AMD R9 380 Black screen crash causes system freeze, force reset

[Lewinator56]

Now turning to toms hardware for advice.
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I've been experiencing intermittent black screen crashes when playing war thunder (only seems to be this game). Basically, the screen goes black, audio glitches out then goes silent, BUT, the system remains running, all fans spinning, RGB all still on etc... I have to force reset the PC.

First few times this happened, the VGA debug LEG came on on my motherboard, but it isn't doing that anymore.

SYSTEM:
CPU: RYZEN 7 1700 @3.6GHz
GPU: PowerColor R9 380 PCS+ 4GB
MOBO: Aorus X370 Gaming K5
RAM: 16 GB Corsair LPX 2133MHz
PSU: XFX TS 750W

Its mostly a new build apart from the GPU, which has had no problems in the past (apart from running excessively hot, to the extent that i had to create a custom fan curve)

Troubleshooting i've tried so far:

• 
  ■ Stress test CPU and GPU with +20% GPU power limit and moderate overclock for 30 minutes. No crash, nothing to indicate any problem GPU maxed out at 95C and 100% fan, CPU maxed out at 60C.
  ■ Blue screen stuff. Well, since the system doesn't record any crash, just 'shutdown at xx:xx was unexpected', this is pretty useless.
  ■ Boot into separate windows install and stress test. Once again, nothing.
  ■ Boot into linux and stress test. Once again, nothing.
  ■ run sfc/ scannow and similar utilities. Everything comes back OK.
  ■ Actively monitor voltages while ingame. 12V is holding stable, no anomalies.

Basically, as far as the PC is aware it didn't crash. there are no 'hardware stopped working' logs in the reliability monitor, no 'driver crashed' messages. im on the latest AMD drivers. I just can't find the problem.
Even more strangely, this only seems to happen in war thunder, i've submitted stuff to the devs, but, since there are no crash logs, they can't really do anything.
One thing i have noticed, is after the initial windows bootup (those of you without SSD's will know what i'm talking about), before it goes black screen then shows the spinning dots again ther is sometimes an artifact for about 0.1 seconds horizontally across the centre of one of my monitors, this has only started in the past few months. But no artifacts or anything show up at any other times, and this isn't a regular occurrence.

please help!

 

[Martell1977]

I'd start with replacing the thermal paste on the GPU. If it has been running hot, the paste the factory put on it probably dried out. Hopefully, the heat didn't damage part of the card, which is possible. I've been using Arctic MX-4 on my CPU's, GPU's, and laptops for a while now and it works great.

 

[Lewinator56]

I'd start with replacing the thermal paste on the GPU. If it has been running hot, the paste the factory put on it probably dried out. Hopefully, the heat didn't damage part of the card, which is possible. I've been using Arctic MX-4 on my CPU's, GPU's, and laptops for a while now and it works great.

its always run quite hot, but ive always run it on a custom fan curve, maxes out at about 75C under normal load, so thermals probably aren't the issue, plus, i don't have any thermal paste at the moment.
Idling at 30-37C which is what i'd expect anyway.