Some Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 Cards Affected by "Black Screen" Issue

According to an investigative report by BeHardware, some Sapphire-made Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition graphics cards may be affected by a "black screen" issue. Some Sapphire HD 7870 users could notice random screen blackouts. A collaboration with AMD unveiled the cause of the screen blackouts to be caused due to a "noisy" GPU electrical signal (voltage is controlled by pulse-width modulation). The cause for GPU electrical signal noise is found to be bad quality ceramic capacitors responsible for conditioning power to the GPU.

AMD has been investigating the issue for months, and had already informed its add-in board partners (AIBs) about components responsible, and to take steps to correct the issue. BeHardware, however, was able to reproduce the problem in recent batches of Sapphire-made HD 7870 cards bought from stores. Following the investigation, Sapphire corrected the issue at their production lines, recalled inventories from French retailers, and relaxed its RMA policy towards existing users of its HD 7870 cards.