Question Black screen after tiny amounts of water got into desktop tower

[MementoMorii]

Hi all,

A while back I moved into a new house and being the idiot that I am, I had placed my desktop near a window. I had my window cracked while I was out of the house, and rain had gotten in without me realizing it. When I got back later I booted up my PC, everything was running fine, but after a while I noticed there was some droplets of water inside the tower. I opened it up and only found small traces of water inside, some of which was on the GPU. I'm sure some probably got onto the motherboard that I might have missed. I turned everything off, and took apart my GPU and cleaned it with 99% isopropyl. The water had gotten onto the metal backplate, and some of it got underneath the backplate. It worked fine for quite a while, but then I started getting intermittent black screens the next day.

After a while of using my computer, a black screen would occur. If I restarted my desktop, everything would work fine for a while, but then another black screen would happen. Sometimes it would be after 5 minutes, other times I could use it for hours without any occurring. I took the GPU out for a week and used my integrated graphics without any problems, and then put my GPU back in and it worked totally fine for almost a week before the black screens started again. I've been tracking the temps and the black screens can occur even at low temps.

Most of the time when the black screens occur. I get this WHEA-Logger warning in the event viewer:
A corrected hardware error has occurred.
Component: PCI Express Root Port
Error Source: Advanced Error Reporting (PCI Express)
Primary Bus: Device:Function: 0x0:0x1:0x0
Secondary Bus: Device:Function: 0x0:0x0:0x0
Primary Device Name: PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_460D&SUBSYS_86941043&REV_02
Secondary Device Name:

Here's an image of the dump file that I took after a crash. I forgot where I put the file, but I can look around for it.

https://imgur.com/d0ZkG1p

System Specs:
i5-12600k
Asus Tuf RTX 3080 OC edition
Asus rog strix z690-a gaming
Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro SL 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4 3200
Corsair rm850x 80plus gold

I'm not sure what I could do to try and salvage my GPU, if that is actually the issue. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

Check and see if you've got a BIOS update pending, then see if your OS is pending an update, then see if anything in Device Manager is flagged with a yellow exclamation mark.

Following through the above, I'd then use DDU to uninstall all GPU drivers off of your platform, then manually reinstall the latest GPU drivers sourced from Nvidia's support site, in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator.

 

[MementoMorii]

Thank you!

Turns out I did need to perform a BIOS update, so I went ahead and did that. As for things marked with a yellow exclamation mark in Device manager, I have the following in "Other Devices": PCI Device, RAID Controller, SM Bus Controller.

I'll try using my GPU for a bit after updating the BIOS, and if I run into a black screen again I'll attempt reinstalling the GPU drivers. If that fails too, I'll report back here. Thanks again!