AMD R9 290 -- expectations unmet

[Jagd99]

I bought a Radeon R9 290 (Sapphire) from Newegg in late 2013. I never OC'd, because I just don't care that much about the extra performance and I've always been of the opinion (maybe mistakenly) that doing so just shortens the life of your video card.

Well, this past weekend my computer started black screening on me around 20 or 30 seconds after jumping into Warcraft. I tried it on Kingdoms of Amular and the same thing happened. I proceeded to spend the next day troubleshooting and was able to deduce that the problem is most likely the video card.

I downloaded TriXX (Sapphire's OC software) and monkeyed with some of the settings in an attempt to throttle my video card and see if it would stop the black screening. I put the GPU Power setting down -50%, and I haven't had any black screens since.

Unfortunately this solution sucks (excuse the colloquialism) because my graphics card is effectively running at half it's power and so my gaming experience is somewhat less enjoyable, to say the least.

IIRC, I paid around $400 for this card back in late 2013. I am surprised that it would be having these problems. I've ran other video cards for this long and never had this issue. In fact, I have another rig with a Radeon HD 5870 (also Sapphire) that I purchased back in late 2010 and is still running like a champ.

So are my expectations too high? Have I just been lucky up to this point that none of my other cards have gone out after a few years of use?

Also, because I suspect that some of you will want to know -- yes, I did blow out my entire case. I tend to do so about 2 times a year. But I have never re-greased the gpu with thermal paste, so I'm going to try that this weekend, although I don't expect much to come of it.

I did do a clean install of Windows, and I'm running Win 10 Pro right now. Also, I have the latest AMD drivers installed, but I have not tried reverting backwards to see if the problem goes away with older drivers.

Any other suggestions would be appreciated, and also any opinions on whether or not it's par for the course with regards to the 4 years that I've gotten out of this card.

System Info:

• 
  ASUS ROG Crosshair V Formula-Z
  AMD FX-8350 Black Edition Vishera 8-Core 4.0 GHz
  G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 (PC3 17000)
  ZALMAN CNPS9500A-LED 92mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler
  CORSAIR HX Series HX750 750W

 

[okcnaline]

Your GPU is not running at 50% power. It's running at 50% power (wattage). That's fine. It just means less heat will be produced. And since it's stable when lower wattage is used, it just shows that your GPU core is beginning to die out. It'll be another 2 years or so before serious stability issues show up but at the moment your GPU's perfectly fine.

Frankly your expectations are too high. The GPU's running fine, though its age means it can't keep up with the latest game as well as the triple-A's from 4 years ago. Your CPU is most likely putting a bottleneck.

 

[velocityg4]

Since 2008 I've had a Radeon HD 3850, 3870 and 4850 die (all VRAM). As well as a GeForce GTX 560 and 560 Ti (unknown reason the 560 has discolered metal like it burned, the 560 Ti just crashes the computer and corrupted the BIOS on my testing computer luckily my mobo has dual BIOS). These are for two different computers. Mid range and higher cards just don't seem to hold up for more than four or five years in my experience. I always use high end PSU with good ratings. I also use upscale surge protectors, dust everything regularly, have good case cooling and never OC them. The funny thing is I have a pile of working cards from the late 90s to mid 00s. Which work fine. Plus a lot of newer low end cards. It just seems like newer mid to high end cards don't hold up.

 

[renz496]

@velocityg4

Maybe because board partner like to cut corner? There were PCB analysis for Gigabyte RX480 and the conclusion was the custom board was using much inferior component than the reference (it was supposed to be at least on par with reference else the reference can't be called reference anymore) to reduce the cost.

@OP try using different drivers. Black screen issue is quite common on AMD GCN (anything older than polaris). In some cases people have end up using custom BIOS (which voiding the warranty) to solve the issue.