Help!
I removed this GTX1070 that has been running fine since the day I got it. I ordered a 3090Ti hence decided to part with it.
I never noticed a slight sag in the PCB but the buyer now claims I tried to hide it.
He had me run FurMark over a video call and it stayed under 69degC. These are 12-layer PCBs so I am pretty sure this is not an issue other than an overly fussy inexperienced buyer.
Could anyone chime in please with any possible advice?
Thanks M
I struggle to see any sag in the buyer’s photo…
I had the same card before I upgraded to a 3080, never noticed any sags. No one complained about the card sagging on forums too afaik. Not to mention the 1070 SC isn’t that heavy to begin with.
I seriously think your buyer is haggling you for some refund post sale, is the sale through ebay?
Nah, thankfully in person. I got him to sign a letter agreeing to no refunds post inspection. That I provided video and photo evidence of performance and indemnification (of me) against any further claims.
It looks fine to me. i don’t see any sag at all. Besides, if the thing is working… what’s the problem? o_O
I think he is looking at the shape of the card’s heat sink, not the shape of the board itself. the board actually looks very straight to me.
One thing, since it’s an EVGA card, if you were the original purchaser, you can transfer the factory warranty (if it still has one) over to him and EVGA will cover any problems.
EVGA lets people transfer a video card once, from the original owner to anyone who may happen to buy it from them. Of course, if the original warranty has run out, then it wouldn’t matter.
Yeah no warranty left and the card has been rock stable at stock OC settings.
I told him to run a 24 hour burn in test if he’s convinced I’m lying in anyway (he seems to think so) 
Thanks to all that posted here 
with the current, still fairly elevated, prices of GPUs, why not just refund him and sell the good GPU to someone else?
From owning an EVGA 1070 which had a backplate, the most sag I had was from the fan shroud and it never impacted the performance. One possibility is the buyer has a motherboard without a reinforced GPU PCIe slot and the previous card slightly “sagged” the slot itself–I had an Intel B250 motherboard that experienced GPU sag from a single fan 1050.
In my experience all cards sag to some degree due to the heatsink+fan weight with some makers, however if following the tip by Jayz2cents you can avoid it with most cards.
Video on GPU sag:
I mean I can see it in that pic, but I have had and still have a pretty wicked bend in my cooling stack and all is fine.
I can understand the caution but as long as the tests check out all should be okay.
So he received the card from you in person? That sell is final, especially since you had him sign off on it. Any complaints or issues he might have had he should have let you know the moment he was inspecting the card himself.
Unfortunately you can’t really help them, tell them that and that’s the end of it.
Thanks all.
Sag isn’t really a thing with the graphics card itself, surely? I thought it was more than angle it sits at in the PCIe slot and the case, because it’s all fixed at one end then it effectively forms a pivot which mean any small amount of force (such as the weight, which let’s say acts down the centre of the card) has a large turning moment. The only way of remedying this is to support the far end, which is exactly what “anti sag” braces from GPU vendors do. So unless my understanding of sag is way off, your buyer is bullshitting you, and the “issue” is of their mounting.
I had something like this too, tbh. I sold an i7 3960X a couple of years ago with a Rampage IV extreme and 16GB of DDR3 2133. The buyer messaged me to complain that it would boot into Windows for a bit, shut off and then he couldn’t boot it for about half an hour afterwards. He’d cycled it repeatedly like this, and that it was clearly broken and wanted a refund. I tried to explain to him that if the CPU were broken he wouldn’t be getting into Windows at all and tried to troubleshoot the problem with him. I asked him what the motherboard error code was, he said “it temperamental it like woman”. Which meant it was POSTing and booting correctly: a CPU failure would be the first error code to appear if something were wrong, it would hang on 00. It turns out he hadn’t mounted the cooler correctly and it was hitting the max temperature and shutting down. The motherboard was then not booting until the temperature had decreased. I’ve experienced this behaviour myself when an AIO pump broke. It turned out, though, that either a day or so of trying to run it like this or the fact that they sent it back wrapped in bubble wrap without the anti-static bag I’d sent it in actually did kill the CPU, and Ebay gave him a refund anyway and charged me for it.
The kicker is this guy was buying very old CPUs on ebay, putting them in builds in his shop and selling them as “new”. So even if he hadn’t managed to scam me out of what I could have gotten for that CPU had it gone to someone legitimate, he would have scammed someone else by not telling them it was a decade old CPU and motherboard.
Sag is for sure a thing with GPU’s
Even firmer / thicker PCB’s don’t always hold up the heatsink too well.
But, OP could just give buyer a plastic brace / bracket and let buyer carry on as before…
Card works, no cause for refund. Buyer('s card) just needs some “support”… /s
So is it the PCB physically flexing?
I’m not the OP, so can’t say for Sure about this particular case, but I can say in my own experience, that I have had at least two of my own GPU’s sag. One HD7970 (iirc) and a GTX780ti.
the boards are brittle, but have some flex to them, and if the heatsink is not well anchored by the board partner to the backplane brace, it can sag.
Not saying it is too drastic either- I didn’t bother with a brace on one of the cards, as it only drooped a bit, and the other, I just strung a thread to the case and lifted it easily.
Most of these PCBs are 12-layer FR4 (or better) PCBs and they can take a bit of flex.
Case in point, I’ve been able to install both of my Asus Zenith Extreme mainboards into Corsair Crystal 570X cases. This is an E-ATX mainboard, inside a case that doesn’t support E-ATX and to make matters worse, has a rising edge.
The trick used was to make sure that where the PCB starts to flex (towards the edge that has the mobo power connector/SATA ports) to be very relaxed with the mobo screws so as not to tension the mainboard much.
Both my TR4 1950X rigs have been running fine like this since the day I got them way back in 2017/2018.
Heck, I even moved a GTX1080TI FTW3 into the machine that I pulled the GTX1070 from. Due to the mainboard PCB having a slight curve, it is much harder to install this GPU as the free-floating end of the card starts to strike the top the mainboard, which means some of the PCI pins (towards the locking tab end) are exposing about a mm of PCB traces. Just barely.
Boots up fine and I’ve been using it for a couple days now, no issues.
With regards to the GTX1070 sold, the card works flawlessly. The seller is just inexperienced and probably had other intentions.
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