[SOLVED] Are my GPUs bad?

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Inquisitive Kiwi

Jan 11, 2020
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So I've been in an absolute war with my PC the past few days since I bought and installed two used ROG Strix 1080s onto my rig. I bought them in person out of good faith on the word of a seller on eBay since he was willing to remove the listing and give me the cards for cash for a discount. This means I have no recourse if he did in fact sell me bad cards.

The GPUs work perfectly fine until I try and play Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 zombies. Temps never go above 70, and the clock speeds don't fluctuate or do anything weird. The cards balance the load perfectly and work fine. The game runs flawlessly for an arbitrary amount of time, ranging from 15-90 minutes, before the PC blue screens. I have seemingly gotten a different error code every single time the system has crashed, and from what I have looked up, all these codes indicate a problem with either new hardware, drivers, or ram.

I am 1000% certain that my ram is fine, so I'll move onto drivers.

I have installed and reinstalled the latest NVIDIA driver countless times, so it is not the GPU drivers. I have even wiped my PC entirely, started completely over with a fresh install of windows, and even when I have nothing but windows, GeForce, Steam, and Black Ops 3 installed, the game still blue screens my system after the stated arbitrary amount of time. Reinstalling my old GPU fixes the issue, but obviously I want these cards to work.

I have tried running the game with just one of the new cards, and it also blue screens.

Chrome has also black screened on me permanently a couple times. None of the solutions I looked up could fix it, not even reinstalling it, hence why I have reinstalled windows so many times now. It even happened once with my old GPU hooked up, which leads me to think that my system has been 'corrupted' in some way or another by the cards blue screening my system several times.

One other thing worth mentioning is that I bought these cards with their stock coolers and water blocks. The water coolers were installed when I purchased them, so I removed them and installed the stock air coolers myself with the appropriate stock hardware. I am very confident that I did this correctly, but if it's worth looking into given the issues I am having, let me know.

So while it seems obvious that the cards are the problem here, I still can't convince myself that the cards are bad. Admittedly, I have not had time to play and test other games for extended periods of time, so I am not certain if this is strictly a BO3 issue. The short amount of time I have spent playing other games has yielded zero issues thus far. Either way, BO3 is one of the most demanding games I own, and it is also one of my favorite games, so I would very much like to run it on my new cards for the best experience. I also am extremely confused that if the cards are bad, why does everything work perfectly fine up until an instant where it all falls apart? This whole thing leaves me desperate for some explanation.

Things I have not yet tried:
I have only tested one of the new GPUs by itself, and not the other.
I have not tried running the system with either one of the GPUs installed alone after a fresh windows install.
I have not tried flashing/updating my bios.
I have not tried pulling ram sticks or installing different ram. Like I said, I am certain that my ram is fine.
 
Solution
hang-the-9
There are so many variables here, used cards, overclocked system, power supply may have been to weak to run dual 1080 cards, removing the water cooling hardware they came with. You need to test the cards one at a time with no variables outside of the cards. If you have a friend with a gaming system with a good power supply see if you can get the cards to run in that system, one at a time.
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Each time you did a reset did you Run the DDU? To remove the onboard Graphics Drivers? And may need to remove the old GPu drivers as well. it could be causing a conflicting issue. but it does sound like a possible error with the new cards
 
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COLGeek said:
Maybe. Are you overclocking anything (CPU, GPU, memory)? If so, revert to stock speeds and see if the system stabilizes.

Are Windows and all of your major drivers up to date?
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Well, you were right. I never stopped to think about the power supply since I figured 750 was plenty. Anyway, I have disabled the 4.8 ghz overclock on my CPU and it seems to be fine now. Thank you very much.
 
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Inquisitive Kiwi said:
Just kidding no it isn't.
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I hate to be the bearer of bad news but if everything you are trying isn't working you might have faulty GPU' but there is a few things to try. Get a 1000W PSU and see if that helps curve the problem. but its hard to say it's the PSU because you said you used just 1 and it still crashed. You can try and see if there is enough paste on the GPU's and maybe trying to reset the gpu's bios as someone may have but custom bios on there.
 
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There are so many variables here, used cards, overclocked system, power supply may have been to weak to run dual 1080 cards, removing the water cooling hardware they came with. You need to test the cards one at a time with no variables outside of the cards. If you have a friend with a gaming system with a good power supply see if you can get the cards to run in that system, one at a time.
 
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Solution
COLGeek said:
How many GPUs are you now using? How old is the PSU?
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The PSU is very new. I got it on Black Friday. There was a moment where after disabling the overclock and reinstalling drivers, the system was working well and not crashing with just one of the new cards. Feeling confident, I put the second card in SLI, and things got hairy. Chrome was blackscreening, games launched and got single digit frames, and reinstalling drivers did not fix this.

So I took out one of the GPUs, and there was no change. Then I reinstalled NVIDIA drivers, which fixed the games, but Chrome was still blackscreening. Now I have put my old graphics card in and there are no issues. Something about all this just isn't really adding up. I keep getting different issues which I fix in different ways.
 
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hang-the-9 said:
There are so many variables here, used cards, overclocked system, power supply may have been to weak to run dual 1080 cards, removing the water cooling hardware they came with. You need to test the cards one at a time with no variables outside of the cards. If you have a friend with a gaming system with a good power supply see if you can get the cards to run in that system, one at a time.
Click to expand...
I think you're right.
 
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Ferimer said:
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but if everything you are trying isn't working you might have faulty GPU' but there is a few things to try. Get a 1000W PSU and see if that helps curve the problem. but its hard to say it's the PSU because you said you used just 1 and it still crashed. You can try and see if there is enough paste on the GPU's and maybe trying to reset the gpu's bios as someone may have but custom bios on there.
Click to expand...
So, here's where we're at now. I have figured out how to get the system running perfectly with just one of the new GPUs.

When I put in both cards, I assume because of my power supply being overworked, it wigs out my system and things don't run correctly (stuttering on the desktop, failure to launch games, and single digit frames in game loading menus). When I removed the new cards, put in my old card, and reinstalled NVIDIA drivers, it fixed all my problems. Now I have taken out my old card and put in one of the new ones, and I am experiencing no issues.

Because of this, I am very certain that this is a power supply bottle neck issue. I'd like to give you all virtual hugs for all your help here. I would probably be chasing around the strange eBay man for my money back by now if not for all of you.
 
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