r9 280x artifacts

[BennBen]

Hey, my friends GPU is acting really weird. On some games there are a lot of artifacts. For example: Arma 3, PUBG, battlefield 4, dayz, rainbow six siege, unigine heaven and more..

http://plays.tv/video/58f4fe00211e46b69a/yeah-time-for-an-nvidia-card-at-this-point

Everywhere it says the gpu is "r9 200 series", but we are fairly sure it's an r9 280x (gigabyte). We've tried old drivers, trying to access voltage control (with no luck), downclocking. We've tried flashing the bios and so on. We've tried all the things we can think of. It's also very weird and inconsistent, for example on unigine heaven, if you start the game with AA 8X it's literally like a disco, bunch of different colors and weird flashes and artifacts. If you then switch to 4x and back to 8x the artifacts are completely gone. If you start without AA there are no artifacts, and if you start on AA 8x but with openGL theres no artifacts. On arma 3 you have to play for like 5 min and then the artifacts appear. On PUBG its completely fine, but if you open the inventory it becomes absolutely crazy, then if you close the inventory its completely fine again. Or you have to spam the inventory for it to dissapear.

Sorry if this was badly formated, but does anyone have any idea whats wrong?

Thanks.

 

[SBMfromLA]

I think I know what your problem is. I also have an R9 280X and I've discovered that huge batches of them were sold with bad VRAM. That happened with the first version I bought. The artifacts started showing up on Day 2... even during the boot process (before Windows was ever loaded). I returned the card to Newegg and was sent another one that hasn't given me any problems at all. However, there are still batches out there in the wild that bad vram and for some people, it could be 6 months to a year before the artifacts show up. That's why the 280X is the one card I can NOT recommend anyone to buy used.

There really isn't much you can do. All the fixes people suggest like underclocking the card or performing a clean reinstall of Windows will not work. The one thing that might work would be to find another 280X that's working and Crossfire them, with the bad card being in the second slot... but that wouldn't be worth it unless you got one for free.

 

[Liron_]

Have you OC'd your GPU? Try to lower the mem clock if you did.

If no then try to remove your drivers using DDU program (just google DDU) and then download new drivers from amd's website. might help

 

[BennBen]

I think I know what your problem is. I also have an R9 280X and I've discovered that huge batches of them were sold with bad VRAM. That happened with the first version I bought. The artifacts started showing up on Day 2... even during the boot process (before Windows was ever loaded). I returned the card to Newegg and was sent another one that hasn't given me any problems at all. However, there are still batches out there in the wild that bad vram and for some people, it could be 6 months to a year before the artifacts show up. That's why the 280X is the one card I can NOT recommend anyone to buy used.

There really isn't much you can do. All the fixes people suggest like underclocking the card or performing a clean reinstall of Windows will not work. The one thing that might work would be to find another 280X that's working and Crossfire them, with the bad card being in the second slot... but that wouldn't be worth it unless you got one for free.

well thats a bummer

 

[BennBen]

Have you OC'd your GPU? Try to lower the mem clock if you did.

If no then try to remove your drivers using DDU program (just google DDU) and then download new drivers from amd's website. might help

already done 2 times, including a windows clean install

 

[SBMfromLA]

Have you OC'd your GPU? Try to lower the mem clock if you did.

If no then try to remove your drivers using DDU program (just google DDU) and then download new drivers from amd's website. might help

already done 2 times, including a windows clean install

None of that will work.. bad VRAM = No Fix

 

[Theri0n]

I had artifacts and crashes. Gone after changing PSU to 80+ bronze.