14 DAY TRIAL // The blue screen of death (BSOD) isn't about to lose its status as the most alarming thing that can happen to a PC (short of the hardware combusting for some reason), but it isn't the only type of screen of death, as Sapphire's Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition graphics have proven.
Because of some bad quality ceramic capacitors, the power to the GPU is not conditioned properly on these video boards.
This leads to system crashes and a black screen, as the input from the PC's video board suddenly stops.
The issue did not crop up overly much, but most complaints did name a Sapphire board as the problem.
AMD had researched the matter for months and informed add-in board partners about the components responsible some time ago.
Sapphire either did not do it properly or missed a few cards, because some of the recently-manufactured HD 7870 units had the problem anyway, according to BeHardware.
Fortunately, the RMA (return merchandise authorization) has been relaxed and the inventories of French retailers have been recalled.