Little Help Guys.

So I recently updated my M18x r1 from 580m's to 780m's and it went flawlessly thanks to all the help i received. Well i sold my 2 580m's on ebay to an electronic parts company from what i can tell. They paid for the cards and installed them then contacted me and said that one of the cards was giving them an error and shutting off the system. Both cards were in full working order and handled with care after they were replaced. They are currently shipping the supposedly bad card back to me for a refund. with it being an electronic component that is sensitive to esd and user error i am hesitant to just say it is bad and hand them back their money when it is much more likely that if the card is bad they damaged it. I was hoping to gain an understanding of just what to look for as far as user error goes. i have before pictures of both sides of the board but i find it unlikely that it'll be sent to me with such an obvious user error. guys I am hoping my card boots right up but it'll be hard to say and I've got to disassemble my painstakingly reassembled laptop just to make sure it is bad. is it worth the trouble? am i better off eating the 250 refund and attempt to have it repaired or checked for problems? Thank you anyone for any advice and i hope i didn't post this in the wrong place.

 

Having these cards in sli can mask a problem. So the company who bought them were just using one at a time this is why they can see errors. Also these cards fail all the time. 580M & 675M are junk for how often they fail.

 

It's easy to be suspicious because there are some dishonest people out there. But, put yourself into the buyers shoes and you would expect fair treatment. Think of how disappointed you would be in the same circumstances. (I am sure you are a fair player, and that's evident because you're asking for advice.) The question is whether you sold them "as is" with expressly no warranty of any kind. If you did that, I would question the basis of asking for a refund. Even so, it would still be the honorable way to handle it. Anything is possible... ESD can kill electronics, but they're more resilient than most people give them credit for.

Hindsight is always 20/20. Anytime I sell something like this I inconspicuously put a permanent marking that I can identify later on, but nobody else would notice. I also take photos of it before shipment. I had someone try to do a shifty thing to me a few years ago. They definitely had a defective part... but, it wasn't the one I sold them. The one they sent me was not the part I sold them. I was able to ram that scam up their bobo by having documentation. Most people are definitely not like that, but being prepared for the few that are dishonest can be pretty handy.

 

i took several pictures before hand just to be careful and the cards are distinct. ill be able to notice if they switched something. but i fully intend to refund if the product i sold is defective. Sometimes it happens i guess i just don't have any experience with these cards so i was just making sure. I appreciate the answers guys.

 

That's awesome. Glad you did that. Did they say what the symptoms are that causes them to state the one GPU is no good? Just wondering if maybe it was not seated correctly in PCI-e slot or something like that.

 

They said that the card would cause the system to error and shut down. But that the other one worked fine. I tried to get then to be more descriptive but they never responded. I guess I'll just have to take my laptop apart again to test it myself. It's such a bother though. I worked hard at getting this right. haha

 

Here are pictures of the before:
<iframe width='480' height="360" src="http://s1343.photobucket.com/user/eeposaurus/embed/slideshow/Before%20Sale"></iframe>

Here are the pictures after I received the card back.
<iframe width='480' height="360" src="http://s1343.photobucket.com/user/eeposaurus/embed/slideshow/After%20Sale"></iframe>

It's obvious that one of the posts for the x-brace is bent way off and I would think that could really affect the ability of the card to function properly. But from my pictures before I shipped there seems to be a possibility that the post was bent from the start. I know for a fact the cards functioned properly before hand and I bet if i replace the x-brace it will be fine. What do you guys think?

 

ESD is a serious thing. Ive fried multiple Mice and keyboards even from it, nevermind dozens of laptops and computers. This is even while grounded. Im also oddly special in this damn friggin case, as I get slightly electricuted everytime I walk by osciloscopes and amplifiers and psu's or sockets in the wall... its almost a running joke with anyone I know personally about me. Anyways, these cards can easily be damaged, in test run from not being properly seated, or thermal paste not applied evenly on the die between the die and heatsink. Most issues coming from the NAND / Memory tself, will be mor egradual as heat increases, things to do with PCB or the GPU die itself would present more random errors, like not installing drivers properly , or failing some types of surface test draws..etc..

Most the time they can even be rebaked, and fixed, if you know how to protect the rest of the components.