Question Having Weird GPU Related (I think) Issues.

Aug 3, 2020
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Sorry for the wall of text in advance.

I’ve had my PC for 4.5 years now and recently I’ve been running into severe issues my either my graphics card (Sapphire r9 390) or my OS (Windows 10) where I get crashes to a black screen and then to a BSOD with a “Windows could not load correctly” error within minutes of a reboot. After days of troubleshooting I’ve boiled it down to the problem most likely being GPU related and more specially GPU driver related.

My reasoning is that in Linux, the system as a whole works fine, I’ve used it running Linux Mint probably around 12 hours in the last few days with no problems. Secondly, when I took the GPU out to run the PC on integrated graphics, It worked just fine for the few hours I tried that. Finally, the PC works fine in safe mode, with the only exception being that I got an error saying that “AMD software couldn’t detect drivers or the drivers were malfunctioning” or something to that effect. All in all, I only run into problems while running normal Windows with my GPU installed, particularly while trying to install drivers from AMD.

I’ve tried using the AMD cleaning tool, uninstalling the GPU through the device manager, using different versions of drivers: the most recent one released yesterday; the one released in July; and one released in January, which were the one my PC was running before these problems started. Also, I have updated and checked the health of almost every other component in my PC such as the drives and the RAM. Even with all this, without fail I get a black screen and then a BSOD at some point in the process of installing drivers. So is it the drivers, or is my GPU going bad, or something else entirely that I’ve missed? Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Specs:

128GB Samsung SSD (this is where the system files were kept)

1TB WD Blue Hard Drive

i5 6600k

Sapphire r9 390 4 or 8GB VRAM (cant remember which but I think 8)

AsRock k170 Fatality MOBA

16 GB Corsair Vengence RAM

EVGA 650GS Powersupply

Windows 10 1079
 
Aug 3, 2020
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Hi TurboRoundhouse.

Do you mean Windows 10 1709?

That version is
1709Redstone 3Fall Creators Update16299October 17, 2017

It's almost 3 years old. The drivers are probably not playing well with this Windows 10 version. It's time for you to upgrade to at least 1909.
That's my bad, I must of typed in the wrong version number. I've installed the most recent version of Windows 10.
 
Aug 3, 2020
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No the issues started out of the blue seemingly while playing a game. The last time I think I updated Windows was probably in late June early July, at least before I had to do a fresh install yesterday.