My leadtek (winfast a400 GT TDH) geforce 6800gt is doing crazy things

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oiboy said:
It's been 3 weeks and they still haven't replied to my request for an RMA number. Spoke to a guy with a heavy Asian accent named John Zhang. He told me 'the man who is in charge of RMA numbers is out of the office". When I pushed onto when I will recieve my RMA he said maybe next week. 3 weeks and waiting.

Anyone interested in a class action? :haha:

I cannot wait till I upgrade to PCIe and say goodbye to LeadHECK.

Hello oiboy. I hope that they respond to your e-mails, however I think there is more behind this then you are letting on to. For example how long since you bought the card. Is it past the warrenty? Where do you live? Did you use the web site to request service? If you cant get anything dont with Zohn Zhang you will have to go higher up. Check the directory when you call in to leadtek. Forgive me for not reading your prior post's.

Hope it works out for you.
Steve
 
Barrans...I purchased the card in October 2005. In the user manual it says the warranty is 1 year. After having the same 'issue' as numerous others on this forum, I deduced it was not an isolated event. I recieved an RMA request form and submitted it along with a copy of my reciept as requested. I will try again tommorow but I'm not optimistic. I'm in Canada, and the office in California is the one that covers my warranty. The store where I got it told me to contact the vendor directly as they will help me for the first 30 days only.

If Leadtek actually read the posts here and cared, they would overhaul their customer service department and perhaps implement advance RMA's; at least on this card, obviously there is a manufacturing flaw there.
 
Hey guys. I've been using the WinFast PX6800 GT TDH video card from Leadtek since September 2005. Just recently, however, I began having problems-the same problems listed here. Oddly, I'd reboot and the artifacts would be gone, and I could load the game(WoW) again.

For a few seconds. Then artifacts appeared, the computer would freeze and I'd reboot again. I figured I needed to update drivers, so I uninstalled my drivers, and installed the one from the Nvidia site. My monitor turned off.

I had no idea what to think, so I rebooted into safe-mode (where all the artifacts promptly disappeared) and tinkered. Nothing happened in my tinkering, so I decided my best bet would be to reformat and call it a day. I reformatted, and began installing the drivers. When I tried the nvidia driver again, it did the same thing. I rebooted in safe-mode, uninstalled the driver, and rebooted again. This time I installed the driver from my driver cd. Well, I TRIED to. Instead, the computer rebooted during the intelligent installation(with Leadtek, that's slightly oxymoronic...) and I couldn't get it to work.

I called Leadtek and they beat around the bush for a bit and finally concluded with "You'd have to send it in to us so we can check it." There was no way in hell. I said my thank yous and goodbyes, and called Newegg. They listened to my problem, and offered up an RMA- but at least with Newegg, if it's really busted, they'll offer me a comparable video card or my money back.

Thank god. It's in the mail now =)

You guys have been a great help in this; been reading since the problems began. Damn laptops suck...
 
Thought I'd join in on this fun. Thanks google. So I've done the rma thing with Leadtek after it ran fine for five months then bombed (bought September 2004). Didn't have any real issues with the RMA process other than... talk to California only, there is a huge language barrier for Taiwan. Granted, I don't speak any Chinese, so I appreciate their effort to speak English. Nevertheless, the US Leadtek returned me a second edition card which worked for nearly a year and two months. I'm sure if I had a big bag of BC weed, this crazy graphics corruption might be entertaining... but for now it has gone belly up.

Can't say $400 for less than two years worth of gameplay was quite worth it. I expected the card to last a little longer (no overclocking), ha ha... uh... eh... :blackeye: :( Ah well, I needed a break from Oblivion... I'm not ready to go PCI-Expre$$. My god, no Socket 478 PCI-E boards! Except the MSI celery stick edition. Oh well, guess I'll try to talk them into letting me buy a 7800GS at some discount and pray to the gaming gods it does not go kaput.

Btw, Oblivion kicks ****. Never owned an RPG until this one, and even then it's more a blend of varying gaming genres.
 
7800 GS on its way...?

Ok I finally accepted to get their 7800 gs. First I filled the form that they gave me. Then I shipped the 6800 gt, gave them the tracking number and 1 hour or so latter, I received an email from Quantum view (ups) telling me that leadtek has shipped a package for me... the problem : it's written "Purchase order number : A400 GT" in the Quantum View email.

WTFF?

I'm gonna get another crappy card even though I accepted their offer ?

I sent an email to David Jiang to get some explanations, he better give me good ones.
 
same problem with mine as well.. i still haven't tried the trick of the copper wire.. tommorow I'l try... in any case, how much does leadtek warranty last for these faulty a400gt??? i bought mine on 28/02/2005-- in italy warranty is 2 years minimum for law..
 
no.. i mean the main problem.. the one of the artifact @boot, and in windows, in everything! I had a shock when I saw all those crappy artifacts!
 
Good to see I'm not alone...

I've got the Leadtek A400 6800GT and I'm getting corruption in the BIOS & (not surprisingly) in Windows. I have contacted Leadteks 'support' (Ha) and given them all the relevant info (serial number, mobo/cpu/memory/psu details), and they sent me the following reply:

Hello,

We think that your graphics card is broken so please go back to the shop where you bought the card

By Euopean law the seller has to give 2 year of warranty see link below, there is no possibility to get the warranty directly from Leadtek.

Met vriendelijke groet,
Best regards,
Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Leadtek Support Europe


One small problem - the shop where I got the card from stopped trading ages ago! I have since told Leadtek this & asked them to confirm what options I now have to get the card repaired. That was a week ago & after two more emails still no reply.

So far I am not in the least bit impressed with Leadteks customer care and from what I've read in this thread I'm not the only one!

Does anyone know how to get a response of out Leadtek Europe - or even to take this seriously? Any tips gratefully received!

MaX
 
Another one

Just thought I'd put my $0.02 in. I've had an A400 GT TDH for a year and it just exhibited the garbled screen problem this past week. Got an RMA for it and shipped it off.

Imagine my surprise when the UPS truck backed into our driveway today and the package was from Leadtek. Wow. Quicker turnaround than I was expecting, after reading some of the threads found on the A400 GT TDH after I had sent the card in for repairs.

Imagine my surprise to find a different box with apparently a newer card.

Imagine my surprise to find that it was just a newer box.
The card inside is an A400 GT. Okay.

Imagine my dismay at finding the card COVERED WITH DUST. Had to spend a half hour cleaning it before putting it in the machine.

Imagine my total disgust when the screen came up and it was filled with

!!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!! !!!
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intermixed between incorrect characters so you could barely read the screen!

Is anyone actually repairing these cards the way they should be AND TESTING THEM or are they just playing musical chairs until we happen to get a card that didn't work in someone else's machine but might squeak through in this one? I do not have time to screw around installing and removing and shipping and installing and removing and shipping cards. I have work to do and this is not the way to perform customer service.

Now, I need another RMA # and this time I want my original card back... fixed! At least I know what that card has been through and that it was well taken care of. Big chance of that...

Just thought y'all would like to know that nothing's changed at Leadtek. BTW, I tried to send my less than cordial response to this waste of my time and money to the RMS supervisor's address as well as Zhang and it bounced.
 
I have been dealing with Leadtek's horrible customer service for the last two months. I will save you the long story but to sum it up, I had a 6800GT (which I paid $385 for BTW) for a year and a half when it started having the graphic problems and artifacts. After RMA'ing the card I was sent another defective card not once, but TWICE. I then contacted them and told them I was done dealing with their crap and that I wanted a working card.

John Zhang offered me the upgrade to a 7800GS for $80 and I told him there was no way I was going to pay it. He told me to contact David Jiang, who might waive the fee, which I have tried multiple times to get ahold of to no avail. They stopped returning my email's about 2 weeks ago and David never returned my calls. I have since filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.

Leadtek is a HORRIBLE company with whom I will never do business again. I hope that my BBB complaint will help motivate them to do the right thing and get me a working video card. Good luck to those of you out there dealing with this ridiculous mess of a company.

Don't bother wasting your time with RMA's. They don't seem to have any working cards and they are not fixing the defective ones that are being returned to them. It seems to me they just keep swapping out for other defective cards and screwing over their customers.
 
arghhhh wtf!

ARGHHHHHH

i have a leadtek a400 ultra, bought for 400 quid.

i have now recieved my card back from rma (yes my card, not a replacement or renewal but the same faulty card - artifacts at boot etc)

well i have been dealing with te europian ones, slow.....they are the meaning of slow.....they put my 95 year gran, a dead tortoise and a slow then to shame! there response time on emails is terrible, sometimes i got responded to in german (everytime i forwarded all previous convos to them...they could see the english.

anyway, sent card semi working with artifacts to them, i come to the conclusion well i would get a replacement or at least the memory replaced which is what they say causes the artifacts.

well, the same card has returned...but wait...instead of the lethal weapon atomic bomb shielding heatsink, it had a slimmer, smaller, ''A400'' heatsink on.

memory....nada...i took the serial numbers of eash memory under the heatsink down before i sent it, with pictures of the card, serial number of card, etc etc.

o but wait....they put new heatpaste on aswell.....thanks guys, i did that before as i thought it was a heat issue...and i did a better job at putting it on.

so now here i am, card now doesnt even work, pc cant post or boot when it is inserted, card just gets really hot next to capacitors and the crappy fan it has doesnt spin....another rma to get the same awfull card...

thanks leadtek, another customer lost.

ps: leaktek is more useful then blender in a unblenderable place.

nuff said.
 
i got a leadtek card in july 2006 rma 3 times and finally said it was enough all three cards had the same problem and i talked with david jiang before and i was able to get a free upgrade to the 7800gs after saying that i would not pay 80 to upgrade i suggest that u e-mail them alot and call them everyday i got my card in the mail and is coming on the sept 9th dont pay for the upgrade
 
Hi i also bought my Card in July (A400gt) , after a month of it working fine i Had the same frigin problem as all of you guys,

Whats funny is that i live in New Zealand, so i dont think these defective cards where limted to just a bad bunch.

God dam you Leadtek ,
 
i just want to say that i got my 7800gs a few days ago and it works great it even got a g71 core and i was able to over clock it to 543/1420
 
First off, I'm glad I'm not the only one having this problem. I also found this link with a little help from Google. My "helpful" support person through this is also John Zhang.

My card '6800GT TDH PCI-E', has the same corruption on boot bios screen and into the windows boot process, just like everyone else. After sending in my RMA request on the card I shipped it, two weeks later I get my card. I'm thinking awesome!, nice fast service. I first took a look at the card they sent me and noticed some dust and the typical black burn marks on the contact, typical of older refurbished cards. I was kind of taken down from my high hopes of good service when I saw that. Then was even more discusted when it had the same problems as my original.

I sent them a harsh email saying I would like a full refund or an upgrade to a card of equal value of my original purchace price. I got a reply saying we don't give refunds and gave me a link to the RMA page. I replied that I refuse to pay to ship them the card back at my expence. A day later I recieve an email saying they will mail me a shipping label. I assiume this will take the standard week and a half to get to me, then 3 weeks later for a hopefully working card.

Thanks for the help unleashing my rant.
 
i just want to say that when i had called them last time i had talk with john zhang and complain well everyday in the end it was either teh 7800gs or the pci-e 7600gt have u try talkin to the manager?
 
damn......

I probably should have sent my card back in as soon as I got it, as I did notice some issues with the card. Like a loud fan, and some weird graphic issues in 3d games.

The issues have gotten even worse now. The fan is pretty loud and sounds like it could fail, it sounds even worse when the computer first starts up. Personally I think it sounds like the bearings in the fan are bad. When it starts up though it sounds like the fan is actually hitting the heatsink.

If thats not bad enough, while playing 3d games I'm getting all kinds of different corruption. Tears in the world, parts of the world disappearing, being able to see just a bunch of meshes at times and the screen goes black at times. With different drivers the errors move to incorrectly drawn graphics, in WoW the ground goes entirely red, and I can get texture corruption. Some drivers are better than others about that stuff, it doesn't really make much sense to me.

Then while in 2d mode I've started to get bsod and instant computer resets because of the card. Oh the joys of bad memory.

The real topper comes in as I tried to give them a call, and no one was there or they were not answering. One of the messages I got from the tech department was that they were not in for the thanksgiving holiday..... forgive me if I missed something but wasn't that last week. You would think they would be back by now.

For now I've just sent them a service request. Lets see how long it takes them this time around.
 
I just read this entire thread in safe mode. my eyes are killing me.

So I have a leadwek a400 gt tdh and it worked fine for a little over a year. during some half-life2 gaming it covered the screen with lines and then crashed my whole system almost immediately. i took the thing apart and reattached the heat sinks and everything but it happened a few more times. finally one time when i booted it up i got all those artifacts everyone is talking about in the BIOS, and when I got to the windows (xp x64 pro) loading screen, it would reboot.

however if i tried safe mode it loaded. so i uninstalled the nvidia drivers that i had and it defaulted back to the windows display adapters (circa 2002) and now i could once again boot into windows normally (however the BIOS artifacts are still present). After doing research i stumble upon beta drivers for the 6800gt (and many other cards) released by nvidia. i install and run them and i am back to my original problem of auto-rebooting everytime i get to the windows loading screen.

so it seems that after working fine with the nvidia drivers for more than a year, windows decides that it didn't want to use them anymore, it wants to use its own, ****ty drivers that run the card with the efficiency of a quadriplegic traffic cop. 'look ma, i can max-out the shadowing on tetris.'

i can deal with artifacts in the bios if the card works fine otherwise, and im the type of lazy **** that would rather buy another 6800gt (not a leadtek though) for 150 bucks than deal with the RMA process. so i am wondering, are there any drivers out there that run the 6800gt series for windows xp x64 professional that i may have missed? also, if you are having the same problem as me and haven't tried a driver swap, i encourage trying it, cause maybe it's just my computer or something. either way i'd really like to know.
 
You can forget about trying different drivers, your card just took a crap on you. It isn't windows, and its not your drivers. These cards have some bad ram in them. I'm not quite willing to go as far as to say the heatsink is part of the problem as well, but I suspect it may be. Either because its just not stable enough or its a bit to heavy to be hanging there like it is without more support.

Anyway you look at it though your card is on its last legs. Here is your current problem. You have a graphics card that runs on the agp slot. Unfortunatly there are not a lot of those left. Soon you'll need to upgrade your motherboard and graphics card to pci express, I'm in the same boat here. But the thing is if your going to buy a new card you may as well get the new motherboard and go with the pci express. Myself I'm going to get my rma taken care of so I can save up some money and replace my motherboard cpu and graphics card at pretty much the same time.

The only current problem is Leadtek usa is currenly in the process of moving their offices somewhere else. I was told they were going to be out of their current offices on December 15th. Because of this its been very hard to get in contact with anyone there. I believe its also kind of problematic for sending in a card right now, as tech support probably won't have much time to look at it. A bad situation all around right now.
 
ranmas said:
You can forget about trying different drivers, your card just took a crap on you. It isn't windows, and its not your drivers. These cards have some bad ram in them. I'm not quite willing to go as far as to say the heatsink is part of the problem as well, but I suspect it may be. Either because its just not stable enough or its a bit to heavy to be hanging there like it is without more support.

Anyway you look at it though your card is on its last legs. Here is your current problem. You have a graphics card that runs on the agp slot. Unfortunatly there are not a lot of those left. Soon you'll need to upgrade your motherboard and graphics card to pci express, I'm in the same boat here. But the thing is if your going to buy a new card you may as well get the new motherboard and go with the pci express. Myself I'm going to get my rma taken care of so I can save up some money and replace my motherboard cpu and graphics card at pretty much the same time.

The only current problem is Leadtek usa is currenly in the process of moving their offices somewhere else. I was told they were going to be out of their current offices on December 15th. Because of this its been very hard to get in contact with anyone there. I believe its also kind of problematic for sending in a card right now, as tech support probably won't have much time to look at it. A bad situation all around right now.

Ah well thanks for the bad news haha. no honestly I mean it; now I can stop struggling with this thing. However, I guess I forgot to mention, I have the PCI-E version of the card, not the AGP. when you plug it in and screw it to the case it sits very firmly in the slot, despite it's weight. The motherboard I have even has a plastic latch that locks the card in when it's plugged into the slot. But I do believe you that it's a RAM issue. A lot of people have 6800gt's and windows x64 pro, and i haven't run into anyone else complaining about x64 drivers for their cards except for people with this leadtek.

yea, i've been thinking of getting a new mobo/cpu too. I'm so god damn tired of having to find 64-bit compatible drivers and hardware, it's a pain in the ***. god damn 32-bit dual core comes out right after i build my system and all of a sudden no one gives a flying ****ball about 64. oh well, i guess that's not totally true, and i can always wait for the socket 939 64-bit dual cores (which may be out by now for all i know). either way though, the 64-bit enhancement wasn't worth the aggrivation in my opinion.
 
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