GPU behaved oddly, trying to figure out possible causes

Estacado · April 2, 2023

Im using an RX 6950XT for my rig with an i7 12700f and an 850w +Gold power supply from BeQuiet.

Yesterday while watching a movie the system completely froze, no blue screen, no blackscreen etc. Just a frozen image of the movie I was watching. I restarted the pc and everything seemed to be working fine. The event logs provided no info on the possible issue for that freeze. So I started FurMark in order to figure out potential issues with the hardware part by part. The behaviour of the gpu was odd:

My usual benchmark setting gets me around 72-76 FPS using 325 watts at 72-76 degrees celcius. This time it started at 60 fps and slowly went up to 72 max. After 90 seconds the frames and the power usage went down significantly to 225w. I installed the newest AMD driver but the issue prevailed for another 20 Minutes. After restarting the pc again, everything seems to be working fine again. All games run smoothly, and FurMark produces the usual results. 72-76 FPS using 325 watts at 72-76 degrees celcius.

I have no idea what caused the problem. Any ideas what kind of bugs/errors cause these kind of gpu problems?