staticmaker

GIGABYTE GA990-FXA UD3 AMD 8350 8-core CPU 4ghz 4Gig (x4=16gig) DDR3 1333mhz WD 128gig SSD RADEON R0 270x XFX HP 25BW display OMG I am so tired and fed up after a week of trying to fix my Radeon R9 270x (xfx) graphics card. I called customer service yesterday (Fri 8-9-18) at 11am and their voice recording said that they're only open from Mon-Fri 9am-5pm and that they are now closed. I tried several other times and have never been able to get anyone on the phone. Always says they're closed and it's during business hours. Their website support forms are pointless since they rarely respond and IF they do (and that's a big "If") it's an incorrect answer and so bad, in fact, that I wonder if they just send out random answers about anything back to everyone. The problem is that my PC (Win7) just keeps shutting down during one of any number of actions....nothing specific causes it. Usually if I click on something...like Chrome, ...BLINK! and it shuts off. Or if I'm lucky enough to get Chrome open (with a few tabs) and I click on another new tab....BLINK! It's off again. Sometimes I only get to the logon screen, hit "enter", and BLINK!. Power off. It's also strange that I must turn off the power strip for a minute (and back on) before the PC's power button will turn it back on again. I went through a seriously tedious series of troubleshooting to narrow the problem down to the R9 200 series drivers. Of course I completely uninstall dll's and reboot before installing different ones. This is painstaking. The problem does NOT occur in safe mode nor does it occur when I uninstall the card in DevMgr. So right now, I'm using basic windows graphics dll's just so my PC stays on. Of course the graphic's quality is similar to that of an old calculator.....BUT it stays on. I tried downloading a bunch of AMD's old drivers from 2014-present but so far only tried 3 -with no success. Oh.... interesting thing happened during some of these installs. One of the files contained some online gaming utility. I'm not a gamer but though "Ya' know what? maybe since this card is designed for gaming, maybe installing one of these games may add something that could help the situation". So, I installed what I thought was a simple online game. Turns out, it required something called Steam to run so I had to install, register and e-mail confirm to use it. So now I can play? "NO!!!". Now I gotta register for the game utility (Vypr or something)....login in two different panels. Then something else needed installed and reg's.... Man I eventually had about 10 window oen just to try to play a stupid game. I was like...."This is assanine." So I had to uninstall everything and clean the reg. Now i"ll be blasted with emails, ads, and other crap....on FB too since I registered one of them with my FB account. What a freakin bunch of nonsense. I thought that when companies claim to be great at what they do, then they actually strived to be the best. ? What ever happened to this philosophy? Am I the only one who still believes in this? Now back to installing older dll's.-It's such a hassle doing all this crap. I've gotta' remove the card in DM, reboot, install old driver, reboot, then see if it shuts off. When it does, I've got to repeat the 10 minute process. I've had the card for about 3 years and It's worked fine until 3 months ago. The power outages were very few at first. Now I can put on a movie and it will play fine until I click on almost any other application. Oh... and this is interesting: When I try to use Windows performance tools and rate the computer (You know where it grades your computer's components from "1" up to a "7.9".... it shuts off. Also interesting is that it shuts off anytime I tru to use any kind of utility that accesses hardware for evaluation or monitoring purposes. I've found many other prople online with the SAME issue!! Nobody is getting helped! AMD is simply IGNORING everyone! If this is a marketing ploy to frustrate users so they just buy a new graphics card, it's sleazy and disrespectful to us and it upsets me a little. Honestly, I feel it's a crime and they should be penalized some way for this, at the very least, beaten up. Yeah... that's it. We send some thugs over to their office and have 'em all beat up. I really can't afford to drop $200 on a new card right now. Even if it was a problem with the card (and not the dll's), I'd need to go the RMA route. Upon reading the warranty and RMA info, I was directed to register- simple enough. I was confused when I was asked to register a credit card JUST to register with them. Not to mention there was no explanation for why they wanted this or any details on what or how much they might wanna' charge me. Judging by the high volume of others with this same exact problem, I'm pretty sure AMD is just legally stealing our money. I will never buy another product from them. Anyway, my experience with the Radeon XFX R9-270x Graphics card was one of those times in life that truly tested my skills as a Zen Buddhist. I searched for help and tried about 30 diferent solutions that did not work. The only thing that worked was to uninstal it. This is how I know that it's the card. My displays are still plugged into it but the drivers are rem'd. I will say, however, that WHILE it worked, it was nice!