Best way to test VRAM?

[Justin_]

Hi, somebody gave me a ASUS STRIX 970 GPU and they says that it has an issue that will pop up every 2 or 3 days. The issue they described sounded like a VRAM issue to me. So I was wondering if there any stress test program or method that is designed to hammer a GPU's VRAM instead of just the GPU chip itself??

[Zyndo]

12 minutes ago, Justin_ said:

Hi, somebody gave me a ASUS STRIX 970 GPU and they says that it has an issue that will pop up every 2 or 3 days. The issue they described sounded like a VRAM issue to me. So I was wondering if there any stress test program or method that is designed to hammer a GPU's VRAM instead of just the GPU chip itself??

load games with high resolution textures. textures tend to eat up VRAM without requiring a ton of actual processing power. most games usually do not come with textures extreme enough to really "stress" anything though, so you may need to resort to 3rd party downloads and mods to get the desired effect. Also, turn that Antialiasing wayyy up.

what are the symptoms?

[Justin_]

They said that there was lines and blocking on the screen and sometimes some discoloration. They tried using a different display and they still had the issue. The computer it was in was almost always on 24/7 but the GPU was never under much stress as they bought it for CUDA acceleration (not gaming), but could never got the CUDA acceleration feature in their software to work. They said that restarting the computer fixed the issue until it came up again 2 or 3 days later.

[Justin_]

They also tried using different cables and that didn't fix it. Now that they have a different GPU it is working just fine.

[PenPoint]

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/having-problems-with-video-card-stress-test-its-memory/

Google told me one of these will work in terms of testing VRAM.

[Justin_]

Neet software @PenPoint I will try that and see how things go!

[Zyndo]

13 minutes ago, Justin_ said:

They said that there was lines and blocking on the screen and sometimes some discoloration.

without being able to see the exact issue.... it sounds like it could very well be artifacting due to unstable clockspeeds/voltages. even if you're running its default out of the box settings, you could try manually turning the speeds down just a hair in case the card is boosting itself just a little bit harder than it should without noticing.

[NicholasNicholasNicholas]

18 minutes ago, Justin_ said:

They said that there was lines and blocking on the screen and sometimes some discoloration. They tried using a different display and they still had the issue. The computer it was in was almost always on 24/7 but the GPU was never under much stress as they bought it for CUDA acceleration (not gaming), but could never got the CUDA acceleration feature in their software to work. They said that restarting the computer fixed the issue until it came up again 2 or 3 days later.

 

Those are artifacts. Theyre nothing to worry about, but if they really are annoying you you could mess around with the voltage. More voltage usually gets rid of it. You could also try reducing the clock speeds themselves.

[Justin_]

Just now, Nickathom said:

Those are artifacts. Theyre nothing to worry about, but if they really are annoying you you could mess around with the voltage. More voltage usually gets rid of it. You could also try reducing the clock speeds themselves.

They made it sound like it was covering the full screen like with VRAM issues, but I could be wrong.

[NicholasNicholasNicholas]

3 minutes ago, Justin_ said:

They made it sound like it was covering the full screen like with VRAM issues, but I could be wrong.

Cant you overvolt the vram with nvidia cards?

[Justin_]

5 minutes ago, Nickathom said:

Cant you overvolt the vram with nvidia cards?

I think you can.

[jjohnthedon1]

Gtav max drs 4K then rescale in game 2.0 

max textures 8x msaa this will test the vram to the max 

[Justin_]

Well I can't get anything to make it cause the issue, I guess I will just leave it in for a few days and see if it comes back.

 

Also that software does work, but it is a bit annoying, it will only test 1/3 of the reported RAM because "sometimes drivers don't report the proper amount of RAM" and to make it test everything you need to edit a text file that is written in at least 3 languages (not repeated, but consists of 3 languages) and it is written in perfect ingresh.

 

I gave up and just ran 10 instances at once.