Erratic Performance and Hard Crashes with XFX Radeon R9 380X

[Devlosirrus]

Hey guys,

This is kind of a long story, so I'll try to make it concise. I bought XCOM 2 recently, and was getting terrible performance with my Radeon HD7850. Since it's tax refund season, I sprung for an R9 380X. I had some issues with getting the card running, but a BIOS flash fixed that. However, since I've been gaming with the card, I've had poor performance and frequent hard crashes (computer completely freezes on a garbled screen with stuttering audio) in XCOM 2, Fallout 4, Cities: Skylines, and Galactic Civilizations 3. I was using MSI Afterburner to overclock the card, but after encountering these issues, I reset everything back to factory default. This seems to have fixed Cities and Fallout 4, but I still have issues in other games. Total War: Rome 2 crashes after about ten minutes in the prologue campaign. XCOM 2 runs at a disappointing 25-30 FPS, though it no longer crashes the computer.

My question is this: do I have a bad card? I've run Heaven benchmark for hours on end at the highest settings, and get around 30 FPS with no crashes. GPU temperature never gets above 35-40 degrees Celsius. I've updated to the latest Crimson drivers for the card, and updated drivers for every other piece of hardware I can think of. Still, I keep getting game crashes and poor performance. I don't want to jump to conclusions and RMA the card, but I never had these issues with my Radeon HD7850.

Thanks for your thoughts, guys. I'll post my DXDiag down below. (Edit: DXDiag shortened)

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System Information
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Time of this report: 2/25/2016, 18:51:39
Machine name: BEHEMOTH
Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1 (7601.win7sp1_gdr.160121-1718)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
System Model: To be filled by O.E.M.
BIOS: BIOS Date: 01/06/14 13:03:08 Ver: 04.06.05
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz (4 CPUs), ~4.0GHz
Memory: 16384MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 16344MB RAM
Page File: 7218MB used, 10124MB available
Windows Dir: C:\Windows
DirectX Version: DirectX 11
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
User DPI Setting: Using System DPI
System DPI Setting: 96 DPI (100 percent)
DWM DPI Scaling: Disabled
DxDiag Version: 6.01.7601.17514 32bit Unicode

 

[clutchc]

PSU make and model?
Btw, you can delete that DxDiag dump. It is useless and will deter folks from bothering to read the post.

 

[Devlosirrus]

PSU: Silencer Mk II PPCMK2S750 ATX12V & EPS12V 750 W
Also, sorry about the long DXDiag dump. I'm new here.

 

[clutchc]

That's a good PSU. Plenty big for that card and CPU, too. In fact, there is no reason you should be having performance issues with a i5-3570K and R9-380X @ 1080p.
Let's start by eliminating the obvious. Check your tray area for pgms that are running when Win starts. Disable as many as possible. Ones you can run on an as-need basis only. Then run CCleaner and do the Clean and Registry portions both. https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner
That will clean up registry errors and software conflicts that may be robbing performance.
Then uninstall your gfx driver by going to safe mode and running DDU. http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/display_driver_uninstaller.html
Have it get rid of any Nvidia and AMD gfx drivers and its remnants that it finds. Reboot and install the latest driver for your card and OS.
The run Malwarebytes to check that there is no poorly written malware or bloatware hogging resources. https://www.malwarebytes.org/
A virus scan wouldn't hurt either.

At that point, if the problem still persists, it should be safe to assume the issue is not software related. Then you can begin to inspect hardware...