Question GPU Artifacts and games crashing to desktop

[Daniel Ilic]

I've been having these artifacts for quite some time now but for the past week or so my games kept on crashing. Games would run perfectly fine for 3-4 minutes at which point artifacts pop up. Everything from spiky textures to square effects and flickers. After one minute of artifacts my games would crash to the desktop. Gpu drivers crash as well. The temps are hovering around 65-70c so I doubt in it being a temp problem. I even reapplied the thermal paste thinking maybe that was the problem but so far it didn't help. Temps before thermal paste change were 75-77c.
Things tried:
Changing out ram for some other sticks
Undervolting and undercloking the gpu
Overclocking and increasing the wattage
Drivers both old and new were tested multiple times
Windows clean installation was done twice
Thermal paste change
System:
Asrock AB3350M
Ryzen 1600 Stock clocks
Corsair Vengeance LPX 2x8gb 3000mhz cl15 (the other sticks i tried were Hyperx Predator 2x4gb 3000mhz cl15)
600W CM Masterwatt lite
RX 580 Nitro+
Examples of artifacts:

https://imgur.com/Vs1icNm

View: https://i.imgur.com/Vs1icNm.jpg

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kkfj-HzB6Rs

 

[dotas1]

First of all... Hello fellow exile!

I got some bad news... Artifacts, lines, discoloration are signs of a dying GPU. At least 95% of the time. The rest can be faulty/corrupted drivers or game's fault. You should try DDU following this guide:
How To - How to perform a CLEAN install of your video card drivers. | Tom's Hardware Forum

On another note, the PSU is not great. It might be somewhat at fault and I would suggest you to upgrade it, sooner the better, with a better quality reputable PSU.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-psus,4229.html

 

[OllympianGamer]

Did you try underclocking the vram or bumping up the vram voltage by a tiny amount, 50mv or something.

 

[Daniel Ilic]

First of all... Hello fellow exile!

I got some bad news... Artifacts, lines, discoloration are signs of a dying GPU. At least 95% of the time. The rest can be faulty/corrupted drivers or game's fault. You should try DDU following this guide:
How To - How to perform a CLEAN install of your video card drivers. | Tom's Hardware Forum

On another note, the PSU is not great. It might be somewhat at fault and I would suggest you to upgrade it, sooner the better, with a better quality reputable PSU.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-psus,4229.html

For the past few days I limited my fps in Path of Exile down to 60 which had the gpu run at around 50-90w. This allowed me to play until the higher tier maps. With those came the artifacts and from time to time the game would crash. DDU was used with each new driver.

Did you try underclocking the vram or bumping up the vram voltage by a tiny amount, 50mv or something.

I bumped it by 30mv which made the crashes and artifacting even more frequent.

 

[Daniel Ilic]

Update: I ramped up my fans to 3k rpm which allowed me to play games on max setting without any artifacts or crashes. Since gpu showed decent temps even on regular speeds I came to the conclusion that either vram or vrm are overheating. Most likely the former. Any thoughts on this?

 

[Daniel Ilic]

I've done some more testing using OCCT. The testing was at first done one by one component starting with VRAM which worked perfectly fine for 10 minutes then came CPU test which as well worked perfectly fine... PSU test that stressed everything finished without any issues but once I tried the 3D one it just went straight to artifacting. It's a really weird thing and I've no more ideas for a "fix".