[SOLVED] Dying Graphics Card?

ELShockley

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Jun 22, 2011
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18,510
First time poster, long time reader.

I think my graphics card may be dying. A week ago after about 2-5 minutes in a game my PC crashed with a black screen. Tried other games (No Mans Sky, Division 2, Destiny 2) and it kept crashing after about 2-5 minutes with either an all-black screen or a heavily pixilated screen with lots of white squares randomly around it with frozen audio. About half the time I could CTRL+ALT+DEL out and close the program, the other half of the time it would be frozen and I had to do a hard-reboot. On one crash where I got the black screen everything was black and I couldn't do anything, but I still had audio from the game.

Cleaned my case well and all the fans. Started running Open Hardware Monitor while playing to see if my card was overheating. Max temp it was getting to was 73C which should be fine. I've got a log from OHM but don't know how to add it to the post.

Is this a bad GPU? I had the most up to date drivers and also tried rolling the drivers back to an earlier version when it was working fine. I've heard it could also be the PSU but I've got no other power-related problems so I don't think it's that. GPU is a 1080ti that's still under warranty so I'm thinking of just RMAing it.

Thanks!

System Specs:
Win 10
Intel i7-7700k
Asus ROG GTX 1080ti (2 years old)
Corsair 850W PSU
 
Solution
Yes, I think this is a bad GPU. If it still is under warranty I would definitely RMA it, you might even get an RTX 2080/2080 Super in return since I don't think they make GTX 1080 TI's anymore (But don't expect this).

ELShockley

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Jun 22, 2011
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18,510
Crashes happen on multiple games (Destiny 2, Division 2, No Mans Sky). Interestingly they don't happen on an older game (LOTRO). Crashes happen with both the current GPU drivers as well as the drivers from months ago.
 
Sep 15, 2019
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Hey! I had the same problem. One day I was playing and suddenly screen just went black, but I could hear the audio. I restarted the pc, same problem. It was fine, while I wasn’t playing or running a gpu tests. Next day I started the pc and screen was black from the beginning and fans on my gpu were running at max speed. Suddenly it burnt with sparks and a lot of smoke lol. I had gtx 980.
 
Aug 28, 2019
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Yes, I think this is a bad GPU. If it still is under warranty I would definitely RMA it, you might even get an RTX 2080/2080 Super in return since I don't think they make GTX 1080 TI's anymore (But don't expect this).
 
Solution

ELShockley

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Jun 22, 2011
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18,510
OK downloaded MSI Afterburner and cranked my GPU fans to 100%. Played Destiny 2 for about an hour with no issues. I was able to turn the fans down to 60% and still keep the temps in the mid 60s for the card and the game kept playing fine - no crashes. So it's definitely the heat. Should I still RMA the card (it's under warranty)? I'm concerned I have to manually adjust the fans just to play a game that it used to chew through with no issues a few months ago.