About to throw my 7970m in the over, need a 7970m owners help first...

Before I go ahead and bake the card, I want to make sure this normal. After some close inspection, something looked unusual to me. If a 7970m owner could be so kind to peak at their card and let me know if this looks right. In the photo, you see that the solder is connecting to that jumper. It looks out of place to me, is this causing my problems (6 beeps, won't POST, already cleaned, re-seated, etc). I tried to find some photos of a 7970m, but I cant find one with a high enough res to confirm whether it should be soldered like that or not.

If all looks normal...into the over in goes.

 

Definitely not normal. Looks to be a factory defect.

What mine looked like.

 

Thanks! The question is what to do now...

 

Do not put it in the oven. Get someone that is very skilled @soldering and have him remove the excess solder.

 

^That'll work. As long that that solder bridging the two components is removed, it should be fixed, maybe.

 

That's definitely what we in the world of electronics call a soldering bridge, which isn't too hard to fix if you've got good soldering technique. Question: all the joints on those four capacitors look like they've been redone using too much solder. Is that something you did yourself, or was it that way it was when you got the card from the vendor? As a former USAF tech who's been through high-reliability soldering technique classes, we'd call that a very sloppy job.

 

That's how the card looks straight from the factory. It never caught my attention in the pat, but seeing it next to the one posted above really makes it look horrible. I'll contact the vendor I purchased from before I proceed with anything further. It looks like my card failed because they sent me a bad one.

 

Yeah, that GPU definitely isn't Dell OEM like mine. I too also noticed the "moderate" amount of solder used in the OP's GPU. Very sloppy indeed.

 

If it's been working since you got it and it arrived from the factory like that, chances are it's not causing much of an issue, if any. It could be that the two caps that are joined by the bridge are sharing a common ground which, if that's the case, could easily be missed in testing. Still, it's pretty obvious that some flaky soldering was applied there, and a visual inspection by "QA" should have caught that.

That is, if the vendor or whoever did the work for them even has quality control.

Good luck.

 

Honestly something like that is a fault of the manufacture, basically you send them a pic of it that way and they will have to send you a new one, plain and simple.

 

NO! It's normal, it's what you get from a clevo card, mine has it and so do others.

Don't bake it, look here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...looked-their-clevo-7970m-power-circuitry.html

It doesn't cause any problems, mine is working fine.