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
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