PSU or GPU? Or both?

Kris Bendix · October 28, 2018

Hi. Having a problem here. R9 280X video card won't work.
I'm getting the red glitches (pic below) on startup and after that, it goes black. The monitor backlight is on. Works in safe mode tho and no artifacts when in safe mode. Also worked on my old GTX 550Ti when I tried it, but had a bit of a problem setting up Nvidia drivers so I just took it out in case the PSU is damaging the cards. Now I'm using the Intel graphics and everything works fine it seems (with no video card in).
A possible cause - My HDDs started to make vibration noise and had to do some work on the PC. Most likely I didn't plug the power cable in properly after working on it the first time and the PC crashed. Checked the cable and when I plugged it in it made a bit of a cracking/sparking noise. Turned it back on and it was fine for a week I think. Yesterday, while in a game, it crashed again, but now it got a weird gray line pattern all over the screen. Had that in games a few times. And once even while watching YouTube. Finally, it got this artifact in the pics after restarting. Yesterday I restarted and managed to turn it back on successfully. Even updated drivers just in case. But this morning no luck.
When I turn on or off the PSU (with the switch that it has) it makes that cracking spark noise. I don't remember having it before on this or other PSUs. It also sometimes flickers my table lamp when I turn it on and once I heard sparking even from the outlet splitter.
The hope is, that it is just the bad PSU and card is fine. After all, I got that red glitch and recovered after... so maybe PSU just doesn't deliver the voltage anymore and the card freaks out and refuses to work properly. Intel graphics are working (i5-4460), GTX 550Ti worked (without drivers and on low res) and R9 280X itself worked in Safe mode.
Any ideas? Is there a way to test the PSU?

I kinda needed GPU upgrade anyway and PSU is 550W so an upgrade there wouldn't hurt anyway. Just not the best timing now financially. But the GPUs are dropping in price I've heard. Any suggestions on that maybe? maybe I can get a decent GTX980 used or something. Almost anything used now would be an upgrade to R9 280X anyway.

Fasauceome · October 28, 2018

Those lines are indicative of bad vram, a card failure.

Kris Bendix · October 28, 2018

Any way to test the vram?

Kris Bendix · October 30, 2018

Hm, that is interesting. I put the seemingly dead card in (to test) and in less than a minute (that I need to turn the PC on and off) the heat pipes of the card get quite warm. Is that normal for the card to heat up so fast? It doesn't even do any graphics work on the startup screen.
I mean, it is AMD, maybe the heat killed it?
Using the old GTX 550Ti for now. Otherwise couldn't use both displays on the Intel graphics. Neat little card. Served me well before and saves me again after years.