Problem with Graphics Card or PSU

Malice

I seem to be having no luck with components lately
Hot on the heels of my motherboard with bent pins, I seem to have a problem with either my graphics card or my power supply. The card is a Sapphire Toxic R9 280X and the PSU is a Seasonic G-750.

I installed the graphics card last weekend and immediately noticed a problem with certain games where the screen would start to flicker. If I subsequently quit back to Windows then things would revert to normal but if not, after a few more minutes the screen would just freeze up with something similar to this thread. Oddly enough, using a different PCI-E cable to connect PSU to graphics card seemed to resolve the problem but it's back with a vengeance today.

I have also been running Furmark and it exhibits the same flickering behaviour. It crashes every time once the GPU temperature hits around 60 running the 1080 benchmark preset.

When I run Furmark in window mode, it seems to affect the Windows display as well - see what happens to the autoplay menu for an external hard drive:


And to task manager:


Things I have tried which haven't helped:
1. Reseating the card.
2. Reinstalling the newest driver (Catalyst 14.04).
3. Reinstalling the driver that came with the card (Catalyst 13.061).

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can narrow down which component specifically is the problem? I do have a Seasonic 550W PSU which I could drop in but the specs for the R9 280 state that it requires 750W of power so I'm not sure that'll help diagnose anything.

game4it70

You will be fine with the 550w to test as its a good brand.
Try 3dmark or heaven benchmarks while monitoring temps.

Malice

game4it70 wrote: »

You will be fine with the 550w to test as its a good brand.
Try 3dmark or heaven benchmarks while monitoring temps.

Thanks for that. I will download 3DMark but at 1.5Gb it's going to take a while .
I've swapped out the PSU and the same thing happens as before. Furmark crashes the machine altogether, every time with the GPU temp somewhere above 63C. The Heaven benchmark also crashes but it at least brings me back to the Windows desktop. When it crashes I get the following error in the system tray (I grabbed it with my phone):

game4it70

So it looks like its the gpu.Is there any way you can test it on a different pc?

You could try and underclock the gpu with sapphire trixx or amd's CCC.
It might be the factory overclock isn't stable.

Malice

game4it70 wrote: »

So it looks like its the gpu.Is there any way you can test it on a different pc?

Unfortunately not without a lot of work. I have the guts of another PC but it's missing RAM and boot drive. The RAM is easy to swap over but I've already seen that swapping the boot drive is another matter altogether.

game4it70 wrote:

You could try and underclock the gpu with sapphire trixx or amd's CCC.
It might be the factory overclock isn't stable.

Thanks for the tip, I'll give those a go and see what happens.

vibe666

The temps aren't exactly bonkers, have you got a spare hdd to try a fresh install of Windows to rule that out?

Failing that, even repartition your hard drive and dual boot?

Malice

Apologies, I didn't get a chance to return to this last night. I installed Sapphire TriXX and ran it a couple of times dropping the Core Clock from 1150 to 950 and then to 750. I ran Furmark each time and, as expected, it crashed each time the temperature hit around 65. The Fan Control was set to automatic and I can hear the fans getting louder as the temperature increases so I assume they're working correctly.

vibe666 wrote: »

The temps aren't exactly bonkers, have you got a spare hdd to try a fresh install of Windows to rule that out?

I'm not quite sure what you mean. Are you saying that Windows itself could be part of the problem?

vibe666 wrote: »

Failing that, even repartition your hard drive and dual boot?

I hadn't actually thought of that. I've only got the one copy of Windows though which could be a problem. Does it allow a certain amount of time to run before requiring activation? I really only need it for long enough to determine that the graphics card malfunctions in the other PC.

Malice

Just as a further update, I installed an older Radeon 7870 instead of the R9 280X and it breezed through the Furmark benchmark with the fans not noticeably increasing in volume and the temperature just hitting 65C:

Malice

A final update to this. I sent the graphics card back, got a replacement the week before last and everything is working perfectly now. One thing that is worth highlighting is that I decided to call Hardware Versand as I had a couple of questions for them. I called at about 9:45 on a weekday morning and got straight through to a fluent English speaker who answered my questions quickly and clearly. This was a refreshing change from the support lines for many other companies where a dose of teeth pulling would nearly be preferable.