Well, I've been living happily with my evega GT 430 (~$50) for a little over a year, but the past few months I have been noticing the fan was getting a little louder and was on for longer periods of time, and this past week it had even been rapidly starting and stopping until yesterday the whole card just crapped out, the computer wouldn't boot until I took it out.

I guess the cheap little fan they put on it can't keep the card cool enough, until the point where even the fan itself breaks.

Anybody have similar experiences from these cards?

did you clean it?, i recently tore my laptop apart to get th dc jack repaired, i have had this laptop for nearly 2 years, I discovered literally a full wall of dust blocking the fan from properly venting. since i cleared this out, the fan bearly kicks on now, and the laptop never gets hot now when i play games.

Never heard of "evega". If you meant EVGA, they make pretty good equipment.

Looks like you learned the hard lesson that a noisy fan means eminent hardware failure.

For a normal office environment and mounted correctly most computer fans are rated at 50,000 hours or more. If the parts are not mounted properly, or if the computer has poor circulation, or high dust, or other problems then the lifetime can be much less. Care for your equipment and it will last for years. Don't care for it, allow dust to build up, ignore signs of overheating (such as the fan running more than usual or making noise) and the hardware will fail.

(Personally I insist that all machines I buy have at least two and preferably 3 case mounted fans mounted properly for air flow, intake down low and expulsion up high, in addition to the fans on the CPU, graphics card, and power supply. An overheated computer is a dead computer.)

If it failed within the warranty period return it. Otherwise, chock it up to experience and next time take action when you hear a fan start to make noise.

I had multiple fans on different graphics cards die.

Today most things are sadly built in a way that they only last for the time of the warranty on average. Thats to "encourage" people to buy new stuff more often and create higher profits. The marketing term for building such intentionally faulty goods is called "planned obsolescence", if you want to read more on it.

~$50 for a graphics card is not bad going considering it lasted you over a year. I don't use PCs anymore but when I did I used to stump up around £200 per year in graphics cards. Some of my friends who are still PC gamers are still paying this so things havent really changed.

My videocard fan was getting noisier and noisier, then started overheating and shutting down the computer (which is a safety measure built-in to videocards to keep the card from damaging itself or the rest of the hardware).

Turned out that it had a faulty seal and the oil around the fan axis shaft thingy had evaporated, so the fan was encountering too much friction. Now, every six months I take the videocard apart (very easy - mine is just three pieces) and oil the fan shaft with some regular machine oil. With that treatment about every six months (whenever it starts making extra loud noise), it has been humming along quite nicely for over five years, and can be still be used for heavy gaming.

As someone recently pointed out in conversation, I should've had them replace the unit as it was probably still under the warranty before I took it apart. Too late for that!

I'm not a very hardware techy person and the videocard wasn't too great of a card (mid-range, about $135 was all I was willing to invest), but now that I'm used to it, it's a very easy procedure to re-oil the fan of the videocard I have.

Also, make sure you blow the dust out of your PC case (but try not to blow the dust deeper into crevices); alot of dust that can cause things to overheat and contribute to the problem. Kinda like the "Service Engine" light on cars, when a computer starts making funny noises it needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later, or it can get worse.

Today most things are sadly built in a way that they only last for the time of the warranty on average.

When I did biz-stats, were were taught how to calculate warranty periods, so that you would only have to pay for the repair/replacement of some chosen n% of your items. If you're a cheapskate, you can set n=5% and get a very producer-friendly warranty period as a result.

i.e. the warranty is designed in a way where it lasts for less than the average lifetime of the product

The fact that the product doesn't last very long is unrelated

Never had reliability problem with cheap video cards themselves. Problems such as dust are environmental.

Question is why should you buy a 50 vidcard. Even in the case of an upgrade, those cards are often still on DDR3 and won't fill many more pixels than your previous card. Gaming wise, they don't make much sense.

Today most things are sadly built in a way that they only last for the time of the warranty on average.

When I did biz-stats, were were taught how to calculate warranty periods, so that you would only have to pay for the repair/replacement of some chosen n% of your items. If you're a cheapskate, you can set n=5% and get a very producer-friendly warranty period as a result.

i.e. the warranty is designed in a way where it lasts for less than the average lifetime of the product

The fact that the product doesn't last very long is unrelated

Well, I could guess they could have not send out a memo to all people in the company, when the R&D people researched:

- How to replace important metal pieces(like the axis of a fan or a cogweel in some transmission of a household machine) with cheap plastic to make it not last more than x years.

- How to put cheaper, too weak electrolyte capacitors into some item(like a power supply unit, LCD screen or main board) so they will crack from unavoidable heat on normal use after 2 years on average.

- How to stamp "removing this will void your warranty" on that sticker over the opening in the middle of a fan (or other vulnerable part) to deter people from putting a drop of oil in it regularly (like it was customary for some machinery in the olden times) and then reduce the lubricant from x drops to a fraction of a drop and test a farm of cheap fans, to find out exactly how many milligrams of lubricant is enough to make it dry out fast enough for them to last for a median time in hours equivalent to normal use of 2 years or somesuch.

Ok, the last one I only imagine would happen, but the others are real things I saw consumer protection people complain about and knowledgeable people writing how they could repair things easily by replacing capacitors.

Only one motherboard died for me, apart from that, my current machine was bought used, and I bought it some 5 years ago.

Once I had a problem with a noisy videocard fan (in my previous machine). I bought a new fan for maybe 2 euros and the problem was solved.

Power supplies newer died on me, the current one is 4 years old or so, though I change them more regularly than the other parts.

My computer cases always had all the sides removed, and they always had a quite powerfull and expensive power supplies, and I always paid big attention to routing the cables inside the case (I have always assembled the PC:s on my own except for my first 2 PC:s), so they don't touch or obscure anything.

I am always very cautious with static discharge when messing with the hardware, etc. I always read manuals carefully and do everything in the sequence written there.

Same is truth for my other stuff, like cell-phones, or Windows. The only reasons I had to buy new phones were because I lost one of them, and another one would have been more expensive to unlock (it didn't work abroad) than buying a new one.

So I don't think that the manufacturers greedily set everything so that the lifetime of the stuff is equal to the guarantee time, that's more of a conspiracy BS.

Or maybe my secret is that I only buy trusted and higher-end equipment, and newer buy cheap nomane stuff, and I always pay attention to use them right. For example properly recharging batteries.