How do I know for sure my graphics card is a lemon?

[toobladink]

A while ago, I bought a 1070 Ti off eBay, back when they first fell in price (with the release of RTX cards).

 

TL;DR

I've had previous cards installed on my system - I have a feeling there may be a software conflict causing me to crash in almost every single game, but sometimes games work great for me. How can I tell it's the hardware itself and if I should sell the card for parts only and get a new one? What can I do since I crash in every single game?

 

Anyways, the games I played were never too demanding or that have been out for a while, so they were likely using older graphics APIs. I've always had trouble with crashes or stuttering though in a lot of games - like every, single, game. At first I thought it might be related to a CPU bottleneck, so I would immediately limit my framerate whenever I could. (Even though task manager never showed CPU usage at 100% in most cases)

 

But here's what my experience has been like:

I bought Battlefield V. Game was great for a while (had to run it on DX11), like for the first two months or so I had it, it worked great. No crashes or anything - but a patch came out where I started crashing. My game would just freeze for three seconds and then quit to the desktop. This is when it began (and this was a month after I bought the GPU). I could play for about 5-20 minutes depending on my luck, and this happens still months later. I gave up on trying about three months ago because I was fed up, and figured it was just a bad game.

Then I started playing fortnite with my friends, but if I set the resolution to 1440P (like my monitor supports), I crash in a similar manner, almost as soon as I load into a game - game freezes for a bit, then quits to desktop. However, if I set the resolution to 1080p, it works great for about an hour or so, but still crashes.

Now, since I mostly play runescape and bought the GPU just so I could play FPS games with my friends, it wasn't a huge deal to me. Sometimes we would just load up counterstrike and play that.

 

However, I also own a laptop (with worse specs) and EVERY single game I have experience crashing with works PERFECTLY on there. So that's how I've been able to play FPS games with my friends, but now I'm sick of dropping nearly $300 on a GPU and having it be the problem. I had always thought it was a software thing, but I want to know for sure if there's a way for me to test that the GPU itself is the issue and if I should just get a new one. My computer has gone through some changes that have led me to believe it could be like a conflicting driver thing and that I should do a clean reinstall of Windows or something. I started with the 2400G, got an Nvidia 770 from a friend, moved back to integrated graphics for a month, and then upgraded to the 1070 Ti. Every configuration beforehand has worked great - no issues that I can recall. So with the frequent GPU switches, I've installed and uninstalled different divers several times.

 

I bring this up because I've been playing Modern warfare and like a week after release it was working great on my desktop. Then there was an update and I can't get it to work, no matter what I do. Tried playing windowed, safe mode, running game in DX11, etc. And since my laptop can't run this game super well, I want to get this working so I have a smooth experience playing MW.

 

Relevant system specs:

AMD 2400G

Vengeance 3000MHz RAM (16GB)

EVGA Nvidia 1070 Ti (FTW2 model)

Gigabyte B350 Gaming micro

Samsung 870 Evo 250GB Sata SSD

Corsair 550W power supply

 

If you're curious, my laptop that works perfectly has:

Nvidia 950M

7th gen i5 7200U

12GB 2133MHz RAM

 

So I only get like 30 FPS with lowest settings on MW lol.

[Bombastinator]

Are your drivers up to date?  Works with older stuff but not newer stuff implies old drivers.  The card companies frequently do not update drivers.  You need the ones actually from Nvidia.  

[toobladink]

22 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Are your drivers up to date?  Works with older stuff but not newer stuff implies old drivers.  The card companies frequently do not update drivers.  You need the ones actually from Nvidia.  

I would think this is the issue too - but I've always kept them up to date when I can, and even when I installed the driver Nvidia released for MW and didn't install the one released later for RDR2, MW bugged me about not having the latest driver

[RAS_3885]

5 hours ago, toobladink said:

So with the frequent GPU switches, I've installed and uninstalled different divers several times

Did you try DDU to completely wipe any old drivers and start fresh?

[toobladink]

19 hours ago, RAS_3885 said:

Did you try DDU to completely wipe any old drivers and start fresh?

I'll try that and provide an update! I haven't tried DDU specifically, but I have tried removing old drivers before.

[toobladink]

Tried DDU and after about an hour of fillding with it.. I was able to play for about an hour. Will have to test and see if this is an actual fix, if it's temporary, etc. I'll try and play for a couple hours throughout the week and report any crashes. I have been able to play games for a couple hours before without crashes, so I'm still skeptical. 

[toobladink]

Update: tried playing MW again today after the patch last night. Crashed as soon as I loaded in - will try DDU again since the game was patched but I would still appreciate suggestions for a more permanent solution

 

EDIT: DDU seemed to do the trick, but still crash randomly sometimes. Sometimes I crash immediately, but I was able to go for a straight hour and a half until crashing.

[toobladink]

Update:

 

Haven't played the game basically since I last posted. With every update possible, I have been retrying it. I hate this. I feel so alienated because I am literally the only person in my house that can't play. When everyone logs on to play, I can only play RuneScape or something. I'm at a serious loss here on what to try