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Defective Pipelines On A 7800gtx????

Last response: in Graphics & Displays

I just bought a used pny verto 7800gtx and everest and rivatuner are telling me that the card only has 8 pixel pipelines when it should have 24 and 3 vertex pipelines when it should have 8. I'm getting a 60,000 in aquamark 3 when I should be getting over 100,000. I have installed the latest drivers also. It is also set on full graphics acceleration. Is it the card itself thats defective or my pc? Please help!!!

I have an...

Evga nforce-4 sli edition mobo
amd athlon 64 3200 overclocked to 2.6ghz
1gb pc3200 memory
500watt powersupply

I'm going to throw the card into a friends pc to see if it still has the same problem.

In the mean time...can anyone think of anything that may be causing the pipeline problem????

I'm not sure that the problem would be with the pipelines themselves. Defective/unused pipelines are locked in the cards firmware. This information is read from the firmware by RivaTuner, it doesn't test the pipelines to see if they're good or bad. Now aside from driver issues or possible compatibility problems with your motherboard (both highly unlikely), it sounds like the firmware on the card is messed up. I would contact PNY and get their take on it. They may walk you through flashing your card, (EDIT :Sorry, I re-read your post, it was bought second hand, not going to get RMA)or they may just RMA it.

This locking of pipelines is the reasons some people are able to get a card and unlock the pipelines and run their cards as if they were a higher model card (such as a 7800 GT to a 7800 GTX). There are two possible reasons that the manufacturer will lock pipelines.

1. Some pipelines are inferior or broken, in which case they need to be locked to assure performance and/or stability.

2. Yields of a certain series of GPU improves during the latter part of it's manufacturing lifecycle, reducing the number of GPU's with 'broken' pipelines. This reduces the number available to the card manufacturers. This forces the chipmaker to sell their higher model GPU's as lower models to the card manufacturers. The card manufacturer doesn't know which GPU's actually have 'broken' pipes and which are higher binned parts sold as lower binned parts. These are usually the cards that enthusiast's successfully unlock all pipes.
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techgeeks info and advice is very good. to him you should listen.

there's definitely something wrong w/ the card. what's ur 3dmark06 score?

Thanks guys.

I don't remember my exact 3dmark06 score, but I remember that it was abysmal. I contacted nvidia and they couldn't help me and told me to contact pny. So I'm going to contact pny and try the card out in a friends computer to make sure the problem is with the card.

By the way, can someone tell me how to flash the card back to original settings?

What card did you have in before, I know when I changed my 6800ge to a 7800gs riva tuner read the setting of my 6800ge. I did an uninstall of riva and reinstall and it read the pipes correctly. Somewhere in the fourms is a pic showing this. When change card you have to do a new scan of Hardware.

I can't explain how it happened to be honest. But I downloaded ati tool to overclock it and I got a pretty good oc and then the my pc froze. So I rebooted and ran everest to check my temps and all of my pipelines are now shown as available. I ran aquamark3 and didn't see any jump in performance, but what i think i need to do is just reformat windows.

Thanks guys for your help!

Hello all,
what is this rivatuner I just read up on in here? Is it to see how your card is running & where do i get it?
Hello again MPJESSE.
Thanks in advance for the input. (still learning here) 8O