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I recently bought a new computer and I found out (after) that the product had sometimes come with faulty graphics cards.

So how do I make sure I got a good graphics card as soon as I receive it?

I've heard of furmark, but I unsure if it is overkill.

Any suggestions?

It's a Lenovo Y580, and it comes with a NVIDIA GeForce660 card. It doesn't come dead out of the box, but rather mismade or misconfigured. People have noticed problems with games at first, and then it worsened into crashes.

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    Can you post some details, i.e. brand, model, graphics card, etc.? "Faulty graphics card" is nebulous at best. It could mean anything from DOA to short MTBF.
    – Ian Atkin
    Commented Dec 6, 2012 at 0:00
  • It looks like using the NVIDIA card for anything intensive (such as playing a game) is the key to testing it. There seem to be a lot of dissatisfied folks on the Lenovo forum, even as recent as November, 2012. The reviews on Newegg are mostly good, so it sounds, as you said, that only a small number of these have a problem. Perhaps a faulty batch of NVIDIA cards?
    – Ian Atkin
    Commented Dec 6, 2012 at 0:32
  • Yes, the bug seems to come in batches/groups. Hopefully, the one I ordered is not of one!
    – Zchpyvr
    Commented Dec 6, 2012 at 2:23

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This thread on the lenovo forums seems to indicate the issue is either due to heating or clock speed misconfiguration - early posts suggest the former, later posts the latter . Further down (page 6), they suggest setting the power plan to dynamic, and using MSI afterburner to gradually reduce the memory clock speed in increments of 50 - the settings are relative to the actual speed so they suggest starting at -50 and working your way down running a render test at each step to check if it stops flashing.

I wonder if its an over aggressive factory overclock thats causing this.

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  • Will it be clearly evident that there are problems right after using it for the first time? Some have noticed the faulty card after their warranty expired, which is what I'm trying to avoid. Which comes back to the question: how do I know?
    – Zchpyvr
    Commented Dec 6, 2012 at 2:25
  • I'd probably run the tests to see if it happens, and in this case furmark might help since stress seems to trigger it off.
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Commented Dec 6, 2012 at 3:45

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