Stabilizing a GPU

[toobladink]

I've recently received a used card that a friend upgraded from. It's an EVGA 1070 Ti FTW2. He originally bought it to play shooters and stuff but he said just a little after the warranty expired it started acting all weird. It got to the point where games would crash as soon as you open them. Whatever, I'm not gonna create a big anecdote here.

 

Problems:

It can still do little things, but as soon as it goes under load it just quits. Sometimes it makes coil whine, sometimes it doesnt, sometimes it doesn't even sound like coil whine.

I get all sorts of error messages from different games all the time. It's never consistent so I never know what to do. I will often get several different error messages from the same game when I try running it again. For example, CoD MW loves to throw out the following error codes which are either related to RAM or GPU. Sometimes the code will be related to having to reseat them, sometimes the error code means DirectX crashed, etc.

 

Despite getting error message unrelated to the GPU, I feel confident it is my GPU. When I switch it out for my own GPU, everything still works like I would expect.

 

What it can still do:

So it's really just used in an office computer right now. All the video processing it does is either for zoom, Old School Runescape (an old java based game... so literally no load), discord, and other basic things. It pretty much can't game and that's why I want to try and fix this thing.

 

What can I do?

I feel like I really don't know where to start. At first, I just opened up MSI afterburner and tried to let it find the best overclock. I was able to play some CoD and then it quit after about five minutes. No error message or anything.

Is there some sort of program I can run to help find the most stable settings for my GPU? I don't want the most stable overclock. I want the most stable settings. Am I SoL? Not a big deal for me as it is for my friend - but his stimulus was spent on a new GPU some months back and he's just had this sitting around because he didn't feel right trying to sell it to anyone. Anyways... would love to try and figure out how we can get this thing working.

I am obviously on the most up to date drivers. 

[Alex Atkin UK]

Just the obvious really, underclock it, reduce the power limit, see if if it can run.  But I'd be tempted to suspect there is at least a fault with the power delivery, maybe capacitor problems, assuming the chip or RAM isn't plain trashed.