980 Ti Gaming Crashes

mcrmy1996 · January 6, 2016

Hey, so I have never posted here, or on any other forum before but I'm hoping for a good experience, especially from the Linus Tech Tips community.

I myself have a custom rig and have always been technical with computers, generally being able to solve every problem I'm faced with. This one however, has me stumped.
I have a co-worker who just bought their parts and got me to build it for them, all was going well, the computer was posting and he installed Windows and his drivers himself.
Later on however he told me that the PC was freezing and then crashing to reboot when he played games after roughly 10 minutes. It was happening faster the more demanding the game.

This lead me to think it was a power problem, as he's running a 980 ti Gigabyte Windforce card.

I rebuild the computer today for him, tested his GPU in my case, ran some stress tests on the GPU and some benchmarks (Aida 64, Tomb Raider, 3D Mark etc) and the card was fine, the max temperature read was 72c when running the Aida 64 stress test for 10 minutes.

Putting the card back into his computer though, everything was fine for a while but its happening again. I will post his specs below. I thought it could be a power issue, or perhaps a RAM problem but at this point it's easier to just admit defeat and ask for help. Thank you for any and all replies, if anyone has had this issue before, please tell me how you fixed it.

Specs:

CPU: i5 6600,

Motherboard: Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI

PSU: evga supernova 750 B2

OS: WIndows 10 64bit

SSD: Kingston 120GB

GPU: Gigabyte Windforce 980 ti

youngben · January 6, 2016

maybe try testing ur gpu in his build

swimsphinx · January 6, 2016

That power supply should be fine for the card (assuming it is functioning properly). If you tested the card in your build and it was perfectly fine then it is unlikely that it is the card that is the problem. It could very well be bad RAM or some other part in his build.

Since it is an entirely new build we can't rule out any of the parts for being bad until we test for their instabilities individually. (hence the graphics card has already went through this and is unlikely to be the problem).

See if you can get ahold of his computer again and run some memory tests along with swapping out your ram to see if that clears anything up.

If you are convinced it is a hardware issue test each part individually until you can isolate the defective part and then come up with a solution.

Without more detail about the crashes (display driver crashes, blue screen, full shutdown[this could point towards a power supply problem]) I can't give immediate advice or personal experience. Anyways good luck I hope you can find the problem .