Graphics card crashing seemingly randomly

[pepizaur]

CPU: i7 8700k

Mobo: Aorus Z370 Gaming 7 (rev 1.0) 

BIOS: F15b

Memory: 4x8GB G.SKILL TridentZ RGB Series DDR4 3200

GPU: ASUS ROG STRIX GeForce RTX 2080TI (ROG-STRIX-RTX-2080TI-O11G)

PSU: Thermaltake Toughpower Grand RGB 850W 80+ gold

 

This is a bit of a saga. Over the past 4 days I have encountered a graphics crash seemingly at random. It first occured while playing Destiny 2 while I running a Vault of Glass. My screens would all go black, my graphics card's fans would stop spinning and it would not recover. I could hear my friends on disco but nothing else. hitting the power button twice would bring back the system but that exposed another issue that had I'd just been dealing with since I bought the thing. If you hard boot the comp it would sometimes just begin an infinite boot loop, no post codes no nothing. The only way I figured out how to fix this was to turn off the power supply and unplug it and wait 5-10 minutes. It would then boot, immediately restart itself and then start cycling through post codes until it successfully started. every time this would happen if you went into the BIOS menu it would inform you that the BIOS had been reset. Initially I thought this was because of the overclock settings I had used (5.0 ghz) but it still occurred long after I had dropped all overclocking on the CPU. I am hesitant to screw with the BIOS so I just left it. This GPU issue especially when replacing one is as problematic as it is currently made me desperate so I fixed that, Updated to the latest version with the @ bios program.... Display crashed as I was doing that so I swapped to the mobo display port, confirmed it had updated correctly and restarted... Still had the issue. I ripped the thing apart, blasted it clean (probably overdue), reseated everything and tried again. It seemed to be okay as I just browsed the web watched videos but when I started up a games it would crash just randomly. I lasted like 3 overrides in destiny before I crashed. I tried again in world of tanks and crashed immediately on loading in. I restarted and started googling things and then crashed with nothing but chrome tabs and discord open. I checked the even viewer and the only thing I could find was a 4101 ("Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered") error that seems to correspond roughly with when I would lose display. I then tried ripping all the drivers out and doing a clean reinstall. This seemed to work. I was able to play a bunch of different games that I had installed without interruption so I thought I had solved the issue. This was on Sunday. I had no issues. over the intervening 2 days I played Destiny, World of tanks, World of warships and STAR WARS: Jedi Fallen Order with no issues. Then today I was playing STAR WARS: Jedi fallen order and I decided to exit the game and go do something else. Exiting the game caused the same issue to reappear. I had the same issue as before where It would just stop display and not recover. On top of this the same Booting issue re-appeared almost exactly as it was before and the only thing that stops the infinite booting loop was manually turning off the PSU, unplugging it and waiting 5-10 minutes. So I went back to what worked and I Ripped the NVIDIA drivers out and re-installed and tried playing a game, I played a game in world of tanks and had no issues, thought it was fine. Got up and smoked, sat back down to play some more and 3 minutes into loading into a WoT match I crash same as before. I have a Thermaltake P5 open frame gaming case that necessitates a PCIE riser. I started looking for issues that might not be software related. When I bought the thing the riser that came with the case wasn't working so I replaced it with an Athena Power riser that also didn't work and settled on a EZDIY brand one that seemed to have worked. I pulled it out and inspected it and it seems the left pins that draw power (at least I'm pretty sure that's what they do) where a bit burnt (or possibly corroded couldn't tell) and one of the little sheets was a bit lose. The connectors on the Graphics card itself are all fine as far as I can tell. I am going to replace the riser first thing tomorrow hopefully but do you guys think this is the root of the problem? Any ideas on how to address this mobo issue? Gigabyte and ASUS support have yet to get back to me and I REALLY don't want to replace my card atm.