Section 75 advice relating to a graphics card RMA.

MattMattMattUK

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81938047#Comment_81938047

The thing is caps do not fail with an arcing sound, they fail with a really loud pop, even a bang and they stink, I mean really stink, not a burning smell but a weird horrible smell. I have built PCs for nearly thirty years and have in the past even resoldered parts of GPUs (caps and power ports), although not for many years now, it used to be much easier than it is now! These days I would rather send a GPU off to be fixed than try myself with the cost of cards, plus I do not have that kind of kit any more. When testing a GPU with a dead or blown cap they will almost always fail under sustained maximum load, so you can test for that.

If you want a test without taking the card apart then running FurMark is usually a good one, run the full max load stress test, a card with one or more dead caps will usually start crashing after a while, they synthetic test will push it well beyond anything a game can manage. If you have any voltage monitoring kit you should be able to see imbalances on pins (I do not know if Radeon 9070 (or XT) reports that natively). I also cannot see your PSU in that image but does it have monitoring so you can look at rail and voltage fluctuations or spikes? I am thinking that if you can reliably trigger a shutdown or crash under heavy load then they might agree to inspect again.

Trundlebelly

Ah, I see the source of your confusion now, you're talking about the larger electrolytic capacitors which do indeed go with quite a bang, lots of smoke and odour and can indeed be replaced with some careful soldering.

I'm talking about the really tiny SMD capacitors, typically ceramic or tantalum and, as they have no electrolyte, burn out with much less of a performance. I suppose arc is a bit vague, it's more of a small pop with a fizz/hiss sound, sometimes with a brief flash as they overheat but it's over in a fraction of a second with little more than the puff of smoke which has a far milder odour than the very strong burnt horse hair smell with larger electrolytic caps.

Unfortunately, the card is currently missing on its way back from the manufacturer and so I am unable to do any further testing myself.

After the other replies, I phoned Scan again armed with the additional information and they're taking a slightly different approach; hopefully it will yield some good results.