Short, sudden screen artifact flash while working with Blender on an R9 390

VonZigmas · March 2, 2018

Basically I had Blender open, along with some YouTube and other pages in the background. All of a sudden the screen goes black and all I could notice were some brown lines in the corner. This image I found sort-of describes it, except they were possibly horizontal and definitely not covering the whole display. The thing is, it happened so fast, you could barely notice it. I'm sure it didn't last a second. Nothing crashed, YouTube didn't even seem to cut off the audio. Everything came back as sudden as it went dark. Blender seemed to be more zoomed in than before, but maybe I was in the middle of doing that anyway.

By now I've looked through the components for any visual damage, particularly capacitors, but everything I could see seemed fine. Although looking at the 390 PCB now, there are quite a bit more of them than the single line you can see through the heat sink. Still, am I right in thinking that even a single bad capacitor would be noticeable via more constant symptoms? So far putting on some load with Far Cry 3 shows no issues.

Took out my PSU for a closer look as a cap seemed suspect, but it appeared to be the same yellow-green dab of paint that the all the others are marked with, just a bit thicker in the crease. Also checked if everything's seated nicely too.

Anything else worth checking? Things to look for in case it happens again? What are the chances this was a software glitch and not a hardware issue? Any similar, known issues with this combo or any separate piece of software?

Just really not liking the idea of having hardware failure in this 'still kinda new, but old enough to be out of warranty' stage of ownership.

The probably relevant stuff:

Sapphire R9 390 NITRO / Driver version - 18.2.2
i5 4460
ASRock H97M PRO4
Seasonic M12II-620 EVO

Rest is in my profile.

thelordofwarr · March 2, 2018

Such things mostly come from gram problems, had some problems like this with overheating gram on my r9 390 too, I just used new thermal pads, but that's mostly a beam problem

VonZigmas · March 2, 2018

6 minutes ago, thelordofwarr said:

Such things mostly come from gram problems, had some problems like this with overheating gram on my r9 390 too, I just used new thermal pads, but that's mostly a beam problem

Is the GRAM temperature monitored by any sensor so I could check if they are overheating? It didn't sound like the card struggled to keep the temps down or anything.