If you happened to have purchased one of the first 7900 GTX video cards that came overclocked out of the box, or if you have simply seen the many threads in different forums, you might have heard about some random freezing and lockup issues. PC Perspective has traced those problems to some factory-overclocked cards, which NVIDIA says didn't have the necessary headroom for increased clock rates. The issues were present on cards clocked as low as 20MHz above stock speeds.

NVIDIA was adamant to tell us that all the board vendors are going to be fixing cards that show these problems that are in the hands of end users. If you have one such card, contact the manufacturer and get your support process started ASAP. The vendors, and NVIDIA, are being much stricter at the fab where G71 is being manufactured and NVIDIA tells me the new chips going out will be able to run at the speeds the vendors will sell at. That might mean lower clock speeds from vendors (back to stock? Gasp!) or maybe only higher yielding chips will be selected for those cards.

The biggest concern here is the QA programs of the add-in card vendors. There isn't just one vendor that had issues - we saw cards from EVGA, BFG and XFX exhibit these same problems on our testing bench and with end user reports. Obviously, these are stock-overclocked cards, so the vendors SHOULD have been testing these cards for stability at the overclocked speeds. But that didn't happen, at least not the standards that we expect them too. If I can see these "freezes" on my first runs of 3DMark06 that I use for basic stability testing, and end users see it on their computers immediately after purchase, something in the quality assurance process stinks.