What are the odds of two failures simultanous?

[jmarks]

Last winter I bought a few video cards to add to my crunching farm of 9 machines, mostly Asus P8Z68-V Pro/Gen3 mobo’s with 2600k cpu’s, all with quality components.
It is amazing how much work video cards could do vs a high end consumer CPU. If memory serves me the Matrix 7970-P-3GD5 would do about 11x more work than a finely tuned 2600k CPU!

Quit crunching last fall as my goals had been reached. So I've piled all these working machines in my office (which made my wife happy ). I've been thinking of moving my Primary water cooled rig (980x) over to one of the newer crunching machines I bought, so I started tinkering with the machines.
The Matrix 7970 was working fine with the Asus P8Z68-V Pro/Gen3,2600k, Corsiar AX850, Corsair SSD, 8 GB RAM, Corsair H100 Cooling and a couple HD's.
Took the card out and put it in another machine to install windows. Put it back in the original case and the computer booted however there was no video? The card acted fine just no output. Put it back into the computer I just installed windows on and it no longer worked in it either? Video output of the Pro/Gen3 board worked fine though and windows had in fact booted just fine. Although the AMD card isn’t to be found in device manage or anywhere on windows even in safe mode? So I put a xyz7950 from another machine into the primary machine and that video card no longer works, it did when I shut it down a couple months back!

So what are the odds that two high end GPU’s die within weeks of each other? I say slim so I go about spending hour’s trouble shooting after all I have all these PC’s that were put away fully functional.
- Different functioning PSU’s
–Different Power cable sets
- Reset computer BIOS ensured latest update installed.
–Two different working monitors tried
– HD5450 Works fine in all configurations and machines.
-Three different HD7770 cards work fine in all configurations and machines.
- The Matrix 7970 nor the xyz7950 work in any machine

What did I miss? Could two quality cards really die that close to each other???

[HiVizMan]

Yes they can and as to why that is the hard part. One of the biggest killers of hardware is static, and most folks do not even think about static as an issue when they change hard ware. So they walk around on carpets or artificial flooring and happily go ahead and swap out hardware. Not always needed to see or feel the little spark of static but it kills none the less.

Do I think that is what happened with your hardware? Of course I do not, as I have no idea what was the environment you find yourself in. Just saying that yes it is possible, obviously as it has happened to you and providing a possible cause.

Sorry to hear you have had hardware death 😞