[SOLVED] 2080 Ti crashing when playing games ?

[mxwll155]

January of 2020 I purchased a Newegg Refurbished Gigabyte RTX 2080 ti. Up until recently my specs were as follows:

RTX 2080 ti
AMD Ryzen 2600x (watercooled with a 120mm rad AiO - not overclocked)
16gb (2x8gb) GSkill Trident Z RGB 3200 MHz CAS 16
ASUS ROG STRIX X470 Gaming-i
1TB M.2 running in SATA (Windows Local DIsk)
2TB HDD 7200 RPM
EVGA Super NOVA 850W G3 80- Gold
Bitfenix Prodigy ITX Case

Everything besides the GPU is about 2.25 years old.
2 weeks ago I ordered the following:

AMD Ryzen 5600X
ASUS AM4 TUF Gaming X570-Plus
Samsung 980 Pro M.2 500Gb PCIE Gen 4.0
Lian Li LanCool 215 Gaming Case

Everything but the M.2 drive arrived within a week of ordering, so I've been using the new motherboard, case, and CPU about 8 or 9 days.

2 to 3 days ago this started happening ONLY WHILE PLAYING GAMES:

https://imgur.com/u5va9XD

View: https://imgur.com/u5va9XD

This would either just sit frozen and I'd have to press the restart button, or it would BSOD and restart itself.

I checked event viewer and got a lot of stuff like this:

Faulting application name: dwm.exe, version: 10.0.19041.746, time stamp: 0x6be51595
Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 10.0.19041.964, time stamp: 0x812662a7
Exception code: 0xc00001ad
Fault offset: 0x000000000010b39c
Faulting process id: 0x4f0
Faulting application start time: 0x01d744959c161479
Faulting application path: C:\Windows\system32\dwm.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\System32\KERNELBASE.dll
Report Id: 304cf057-686b-4704-b0cc-09bcfde2e4c1

The description for Event ID 14 from source nvlddmkm cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.
If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event.
The following information was included with the event:
\Device\0000007a
21a5(31c4) 04013700 a5a5a5a5
The message resource is present but the message was not found in the message table

The description for Event ID 13 from source nvlddmkm cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.
If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event.
The following information was included with the event:
\Device\0000007a
Graphics Exception: ESR 0x52c7b0=0x1e0009 0x52c7b4=0x4 0x52c7a8=0x7c12b72 0x52c7ac=0x104
The message resource is present but the message was not found in the message table

With different variations of codes and a few other ID numbers

I also read the memory dump files, which you can download here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Akurhk2hq9Qb5xiFg0dAPEo5jMP-WiHz/view?usp=sharing

Windows is up to date. My chipset drivers are up to date. My BiOS is up to date.

I kept MSI Afterburner and Ryzem Master up during every crash. CPU was usually around 50-55c and GPU was around 60-65c.

Point being: this is is not a thermals issue.

At first, I figured it was an issue with the graphics drivers. So I used DDU to uninstall my drivers and rolled back to an older version. Got the same result.

When the new M.2 drive came in yesterday, I did a fresh windows install on the new drive and formatted all the other drives so everything was 100% clean.
I installed the oldest drivers available on NVIDIA's website: 456.71 without GeForce experience or the Audio drivers. Still the same issue.

I used DDU again and reinstalled the newest drivers. Same result.

Finally, I put the 2080 ti back in the original Ryzen 2600x setup and used a different 750W Corsair PSU. The only thing staying the same between the two set-ups being the RAM.
Same GPU crash with the white/green squares. Only this time it didn't crash the whole system and instead just crashed my game with a window saying "Device removed. Please restart game." And going to desktop.

I'm 99% sure this GPU is just bad and I've already ordered a replacement, I would just like some outside opinions. Thanks very much.

 

[DSzymborski]

This is a rather unsatisfying answer, but you did exactly what you should have done and I think you came to the correct conclusion here. Artifacting like that generally points to bad VRAM, something which you can do little about. Did you check the serial to see if you can RMA? Gigabyte tends to be nearly as generous about accepting RMAs from second owners as EVGA is.

 

[mxwll155]

Didn't think about RMA so I'm trying that now, we'll see what Gigabyte says. Thanks.

 

[alceryes]

This is a rather unsatisfying answer, but you did exactly what you should have done and I think you came to the correct conclusion here. Artifacting like that generally points to bad VRAM, something which you can do little about. Did you check the serial to see if you can RMA? Gigabyte tends to be nearly as generous about accepting RMAs from second owners as EVGA is.

I second this. Seems to be a VRAM issue. Thermal issues are not the only cause of GPU failures.