Underclocking to avoid issues

[Verrierr]

Hello everyone,

I have a funny story that I thought might be useful to someone so I figured I'll post it here.

So recently I bought "Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning" game and at first everything worked fine but after a while my GPU (R9 270x) started failing (artifacts on whole screen followed immediately by black screen and everything turning unresponsive) and I had to hard reset my PC to make it work again. Apart from this my graphic card works fine so it's probably driver issue and could be fixed with latest whql drivers. Before resorting to that though, I figured I might try to underclock my GPU instead since the type of failure I was getting seemed the same as what would happen if I put it in an unstable overclock. My edition has a bit of a factory overclock so I kind of returned the chip to it's base settings and increased power limit. And as surprising as it might be it worked. I technically lost some performance but I still got solid 75 fps, so it didn't really matter to me.

And now I'm left wondering, can anyone explain why it worked?

[BloodyWaters]

Maybe you didn't do well in the silicon lottery. 

[Terryv]

You GPU might have degraded a bit. Adding some me voltage likely would have fixed it as well

[Technomancer__]

usually the first thing that dies is the power delivery thing so it might be giving unstable voltage at higher frequencies

if these is the problem it might not have much lifetime remaining

 

i might be completly wrong

 

also try increasing voltage it might work

[Verrierr]

13 minutes ago, BloodyWaters said:

 

Maybe you didn't do well in the silicon lottery. 

 

 

11 minutes ago, Terryv said:

Adding some me voltage likely would have fixed it as well

 

10 minutes ago, Ethocreeper said:

also try increasing voltage it might work

I thought about increasing voltage too but since underclocking worked fine I didn't bother. Funny thing is this very card works fine in more GPU intensive titles like witcher 3.

[Technomancer__]

Just now, Verrierr said:

 

 

I thought about increasing voltage too but since underclocking worked fine I didn't bother. Funny thing is this very card works fine in more GPU intensive titles like witcher 3.

maybe because your CPU is a bottleneck

[i_build_nanosuits]

that's normal

4 minutes ago, Verrierr said:

 

 

I thought about increasing voltage too but since underclocking worked fine I didn't bother. Funny thing is this very card works fine in more GPU intensive titles like witcher 3.

GPU's degrade a bit overtime, and your particular chip probably just made the cut for the factory overclocked settings out of the box...and now it's just no longer good enough to sustain the stock settings in every games. Some games can be ''more demanding'' but that does not mean they make it crash...sometimes games have some particularities that might hit the ''weakness'' in the GPU more or something...for example, my 980ti when i overclocked it ''a bit too much'' i was getting flawless experience in battlefield 1 but then rocket league would seize up

 

You got a bit unlucky, your card probably never really overclocked very well either...no big deal though, just push some more power through it and it'll be fine!