I have a Nvidia 980Ti which I've been using for the last 6-7 years. Recently the GPU was causing problems where I would be playing a game and it would freeze my pc and I would have to do a hard reboot to fix the issue. This would happen every few hours and I thought it might've been a driver issue so I used DDU to remove all drivers and installed new ones.
This did not fix the issue however as I still had this problem and it got even worse. It got to a point where the pc would boot up and immediately freeze after just a few seconds or a minute or two and then I would have to hard reboot from the power button (my pc's and keyboard lights would still be on) or other times it would just freeze and restart and enter a rebooting loop. I put the card into a different system to check if the problem might've been with a different component and the same issue persisted, the card would cause the screen to freeze and then a hard reboot would be needed. I believe the problem is definitely with the card but I'm not sure if it's something that can be fixed. I don't experience screen glitches or artifacts however I have noticed the temps were really high around 50 Celsius while idling.
I then installed MSI afterburner and manually raised the fan speed, it was at a default of 22% and I raised it to around 50% which took the idle temps down to 30 celsius which DID help with the crashes, the pc lasted longer and when it froze it would sometimes blink the monitor and refresh and then it would unfreeze. however this would cause it to eventually freeze and then restart my system completely. The issue does not happen in safe mode. I'm really struggling to understand exactly what the problem with the gpu is, bear in mind I have been using this computer without problems for the last 6-7 years so it could just be that the gpu is now very old and maybe past it's life span. I have also opened up the gpu, changed the thermal paste aswell as cleaned it out properly to help avoid dust / overheating issues as much as possible but the problem persists. I can provide any extra information that is needed and I just want to understand what the problem might be exactly or if there can be any fix to this issue.
This did not fix the issue however as I still had this problem and it got even worse. It got to a point where the pc would boot up and immediately freeze after just a few seconds or a minute or two and then I would have to hard reboot from the power button (my pc's and keyboard lights would still be on) or other times it would just freeze and restart and enter a rebooting loop. I put the card into a different system to check if the problem might've been with a different component and the same issue persisted, the card would cause the screen to freeze and then a hard reboot would be needed. I believe the problem is definitely with the card but I'm not sure if it's something that can be fixed. I don't experience screen glitches or artifacts however I have noticed the temps were really high around 50 Celsius while idling.
I then installed MSI afterburner and manually raised the fan speed, it was at a default of 22% and I raised it to around 50% which took the idle temps down to 30 celsius which DID help with the crashes, the pc lasted longer and when it froze it would sometimes blink the monitor and refresh and then it would unfreeze. however this would cause it to eventually freeze and then restart my system completely. The issue does not happen in safe mode. I'm really struggling to understand exactly what the problem with the gpu is, bear in mind I have been using this computer without problems for the last 6-7 years so it could just be that the gpu is now very old and maybe past it's life span. I have also opened up the gpu, changed the thermal paste aswell as cleaned it out properly to help avoid dust / overheating issues as much as possible but the problem persists. I can provide any extra information that is needed and I just want to understand what the problem might be exactly or if there can be any fix to this issue.