and came home.
Upon starting the machine everything was fine, until the second I went to YouTube. The moment that a video began to play, bam – artifacts, again.
The card was certainly failing – there was no way I could delude myself on it maybe just being a software issue or a one off quirk anymore.
I then proceeded to disconnect everything from the system, open it up, and yank the card out. Now, my machine is somewhat small – really, too small to have a full size card in it, but I shoved it in there, routed the cables where I needed to, and it worked fine for 4 and a half years. It was a bit of hell getting it in to begin with, so removing and replacing it several times was a chore.
The card was clean. Hell, I had actually blown the machine out fully just a month or two ago, so dust couldn’t have been an issue causing overheating. Repeated removals and insertions didn’t change things – one time the card booted to a black screen and ran the fan at full blast. That was an experience, as I didn’t even know the fan in that thing could ramp up like that! Other times, the card behaved normally but I got no video, or the card didn’t detect and I could only use onboard video. Whatever the case, the end result was this – the card was dead.
I finally gave up, and removed the card. I’ve looked around online and found a few replacement options new that would be fine, cheaper than this card was when it was new, and would still, presumably, run better.
So that’s really it. I don’t have much else to say regarding this. A friend is planning on sending me a replacement card, a Nvidia 660 TI which while weaker than the GTX 770 it will be replacing, should be more than adequate for everything I wish to do with the machine until I replace it, or the computer itself.