PC Freeze then displays major screen flickering / distortions.

[Moocats]

I seem to be having some tremendous bad fortune this year with computers. Only a week since having to replace a CPU in one PC I'm having some worrisome problems with presumably a graphics card in the other,

Here are some specs:

MOB: ASUS M5A78L - M +USB3
CPU: FX 8350 w/ Nepton 120xl Cooler
RAM: 10GB 4GBx2 / 1GBx2
GPU: MSI R9 390x
SSD: 120gb Kingston w/ Windows 10
HDD +1 WD Black 1tb 7200 rpm

So this PC only recently had this GPU added to the build. It was on a different PC of similar spec before this and had been use in that machine since purchase 7/5/2016 (7th May) with zero problems. It has been running in it's new home for about 7 days without incident until last night when a family member who had been playing a game named Overwatch for quite a few hours reported the PC suddenly 'crashed' and the screen was displaying odd distortions and flickers.

I had the PC on for about 4 hours this morning, ran a successful FurMark test and all seemed well but a short while ago the same thing happened again.

After this event, both last night apparently and again this morning the PC has been hard to boot again due to the 'crash' re-occurring very quickly, sometimes before even login.

I have managed to capture two 10 second video segments of two different crashes, they are basically the same. These are below.

At the moment what I've done is uninstall the driver and it's currently running on it's onboard native VGA driver. I'm curious to see if this incident repeats. Obviously I have been and am continuing to do some research and some resources do point to driver issues but what has me worried is doomsayers and horror stories about blown capacitors and buggered graphics cards so I wanted to post this in the hopes of having some experts on hand to provide advice as I go.

https://youtu.be/cRsENhqhcLk
https://youtu.be/01S1JIRzY18

Thank you all so much for any help offered. This truly is a wonderful community and you are all very much appreciated.

 

[Jesse_20]

You can easily spot any blown caps on the card with a careful inspection. Blown caps have a bloated/bulging top and if real bad, may even show signs of leakage. Look it up on youtube if you want to get an idea of what to look for. Once you know, they are easy to spot, and can help determine if you have a damaged card or not.

 

[Moocats]

Thanks for the response Jesse.

So we reinstalled the driver and it seemed to run fine. A Family member played several hours of Destiny 2 and some Fortnight and seemed ok. Not long ago the incident repeated and he wasn't even playing a game at the time the machine was mostly idle.

I decided to give the card a visual inspection the problem is I can't see all the capacitors as most are covered by the Heatsink and the framing for the fans.

I can't remove this without unscrewing the entire chassis which would according to the little sticker void the warranty which I'm assuming is 3 years. So I may be needing that.

I did however see a rectangle piece of metal whcih seems to go form one side of the card to the other and is pressed between the sinck and the board with "LR20" stamped on it which according to Google is another name for a type D battery (weird) and this does show some scorch signs as depicted.

https://i.imgur.com/44Us20W.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/QgPtt5u.jpg

Directly next to this is a row of capacitors which are covered and hard to see but their tops are smooth and even and don't appear bulging or broken.

 

[Jesse_20]

Msi cards do have a 3 year warranty.
To rule out a heat damage-related issue, grab a free copy of hwmonitor and monitor the gpu temps. If it occurs when the card reaches a certain temp everytime, you know it's probably in need of a reflow or a better cooling solution. The fact that it's running properly for periods of time leads me to believe hardware failure though.

 

[Moocats]

I concur on hardware failure. This has been tested now on a second machine without any drivers installed (card running on standard VGA driver) and the fault reoccurred. An RMA has been started. Thank you for your help and advice Jesse.