7970M Life Expectancy or Help

It is exactly as the title states, does anyone know the life expectancy of the 7970M or can answer my question?

The reason I'm asking this is because I've had my 7970M since July 2012 and experience no problem until today on the following particular games.

League of Legend: The game is always maxed out with no shadows. The game runs perfectly fine on stock drivers until I updated it to the latest stable one (I forgot which one it was but it was back during Jan). Now once in a while during the game I get flashing artifacts and the game has gone into a "black screen" twice for durations lasting 3-4 seconds.

Path of Exile: I started playing this game starting Jan - runs perfectly fine but once in a while the card would only cap at 45 FPS, I just wanted to know if its still enduro issues or if its my card throttling (doesn't always cap at 45 and I have vsync on).

I'm asking this question because I want to make sure my GPU won't die on right after my warranty ends. (A college student isn't rich ).

If anyone can help me that would be great!

(Should I try reverting to stock drivers? Also I do repaste once every 2-3 months)

 

Should last 5 years +

 

unfortunately thats an almost impossible question to answer. in every hardware product series there are lemons that die on you after a few weeks/months of regular usage. other ones last for years on end without any hiccups. there are of course trends concerning whole series/batches of a product that show significant failure rates after a consistent amount of time. for example, it seems like a lot of 6990m gpus are prone to fail after about a year, judging from all the recent activity on this subject here on nbr. as for the 7970m, there were some isolated instances where the gpu was doa or failed after a week or two but in general no significant failure rates have been reported yet. only time will tell, especially since the 7970m is still a relatively new gpu and hasnt even been around for a year yet.

so basically the only and best thing to do is keep an eye on ur temps, do a regular cleaning of heatsink and fins, repaste every once in a while and keep ur gpu drivers updated to the latest version.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

Its really hard to say since you've had the 7970M pretty much as long as its been available so there isnt info which gives more time with life expectancy. As you're seeing drivers can and will affect perfromance. Once they are released and people find bugs and let AMD know they usually try to fix those in future updates.

 

Current GPU's Super-overclocked with a extra .100mv, Usually can expect a three+ Year life expectancy.. So considering nobody has even managed more than .50mv Overvolting, It should last as long as you will own the machine. Which, if you dont upgrade your computer in 4-5 Years that's like saying you have a Pentium 4 in todays standards.

Long story short, IT will out live however long you will own the machine.

 

mine died in 4 months. but hey, i think i just got a dud...

 

It's relative to how you treat it, as well. Although there isn't really an average life expectancy as Hutsady mentioned due to it being a fairly new card, as long as you handle your investment with kid gloves, it should go far. Occasionally you may get a lemon, but if you do, you'll typically notice right away or very soon, at least.

You don't need to repaste that often, btw. But it's good to see you're trying to take good care of the machine. Just be cautious not to damage something in the process!

Btw - it sounds like you're running on the Beta driver? If so, try the 13.1 stable release. Or, if you're running on 13.1, try the 13.2 BETA.

 

Yes if a change in software fixes or causes a problem it's likely a fault in the software rather than the hardware. Try rolling back your drivers.