Which is the time to life of your GPU?

Hi guys,

Recently, my AMD HD 7970M died.

Now, I have bought a Nvidia GTX 680M 2 GB for my Clevo P151EM. This fact has made me rethink, How long is the time to life of our GPUs?

My AMD HD 7970M lived 2.5 - 3 years aprox.

How much life time have your GPUs now?, Your GPU get broken, How many years it works?

Share your experience putting the model of your GPU, level of use (daily, sporadically...), and months / years:

Example:

GPU: AMD HD 7970M
Level of Use: daily 3-4 hours per day
Time to life: 3 years
Overcloked: No
Is the GPU alive now? : No, it's broken.


Regards.

I expect your participation ;D

 

Nvidia GeForce Go 6600, purchased in 2005 as part of Asus Z71V: died and was replaced in late 2008, replacement died in 2010 and was revived by baking the card, replacement currently functional (as far as I know) but I gave the computer to someone else, so I don't know its current status.

Nvidia Quadro K2000M, purchased in 2012 as part of Lenovo Thinkpad W530: still working perfectly after almost 3 years of regular use (multiple hours per day on average)

 

..the actual chips would survive the aluminum in the chassis, if they were cooled properly, and the contacts around the chip didn't deteriorate. Been a pretty long time since the actual chip construction, for any kind of chip, would wear down over time.

 

I think that the time to life of the actual GPUs is around 3 years (speaking of notebook GPU). Desktop GPU probably more, if it is well refrigerated.

The cooler system in a notebook is worse than desktop coolers, for that the time to life in notebook GPUs is lower.

I would like to know which is the average in a notebook GPU.

 

Depends?

No, it depends on how careful you are with changing cooling goop, how much heat the chip actually gives off (and how bad the cooling elements really are - lots of "gaming laptops" just don't have sufficient cooling in the first place.

So you get things like the 65w class nvidia cards lasting anything from a year to 5 years, the quadro cards might last longer because they typically don't peak on the effect draw and just take longer time to become very hot, that sort of thing.

 

I've had the same HD4510 GPU in my ASUS for more than 5 years... still going strong and under some intense pressure as it's only 512MB.

Motherboard has been replaced, as has the keyboard and a few other things. Starting to wonder if it is still technically the same machine I bought.
GPU is lasting though (touch wood).
Don't make 'em like they used to... my laptop before this lasted 5 years too (a whopping 64MB of VRAM).

 

Still, the biggest problem we've ran into with embedded cards, more integrated circuits, really, is that the print-boards and the contacts for one function can fail and the entire thing breaks. I.e., the spot around the gpu or the cpu expands and the contacts or solder breaks on.. something completely different nearby that never was designed to last forever. Like the sata controller on some of the two-three year old intel boards, for example. It's searing hot, and at least on the HP builds were put next to a bit of plastic that isolated the heat. So suddenly that would break. Kind of like the southbridge chip back in the long-long ago. If you actually used the PC for something other than office, you needed to cool that chip with at least some ribs, or it would become extremely hot and make things unstable.

So embedding that on the actual processor die was a good idea. But the same problem remains with the shoddy power contacts, or some capacitor on the backside, that sort of thing. Basically - the actual processor or the graphics card module rarely, rarely breaks now. It's nothing like for example the 3dfx chips that had ram that would literally boil off the card if you overclocked it, etc.

 

I have never had a GPU "fail" on me because of end-of-life.

I've had GPU / video cards fail because of some kind of defect (e.g. manufacturer improperly soldered the chip, manufacturer under-speced the cooling system, or video card just randomly fails). But those are manufacturing defects, rather than the GPU chip "dying" because of overuse.

In all likelihood, you will want to replace your GPU because of performance reasons, before you replace the GPU because the chip "dies" due to overuse / old age.

 

The Radeon M7820 in my HP is, as far as I know, the original from 2010, and is doing well. But I've only had it for 6 months, so I don't know how heavily it was used prior to that. Use since then has been light, with no overclocking.

The 8600M GT in my Inspiron, by contrast, I've had for just under 8 years, with heavy use for the first 4.5 years, and moderate since then. It has been overclocked occasionally, but not consistently. Despite poor soldering on the manufacturer's part, it's still chugging along, and is perhaps the only original part on the laptop, with a few having been replaced due to failure (screen, mobo), and several others due to upgrades.

I've yet to have a GPU fail, in either a desktop or laptop (the GPU in my current desktop is a 3.5-year-old Radeon 6870, with no overclocking, and no older GPUs failed either). Though I did expect the 8600M GT to fail due to soldering; now that it's 8 years old I figure it may well keep going forever.

 

9600m GT, 512MB GDD3 here.
Still operational after 6 and a half years.
Most of the components in the laptop have remained original except the HDD, CPU and RAM (which have been progressively upgraded through the years).