Hello, fellers,
Being on somewhat of a budget, I purchased a refurbished 1080 Ti from Zotac (only $330 USD!). Coming from a GTX 1060 6gb, I'm feeling pretty excited.
Was delivered today, so once I'm home from work, I swapped out the GPUs. Boots up fine, threw it on a benchmark (userbenchmark, to be specific) and after the first 2-3 tests, both my monitors had artifacts and my PC froze up.
I reseated the card and the two PCI-E 8-pin power cables to make sure it's in there all nice and good, plus fresh drivers, no GPU OC software installed, but same issue. HWiNFO showed me I was right at about 60C when it artifacted.
I swapped my GTX 1060 back in and everything's all nice and good again - no artifacting or anything.
I'm running a Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GB DDR4 3600mhz, on a Thermaltake Smart 750W PSU. I am slightly concerned that my PSU isn't able to supply enough power, or maybe even the wall socket, but from what I've read, it's more likely to be faulty VRAM or a cooling problem. Plus this PSU supplies 62A @ 12V, and the 3700X is 65W TDP. A quick wattage calculation on Newegg indicates I should be consuming somewhere in the realm of 450-500W. (There actually isn't an option to calculate the power needed for a 1080 Ti on the Newegg wattage calculator so I used the 2080 Ti instead.)
Well, I don't really know why I'm making this post, as I made the RMA request for a replacement earlier today. I am really tempted to open it up and see what state the thermal paste is in and how good the coverage is. I've read some posts where a user found that one small corner of the die wasn't covered by paste and that caused the card to artifact. Also wanting to make sure every thermal pad is looking good and looks like it had been making good contact. The card was PRETTY HOT after using it for like 10-15 minutes but I've never owned a beefy GPU before. There's these "power boost" modules on the backside of the PCB that were particularly hot too. I almost want to prove to myself that I could fix it but if the VRAM is bad... then RIP.
What's your take? Bad VRAM or should I check things out?