Help me diagnose my GPU!

chingyg · February 23, 2015

My configuration:

3570K 3.4GHz

Asrock z77 Extreme 4

Seasonic 760W Platinum

G.Skill 2x4GB 1600Mhz

Lian Li K62

Alright so, I have 2 Gigabyte R9 280X which I plan on selling one of them. For the sake of this post, I will call them card A and card B. During the course of my problems, I did not crossfire them. Only one card was in my rig at a time.

So card B started having problems.

- My screen would "glitch"

- I saw random pixels on my screen flashing

- My screen would completely freeze and the "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" notification would appear

- Eventually computer would not power on properly. After the bios screen, the screen would turn black with all mouse and keyboard unresponsive

I switched out card B for card A, and everything was smoothe. So I thought there was something definitely wrong with card B. I filed a RMA request and had Gigabyte repair my card. I noticed that they did not tell me what the problem was, or what they fixed. Is this normal?

Two weeks later I received card B from Gigabyte. I install card B into my main rig, and behold, the same problem still persist (computer would freeze at a black screen upon bootup). I thought that there's no way Gigabyte could have ignored something like this so easily. I then realized that I've been using the top PCI slot for my cards all this time, and that the problem could have been my motherboard. So I installed card B in the second PCI slot this time and ran 3D mark, and played some games. I've noticed that my card seems OK. I didn't see any of the problems from before. But why did card A not have any problems in the first PCI slot? Could my motherboard be faulty? Thanks!

Bussinateur · February 23, 2015

First, ensure you aren't overclocking your B card. Then set power limit to +20% on MSI afterburner for the B card and turn down the clock speed by 10mhz. Benchmark using UNIGINE HEAVEN to see stability. Keep turning down the clock speed until your system is stable.