First of all: no hate on Sapphire please. They were very friendly and they make great products!
PSA: Sapphire Germany might not honor warranty if you take of the cooler off your Vega GPU
Now to the story: I bought a used reference Vega 64 from a miner for a pretty decent price. I mainly needed the compute power for a Uni project but I also wanted to game on my freesync monitor so it had to be AMD ;)
The SAPPHIRE NITRO+ Radeon RX 590 Special Edition graphics card continues the ongoing improvement of the Polaris GPU series and represents the ultimate gaming product in its segment. FinFET process has evolved further to 12 nanometers lithography, resulting in better performance while retaining the same 175 Watts of energy consumption of an RX 580.
Because it was way too loud, after making sure it works fine, I took off the reference cooler and slapped the Morpheus 2 on it. It worked brilliantly and even hot spot temps and VRM temps were lower than before.
After about a week of being happy with my new card my PC didn't boot up any more. I checked and noticed that all the fans were spinning but the LEDs on the Vega stayed off. No signal from the monitors.
So it worked perfectly fine, but between a shutdown and a boot somehow the card died.
Of course I suspected it being my mod so I took of the Morpheus and checked the card. It looked fine, there was barely any sag because I used the backplate. No VRM heatsink had fallen off, nothing to see really. I tested it in a friend's PC because I suspected my PSU but no chance either, it was the card.
Then on a whim I contacted Sapphire. I told them in my initial mail that I'd taken off the cooler and the card initially worked fine. I also told them I had no receipt because I bought it used. The initial response was not what I expected: 'Well we can look at it and maybe diagnose the problem, but an RMA is no option since the cooler and card are too complex to change for customers.'
Really didn't expect that since computerbase.de also states Sapphrie still honors their warranty after dissassembly. Whatever, I for sure wasn't able to fix it so I sent it in. Yesterday I got an email back that said: 'There's no visible damage on the card and the only thing we noticed is that you used too much thermal paste.' Then they restated that no further steps to repair it can be done because I disassembled the card.
So no I'm getting the broken card back and gonna try some fixes myself (the oven is already preheating ;) ). Really sad, but next time I'll just get a card with a decent cooler from the getgo. I'm too old for this stuff anyway.
My guess is it's fine on Sapphire's 580/590 and maybe even the custom Vegas. But the reference Vega apparently is an outlier.
![Terms Terms](https://www.dhresource.com/albu_1024801470_00-1.0x0/wholesale-brand-sapphire-amd-radeon-hd-7350.jpg)
Thanks for reading and remember to ask your manufacturer before disassembling your card!
TL;DR: Changed cooler on used reference Vega 64, Sapphire can't honor warranty because disassembling the card is so complex the warranty is void when doing it yourself.