Testing VRAM?

[AbydosOne]

My XFX RX5600XT has been very occasionally crashing to black screen (OS still seemingly running), only in certain tasks (scrubbing through video files, normally, but sometimes just watching Youtube). Sometimes the drivers will catch it and can recover, but will be much less stable post-recovery until a reboot (like, it even corrupts JPEG decoding, which is not something I thought was GPU accelerated). Other times, booting will hang on GPU initialization until I power cycle it one/a few times. I've tested a few different driver versions, as well as a few different CPU/RAM combinations (different CPU incidentally, and stock RAM speeds for a while after moving it caused a POST failure). I've tried torture testing it by playing multiple YT streams in parallel, but that didn't invoke any issues; playing games (the few I ever do...) also don't seem to cause problems; it's more or less random (sometimes days, sometimes minutes).

 

Today when I booted, I noticed some flickering pixels on the Windows spinny circle screen that went away when I hit the login splash. The artifacts looked a lot like what I've seen failing VRAM to look like.

 

I have a few months left in the warrantee period and would like to take advantage of it.

 

TL;DR: is there a way to diagnose or positively indicate failing VRAM? I'd like to have something concrete to show to XFX when I do RMA it.

[Bombastinator]

32 minutes ago, AbydosOne said:

My XFX RX5600XT has been very occasionally crashing to black screen (OS still seemingly running), only in certain tasks (scrubbing through video files, normally, but sometimes just watching Youtube). Sometimes the drivers will catch it and can recover, but will be much less stable post-recovery until a reboot (like, it even corrupts JPEG decoding, which is not something I thought was GPU accelerated). Other times, booting will hang on GPU initialization until I power cycle it one/a few times. I've tested a few different driver versions, as well as a few different CPU/RAM combinations (different CPU incidentally, and stock RAM speeds for a while after moving it caused a POST failure). I've tried torture testing it by playing multiple YT streams in parallel, but that didn't invoke any issues; playing games (the few I ever do...) also don't seem to cause problems; it's more or less random (sometimes days, sometimes minutes).

 

Today when I booted, I noticed some flickering pixels on the Windows spinny circle screen that went away when I hit the login splash. The artifacts looked a lot like what I've seen failing VRAM to look like.

 

I have a few months left in the warrantee period and would like to take advantage of it.

 

TL;DR: is there a way to diagnose or positively indicate failing VRAM? I'd like to have something concrete to show to XFX when I do RMA it.

Not that I know of.  Part of the problem is the stuff is alway soldered down so dying vram just means dying graphics card to most people.  I’d like to see something written myself.  A niche that has yet to be filled afaik.

[AbydosOne]

bumping for attention.

 

I guess my other question is, since it's an out-of-production card, if XFX finds it needs replacement, what do I get back? Do they keep a stash of every card just for 1-for-1 RMAs, or would I get an "upgrade"? (which is a little annoying since I bought this specific card with an emphasis on aesthetics)

[Bombastinator]

5 hours ago, AbydosOne said:

bumping for attention.

 

I guess my other question is, since it's an out-of-production card, if XFX finds it needs replacement, what do I get back? Do they keep a stash of every card just for 1-for-1 RMAs, or would I get an "upgrade"? (which is a little annoying since I bought this specific card with an emphasis on aesthetics)

RMA is a specific thing.  Out of production cards won’t be eligible.