Hardware problem and windows problem all in one

[managarmr]

So its quite a long story but my system has been through a rather long winded degradation into bad health.

a month ago my old GPU fan died and I had no idea that the fan was broken, my GPU was running just fine without it because it's drivers came with a power management system. Then temperatures got a bit too high one day, and crash. Corrupted driver from that too, and I had a bit of a mystery wondering why my display kept turning off until some experimentation pointed me toward the GPU overheating. Then I discovered the fan and I realized that I had no way to restore the driver. (teach me not to use restore points). The GPU would overheat and I couldn't do much about it. I was meaning to upgrade anyway and so I got myself a new graphics card and this is where the first batch of problems come in to play.

The new graphics card is an MSI Radeon R9280x, and I don't quite know whats up with it. I know its fully capable of behaving itself, because half the time it does! but it has an intermittent fault i cannot for the life of me work out. My old GPU, a Radeon HD5870.

The first thing that I found odd was that whenever my graphics card goes to sleep and I wake it up after a long idle I would see white noise and lines that persist until I switch the monitor's inputs from HDMI to something else and back, or unplug and plug back in. That's weird but I might be able to find a fix. Then I decided to play a game. Seemed fine for about 20 minutes and then weird things started happening. Artifacting, stretched textures, flickering and a whole host of 3D rendering errors.

and the third one, is a strange flickering problem. Say I've been playing a game or want to play some music and go on a forum like I am now, the screen will flicker while I'm using a 2D application. The image jumps for like a 10th of a second. This tends to correspond to little spikes in the core and memory clocks for my GPU, see here


Each of those little spikes causes the image on my screen to jump, but not all the time. All of these problems are intermittent but they may be temperature dependent as playing a game will aggravate the issue. As of writing this I'm currently experiencing no problems and probably won't till I open up a graphically intensive game. but I've had a look and temperatures never go beyond 80 degrees Celsius.

so I have a GPU that flickers, artifacts and doesn't interact properly with my monitor when it wakes up. but I've been trying various driver versions and with varying degrees of success I've managed to find more stability. I just don't know what the issue is, the best version simply means the problems are less severe.

Cue second problem, I have a dog and it ran into my PC, causing a system freeze on impact, quite a major one. Upon reboot I found the PC just froze up each time it attempted to start up. so I booted into safe mode, which seemed fine. Then I booted up into safe mode with networking... freezes trying to load a specific driver. I immediately suspect my Wireless networking card and remove it. I suddenly find I'm able to boot up just fine. Okay, so maybe if I reinstall the card from scratch it'll settle things. I erase all the software, power off. reinsert the card and power on.

System boots fine, device driver software is installing. Half way through installing the system freezes. Power off, remove card. Things are fine again. Try to reinstall it again same problem. So the card is sitting on my desk. I don't need it anyhow, I recently got a neat little power line networking adapter that offers a much better connection. But now the second issue comes into play, it was after this I started experiencing a weird form of system crash. I think it might have something to do with firefox or flash player, the two programs used to crash occasionally. Its at about the same frequency and always when I'm using firefox I get this weird system freeze issue.

Firefox will stop responding entirely. I can close it but I suddenly find I can't open new programs and other programs will start to go "not responding" and I can quite happily close them. It just leads to this issue where I can keep closing crashing processes but there's no way to open new ones. Often using a program feature that opens a new window will cause it to crash. The only way out of this is to forcibly reboot. but I can't for the life of me find the link between that hardware problem causing my whole system to instantly lock up and freeze and this weird crash where things just keep "not responding". again, its an intermittent problem that happens on occasion. This seems to be a once a day thing. I need help. I need a lot of help.

System specs

OS: windows 7 64 bit
STORAGE: 1x WD Caviar blue 500GB and 1x WD caviar black 1TB
12GB DDR3 RAM
AMD Phenom II x6 1090T black edition CPU
ASUS AM3 Crosshair IV formula motherboard
MSI Radeon R9280x OC edition GPU
850W PSU of good quality and unknown origin

[Boggin]

I'll leave it to Shane to go into the nitty gritty of this but when any GPU goes over 70 degrees it should be a cause for concern - when did you last give it a good clean out and what are the CPU temps like and is your PSU up to running that GPU ?

I tend to use HWMonitor as my laptop's BIOS doesn't give info on temps http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

Just because it's a new GPU it may not have the latest drivers and running AMD's auto detect will tell you if there are any newer http://www.amd.com/en-us/markets/game/downloads

[Shane]

In my system I have a AMD Radeon HD 7970 and when idle my gpu temp is 48C and when gaming it gets around 60C

Anything above that and you will start to have odd things happen. So very possible it is a cooling problem. I am also curious to what your other temps are in the system such as the CPU and motherboard.

Heat is the reason why when ever I get a new video card I always get one that has 2 large fans on it and not just one. In my case I have a front fan blowing in over my hard drives then 2 rear fans, one on top and one on back both blowing out. The fan on top makes the best difference. This case my power supply sits on the bottom. Heat rises so the fan at the top is the best spot to pull the heat out.

So far a lot of what you have said in your first post does sound like a video problem, but 2 different video cards mean you may not have a good way to get the heat out of the case. Heat is the worst enemy to hardware, well static shock is the worse lol

Here is what I would do for the first test.

If you case is in a desk or some place where the air around it cant escape easily then move the case out to more of a open area. Try not to have your case in a enclosed area, that heat has to be able to get away.

Then take off the sides of the case and get a normal fan and have it blow air right into the sucker. I mean a normal house fan.

Once you do that try the system out for a bit, whats the temps and go play a heavy 3d game to get that heat up, if you can keep the heat at 60C or lower while gaming then wait and see if any of the problems come back.

Also before you do all that, if you haven't yet, do a proper power reset. Pull the power cord out of the system and unhook any usb device that has its own power supply. Once that is all unhook then hit the power button a few times, when the system tries to turn on it will drain all the electricity out. That is how you properly reset hardware.

Then give that a go. Once you verify you can keep the temps down then we can see if the problems still happen. If they do then we know the problem is something else, but if the problems stop then you know it is all heat related and you need to get either a better case with better fans or find someway to get that heat down.

This is the case I currently use and I use for my customers computers when I build them. I dont go with flashy I go with what will do a good job at being silent and keeping the case cool. All 3 fans are 120 mm which means they move more air at lower speeds so it is much quieter and isnt a bad price for a case

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147153

Shane

[Boggin]

Run http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/furmark.html for about 20 mins and watch the onscreen temps.

Knock it off if it goes over 65 to prevent possible heat damage.

[managarmr]

The last full clean out of my PC was about 2 weeks ago when I put the new card in. My PC is in a cramped space so I have placed the fans all to draw air in; especially the front, and boot air out of the top of the case where there's a wide open clearing. My idle temperatures are not fantastic but it is the best I've been able to do so far.



However, today I spotted a thing! The GPU fan speed doesn't seem to adjust for temperature. It happily climbs in temperature during the benchmark very quickly but the fan speed just sticks at 36%. What is it with me and GPU fans?

anyway, had a look in MSI afterburner and by default the utility managing speeds is off. With any luck this fixes in game artifacts which are by far the most intrusive thing. I also updated the beta driver again and the core and memory clock spikes are still there but it doesn't disrupt the image on my monitor.

But what about the windows freeze ups?

[Boggin]

I'm wary of beta anything but if that's caused an improvement.....

I'm not that deep into hardware but the idle temps look okay as they are well below 50.

Here are a couple of calculators to determine if the PSU you are using is up to the job - a failing PSU can also cause problems when it is over taxed.

However, if the PSU was going bad then Furmark and Prime95 would crash the computer, so the existing freeze could be a pointer to that.

http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=103

http://images10.newegg.com/BizIntell/tool/psucalc/index.html?name=Power-Supply-Wattage-Calculator

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

Just as an Edit to this, you may find SpeedFan useful if the GPU fan speed isn't auto increasing and causing the freeze as it will increase it for you.

http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

[Shane]

Those video temps look much much better.

How has the system been since you got the temps down?

Shane