Near constant PC Crashing,

[Joshyy]

I bought a Sapphire 290 about a week ago and put the latest recommended drivers (13.11 beta 9..?) ever since then I've had near constant crashing, I originally looked around on forums and found that it's a common issue with the R9-290 and it will be fixed in a driver update, so I decided in the meantime I will install my old GPU (Sapphire Radeon 6850) back in and roll back to drivers I know are stable (13.9) however within hours of doing that it started crashing again.

 

I get 2 types of crashes, one where the screen just flat out locks up suddenly with no warning, all sound (IE spotify will stop playing),

The other type I get a weird distorted image (http://i.imgur.com/MeRtXmu.jpg) sound continues playing but it's impossible to recover from this, no CTRL+ALT+DELETE or command will recover it from this. 

Both require a hard reset and makes the BIOS tell me "Over-clocking failed" 

 

What I've tried:

Multi-meter on the PSU at 100% of the load I could put on it, Came out at about 12.2V at all times

Tested the RAM, I left Memtest86 running for 18 hours, it found 0 issues.

Resetting the BIOS and underclocking my memory to 1333 (Used to cause issues)

Removing all overclocks on everything

Complete OS reinstall, Moved from W7 to a clean install of W8.1

Prime95 for 2 hours on the CPU, it didn't crash at all or get any errors.

Disabling Adobe Flash (I originally thought it was crashing on Youtube)

Uninstall the drivers using driver sweeper with restarts in-between.

Logging GPU-Z to file (No spikes or anything similar happened right before the crash) 

Swear at the PC and the GPU

Hit the keyboard

 

 

Interestingly, this mainly seems to happen at idle, I played BF3 for 2 hours the other night and got 0 crashes or anything similar.

 

I also can't place the blame on the GPU as it seems to do it with both new and old GPUs (With the old GPU on drivers that worked fine for months before) 

 

I have also noted that right now, sitting here, in GPU-Z my current dedicated memory usage is 0 MB, http://gpuz.techpowerup.com/13/11/21/6zb.png

 

I'm really, really stumped by this issue, I do hope it's not a motherboard issue as that's the only component out of warranty. 

 

[NinjaStyle013]

Is there a technology built in to switch the gpu off compeltely like when your doing nothing? Maybe thats stuck on and it cant get any power and thats whats making it artifact.

[Altecice]

Is there a technology built in to switch the gpu off compeltely like when your doing nothing? Maybe thats stuck on and it cant get any power and thats whats making it artifact.

 

He tried turning off ULPS and it did nothing to help.

[JohnnyGrey]

So you've confirmed that the crashes are still occuring with everything at stock clocks?

 

Perhaps the only thing left to try is a different PSU. I'm just guessing at this point.

[Joshyy]

The only other PSU I have is a cheapo 500W PSU with 20A on each rail, I wouldn't dare trying to run my PC off that, especially with a R9-290, I don't think it's the PSU (My total power draw is 450-500W) in total (GPU = 300W, CPU = 125W 60-75W for everything else) and the voltages stay stable. 

[Altecice]

Also OP forgot to mention his SSD wont pass a Short DST in seagate seatools HDD tester. it stalls at half way, I find this suspicious plus he tells me it crashes twice a day but I would like to know what you guys think about that

[Joshyy]

Also OP forgot to mention his SSD wont pass a Short DST in seagate seatools HDD tester. it stalls at half way, I find this suspicious plus he tells me it crashes twice a day but I would like to know what you guys think about that

 

That is a good point, the SSD locks up somewhat regularly (Daily) for 30 seconds or so and it never causes a lockup of the system however.