Need a sanity check (2070 Super driver issue?)

[Satan_Prometheus]

So, I need a sanity check regarding my 2070 Super.

 

My card is a Gigabyte Gaming OC 2070 Super which I bought at the card's launch. Originally I had it paired with an R5 3600 but after I had some issues with that, I upgraded the CPU to an R5 5600X. The rest of the relevant components are:

 

Asrock X570M Pro4

16GB DDR4-3600 CL 16 G Skill Ripjaws

Corsair TX850M (2017 model)

 

Everything is completely stock except for XMP being enabled.

 

So, my card ran totally fine for about 2.25 years after I got it, but last fall (around November) I started noticing weird behavior with it. I first noticed it when I saw that I had lost performance in Unigine Superposition. When I first got the card, it usually scored around 8300-8400 in Superposition 4K Optimized, which is about right for a totally stock 2070 Super. But around last November, I realized that it was getting scores in the low 7000s in this test.

 

Looking at the card's stats, I quickly determined that the issue was power-related, because the card wasn't thermal throttling (mid-60s) but it was running at only .8 volts and only maintaining the base clock of 1605 Mhz when it should be up closer to 1800-1900Mhz under load. I tried a whole bunch of fixes: reinstalling the driver, rolling back to a previous driver, reinstalling Windows, resetting the Afterburner settings, etc. Nothing seemed to work.

 

Eventually I gave up and decided that the issue must be my GPU power delivery system failing, but because prices for new GPUs were still shitty at that time, and because my GPU still technically worked, I decided to hang on to the card and just deal with slightly lower performance. Also, my wife uses this PC for her illustration business and I didn't want to mess with anything or send the card in for an RMA, because at the time I wasn't sure if I'd be able to find a stopgap card without paying an arm and a leg.

 

So anyway, fast forward to today. I've updated the drivers a couple times without anything changing since then, and I really just stopped testing it because I figured it wasn't going to get fixed. But today I noticed an occasional buzzing noise in my PC - the sort that happens when a fan's bearings are going bad - so I decided to run a few benchmarks to see if I could isolate which fan was causing the issue.

 

Shockingly, when I ran Superposition, the GPU suddenly works correctly again, running at 1900+ Mhz and full voltage. WTF? I haven't really messed with anything, software-side, the last few months, so it must have been fixed in a driver.

 

Has anyone else experienced this lately with the Nvidia drivers? Or did I just go temporarily insane?

 

 

[Fasauceome]

Computers are more human like than most people believe. It's almost like they get sick and heal sometimes. I've had things like this happen, problems appearing with minor symptoms and then disappearing like nothing happened.

[manikyath]

19 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

Computers are more human like than most people believe. It's almost like they get sick and heal sometimes. I've had things like this happen, problems appearing with minor symptoms and then disappearing like nothing happened.

i prefer to put it like this:

Quote

If IT were predictable, my job wouldnt be necessary.

 

on topic:

iffy power connector, perhaps? i've fixed computers by tightening the pins on ATX power plugs before...

[Satan_Prometheus]

23 minutes ago, manikyath said:

 

 

on topic:

iffy power connector, perhaps? i've fixed computers by tightening the pins on ATX power plugs before...

Maybe? I had checked to make sure the PCIe cables (I am using 2 separate cables) were pushed in all the way at both the PSU and GPU end, because I had actually had an issue a couple years ago where I was getting bluescreens that turned out to be because of a loose connection. But I haven't touched the inside of the PC since the last time I checked on this issue and the GPU was running incorrectly. So I don't know how it could have changed (unless my wife suddenly took a secret interest in PC repair lol).