Red Artifacts when Shutting Down/Restarting

[Leeroy_Milo]

Hello everyone and thank you for taking your time for reading this post.

So lately I've been experiencing this weird problem. Not always, but sometimes, doesn't matter if I shutdown my PC or restart it, the whole system freezes and then there's a BSOD for like a milisecond and the BSOD happens so fast, Windows can't even create a dump file and I cannot find it and analyse the error. The system freezes completely and the upper left corner of my screen is split in half. The left side is a bit bigger than a half and that side is red filled with white dots. The right side of the rectangle is black. Nothing happens and the system won't unfreeze or turn off/restart. I don't really think it has to do with an overheating issue as all my parts actually stay relatively cool both while gaming and doing nothing in the background and while doing some light multitasking.

While booting up the PC, the lowest CPU temp I saw was 17°C and it mostly hovers around 20°C. While gaming, it reaches temperatures anywhere between 55°C and 60°C, depending on how much it's getting utilized. The GPU idles at about 30°C and while gaming, anywhere between 65°C and 80°C. My Harddrive and two SSDs hover in the mid 30s.

I really don't know why this is happening and while gaming, I have no issues whatsoever, no strange stuttering or crashes or artifacts appearing on screen, everything is perfectly smooth, It only happens when shutting down or restarting. And it's only happening sometimes.

My Specs:

FX 8350 @ 4.0 GHz
16GB DDR3 RAM 1600 MHz
GTX 1060 3GB KFA2 OC Black
GIGABYTE GA-970A-DS3P FX
Antec Earth Watts 650W 80+ Platinum
Alpenföhn Ben Nevis CPU Cooler 120mm
ACER K222HQL Monitor

Thanks in advance for reading and any help would be appreciated

[Kisai]

I haven't seen one of these issues for long time on a gaming machine, and there's three possibilities that come to mind:

 

1) Replace your HDMI cables if you have connected it via HDMI or Displayport. One example of the "red mess" is a case where a monitor connected via DP->DVI adapter freaks out, and it actually lost the HDCP handshake. This is the simplest answer, but probably not the right one, as this effect is 100% over the screen.

2) I had a "random red pixel" issue with a AMD A-series GPU in a SFF (small form factor) machine. It would always kick in when the screen resolution changed and would disappear the same way.

3) I've seen a "slowly degrading" effect from a AMD Radeon card where it appears that the RAM on the board was slowly failing as the way the GPU uses RAM is different from the CPU, and it can continue to work while corrupting the display (in particular, the framebuffer memory) for a long time until it corrupts a pointer and crashes the GPU.

 

Your problem sounds like the early stages of 3 above. If you can acquire another GPU of the same class (eg a GTX 1060, OC or not OC) to see if the problem also happens with a different card, you can confirm if the GPU is actually failing or if something else is in play.

 

If you have OC'd the GPU, you can also dial it back with ASUS GPU Tweak and see if the problem shows up with the settings dialed up to maximum cooling or set to silent.

 

[Leeroy_Milo]

My GPU is actually connected via DVI so maybe it could also be the cable then. Although, I really hope my GPU isn't dying, then I'm gonna have to go back to the GTX 1050 I used and it's gonna suck not being able to play most games at ultra settings haha. For now, everything seems fine again. I've been using my PC for the last 2 days and haven't gotten a single crash or artifacts. I will post again when it happens and I will also try and take a picture or video when it happens.