Question Driver Timeouts on Powercolor 7900 xt hellhound only when playing WoW Classic.

[Kavinqt]

Specs:

CPU: i9 13900 - non K

CPU cooler: Deepcool AK400 (keeps the low tdp 13900 nice and cool)

GPU: AMD RX 7900 xt powercolor hellhound

RAM: G.Skill Ripjaw V 3200mhz 4x16gb

Mobo: MSI Pro b760m-a wifi ddr4

PSU: Seasonic focus GX 1000

Boot drive: Samsung 970 evo m.2



Hello, Like the title says I have been experiencing driver crashes / timeouts when only playing WoW classic on my computer. Every other game works wonderfully no issues whatsoever. But WoW Classic? Random driver timeouts pretty often.


This Hellhound 7900 xt isn't my first 7900 xt. I had this same exact issue back at the start of 2023 when I bought a Reference 7900 xt card from AMD. Again that card worked amazingly until I tried to play WoW Classic, Non stop crashes.

I RMA'd the first 7900 xt I purchased and the 3rd party retailer I bought the card through from amazon sent me back a 7900 xt hellhound and at the time I wasn't playing Classic anymore because it legit took months to RMA my card.

Recently Fresh WoW classic servers have come out (Nov 21st) And I played on release and had this same exact issue... Nearly TWO whole years later I am still having the same exact driver timeouts that I did back in feb 2023..... With this being said I have a pretty good idea it isn't an actual hardware issue at least within the graphics card. And I HIGHLY doubt it would be a hardware issue within anything else in my system. I can put my old EVGA 1070 in my system and play WoW classic on the same exact system for hours, days, even weeks with no crash whatsoever. But the fact the issue persisted through 2 cards and 2 whole years of driver updates makes me think it might not be a driver problem as well? Unless AMD & Blizzard both have absolutely no idea this is an issue (Hard to believe tho, There are literally thousands of posts from people all over multiple forums of people having the same exact issue as me.

I have tried a lot of work arounds to fix this over the time I've had this card and nothing has ever fixed it. I've tried a LOT I don't even want to list it here, But I'll type up a slight little list of what I've tried:

Replaced my PSU (Upgraded to a Seasonic 1000w)

Have tried diff ram sticks (First built pc & had same issues with only 2x16gb sticks in dual channel) Crashes happened, I bought the same sticks and upgraded to 4x16gb and still persists crashing)

Running WoW classic on DX11 instead of DX12 (Still crashes)

Disabled XMP

Disabled any Overclock on the GPU

Underclocked, Unvervolted GPU, As well as trying to underclock and keep the voltages maxed.

RMA'ing the GPU

Disabling MPO

Using only 1 monitor

Disabling Hardware acceleration on programs (Discord would crash when the timeouts happened)

Re-installing a Fresh OS (Went from windows 11 to 10) Problem persisted.

Have DDU'd a MULTIPLE number of times (Safe start always)

Cleared CMOS battery

Trying old drivers

Upgrading bios

reinstalling chipset drivers

Using a different GPU (Nvidia 1070 works everytime) - no crashes.

- I have tried more than this all shown above ^

Nothing works, I'm so tired of trying things over these years. I spent $880 on it at launch and with payments probably spent $1200 on it so far, I could have went with a 4080 and saved myself a massive headache and literal mental breakdowns.

Safe to say I probably won't ever buy AMD again.

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

[Lutfij]

Mobo: MSI Pro b760m-a wifi ddr4
BIOS version for your motherboard?

Re-installing a Fresh OS (Went from windows 11 to 10) Problem persisted.
Did you recreate the installer to rule out a corrupt installer? Speaking of installations, did you install the OS in offline mode(sans www), to later install all relevant drivers with the latest versions in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator?

Using a different GPU (Nvidia 1070 works everytime) - no crashes.
Searching across the www, I see that the same issue is with other owners who have the XTX variant as well, it's not just the drivers.

Have DDU'd a MULTIPLE number of times (Safe start always)
Use DDU to remove all GPU drivers(intel, Nvidia and AMD) in Safe Mode, then manually install the latest GPU driver sourced from AMD's support site in an elevated command(stated above).

 

[Phaaze88]

- I have tried more than this all shown above ^

Was uninstalling, then reinstalling the game, one of them?

 

[Kavinqt]

Mobo: MSI Pro b760m-a wifi ddr4
BIOS version for your motherboard?

Re-installing a Fresh OS (Went from windows 11 to 10) Problem persisted.
Did you recreate the installer to rule out a corrupt installer? Speaking of installations, did you install the OS in offline mode(sans www), to later install all relevant drivers with the latest versions in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator?

Bios version for my mobo is the most up to date one. 7D99vAB

I used a clean (Fresh partitioned and nothing else on it) 8gb+ usb installation drive downloaded off microsoft. And I did not install in offline mode, This could be an issue and I did have a problem with this in the past. On my first 7900 xt the one I RMA'd I used to have issues with the drivers reverting to windows updates ones.

Something I overlooked somehow as well is that my gpu has a bios switch on it to swap from OC bios or silent mode bios. I was always on OC bios and used AMD Adrenaline to keep a underclock on my mhz as it seemed too high (I Set it around 2500mhz) I read on reddit I believe yesterday that someone had issues on the OC bios where regardless of their settings on AMD Adrenaline as to what limit they put on how high the Mhz can go on the GPU clock it would spike to over 3000mhz sometimes, I haven't tried to look for this reading spike in any program myself as I have set it to the silent mode now, But I'm thinking maybe this could have caused the crashes. Odd though as how it would only occur in WoW classic though.

 

[Kavinqt]

Was uninstalling, then reinstalling the game, one of them?

Yes. I uninstalled and tried multiple different drives. Also ran repair on it.

 

[Kavinqt]

Going to put this comment here incase anbody else experiencing this issue hasn't found a solution and forgot or didn't realize their graphics card has a physical bios switch on it.

Once I switched the bios switch from overclock to silent bios & in AMD adrenaline settings, putting only WoW classic to underclock my GPU to 2300mhz while I maintained a max of 2500mhz in any other game / setting.

Doing those two things I have no longer had any crashes in WoW Classic since doing both those things.