Question Gray screens and weird behavior with two different 5070 Ti GPUs, but my 3080 works fine ?

[Pystrum]

I recently upgraded from a 3080 to a 5070 Ti. Everything seemed fine at first: ran Superposition, Furmark, and OCCT (with and without undervolting) and saw no crashes or artifacts. But the next day, issues started cropping up:

- Occasional flickering at the top of the screen
- Visual artifacts like a corner of an image getting stuck, or text misaligned for a moment
- Toggling HDR causes the screen to flash random static (on my 3080 it just cuts to black briefly) Video demo in slo-mo
- System froze twice while playing Deltarune, requiring a hard restart
- Zenless Zone Zero and Honkai Star Rail: sudden gray screens followed by crash to desktop, plus audio disconnects, but no full system crash
- Occasional bottom-half white screen flash for a split second
- CPU and GPU temperatures are fine

I messed with undervolting at first, but even at stock settings the problems persisted. I swapped back to my 3080 and all these issues disappeared. I RMA’d the first 5070 Ti and got a replacement. It worked fine for a day, then the same exact issues started happening.

Stuff I’ve already tried:

- DDU and multiple driver versions (latest + older)
- BIOS updated and reset to defaults
- Swapped HDMI for DP
- Replugged PSU cables, reseated RAM
- Tried both undervolted and stock GPU settings

One thing to note when installing the first 5070 Ti, I accidentally snapped off the PCIe lock on the slot. The card still sits fine and is held up with an anti-sag bracket, but could this be causing issues somehow? I feel like I'd notice issues with the 3080 in that case.

The freezing seems like a PSU issue but I'm using the same cables I used with my 3080, which runs completely stable.

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Specs:

- CPU: Ryzen 7800x3D
- GPU: EVGA RTX 3080 FTW3 / Gigabyte Windforce RTX 5070 Ti
- Motherboard: Gigabyte B650 Aorus Elite AX
- PSU: Corsair RM850x
- RAM: 32GB DDR5
- Monitor: LG 32GS95UE
- OS: Windows 11


At this point I’m just really stumped. Any ideas? Anyone else having similar issues with the 5070 Ti? Could I just be really unlucky and both my cards are faulty?

 

[NanoSuit3]

I can see why you thought it was power since your 3080 drew more power at almost 800 Watts max whereas the 5070 Ti drew 700 at max. With that said why not try the system on a different display?

 

[popatim]

Try setting the PCI slot speed to Gen4 instead of Auto in the Bios.
If that doesnt help, drop down to gen3 and recheck.

 

[Pystrum]

Thanks for the suggestions. Yesterday morning I put my 5070 Ti back in and actually didn't experience any crashes or artifacts the entire day. Set my card to 3000MHz @ 0.970v +1000 and ran through multiple rounds of stress tests as well and it seemed to run alright.

This morning, however, I was greeted with the dreaded gray screen almost immediately after launching a game. I tried reverting to stock, restarting my PC several times, using a different monitor, as well as setting my PCIe slot to gen 3 and 4, but no luck. I was able to trigger it semi-consistently by playing a youtube video, launching a game, and within a few minutes, I'd get a gray screen, typically after alt tabbing and opening discord.

At this point, do you think it's likely that something else is the issue and the GPU itself is alright? I feel like if it were the GPU, I would've had crashes yesterday as well. I'd try it out on another system but unfortunately I don't have easy access to one right now.

 

[Pystrum]

So I didn't have an entirely separate PC, but I swapped in another motherboard with an i7-10700F, a new set of RAM, and installed a fresh copy of Windows on a spare SSD. For about a day, it seemed alright. I had it at 3100 MHz @ 0.990v, +2000, and was able to play for several hours without any issues. Unfortunately, I started getting gray screens again, even after resetting the GPU to stock settings.

At this point, it seems like I can narrow it down to either the GPU, PSU, or some sort of software issue. I'll see if I can borrow a friend's PC for testing, but in the meantime, is there anything else I can try doing?