Radeon R9 290 series Black Screen Crash FIX

[paradoxnrt]

Like MANY other R9 290 owners, I experienced frequent BSCs (Black Screen Crash) every 20 minutes or so during gaming. I followed a lot of 'advice' in the forums, trying to fix this issue...but to no avail. Some recent forum advice did finally fix the issue, and I registered on this site to 1) say thank you for the help and 2) to share the tweaks that fixed my R9 290.

I am going to include ALL the steps I have taken. While the last step is probably the most important, I have to include the earlier steps in case one (or more) of them also are contributing to stable 290 performance.

*my system is an ASUS P8P67 with an overclocked 2600k (at 4.4GHz) with 8 Gigs of G Skill F3-14900CL9-4GBXL memory. I use 2 Samsung EVO SSDs in Raid 0 configuration (SATA 6Gb/s) as my main disk.

**I use the Accelero Hybrid II - 120 water cooler for my GPU. I going to point out that its Voltage Regulator and VRam cooling is passive. It cools my VRM to about ~68C during gaming = shouldn't be a problem. Only I don't know if it uniformly cools ALL VRM components to 68C....since my crashes seemed a bit more frequent when it was warmer in the room = I still wonder if the cards memory has heating issues at stock speeds.....

Steps taken to date:

I first off upgraded my power supply to a 1200W Platinum rated PS and made sure that each graphic card power plug socket had a dedicated rail PS (no using a single dual 6 & 8 pin cable). This did not fix the issue!

I then uninstalled all ATI drivers/software and then installed only the latest driver. This did not fix the issue!

I then installed MSI Afterburner and enabled 1) Force Constant Voltage 2) Unlock voltage Control. I then under-clocked my cards memory to 1100 (from 1250). This did not fix the issue!

Installed ATI beta driver. This did not fix the issue!


THIS NEXT STEP DID FIX THE ISSUE!

I went into my motherboard bios and set the VCCSA to 1.1V. Then set my MSI Afterburner to Power Limit -5% (yes, that is MINUS 5%) and my memory clock to 1200MHz (slight downclock from 1250MHz). Since I don't have a fan with my rig, my fan speed is at 0%. The other settings are all at default.

Since doing this last step, I've had only ONE Black Screen Crash during about 7 days of gaming. I consider the issue fixed!

I suspect that I could put the Memory Clock back up to the cards default 1250MHz. Maybe I'll try that for the next few days and see how it goes. I'll let you guys know.

 

[i7Baby]

If you can, RMA the card.

 

[paradoxnrt]

No point since the problem is fixed. Good thing too since my custom water-cooling might have caused issues with my warranty.

 

[i7Baby]

"Since doing this last step, I've had only ONE Black Screen Crash during about 7 days of gaming. I consider the issue fixed!"

I'd RMA it.

 

[paradoxnrt]

I suppose I could remove my water-cooler and then remount the retail fan/heatsink. I could then then RMA it and hope they don't reject my warranty (because of my custom water-cooler install).

But even if they don't reject my warranty, its then a roll of the dice whether I get a better or worse card then what I have right now. My card works fine as is (now), so I don't think it is worth the work/wait/risk.

Besides, it is the absolute cheapest R9 290 you can get (lowest Club 3D model). I really wasn't expecting stellar overclocking performance. Being able to run it stable at stock speeds = good enough for me.

It just sucks that I had to fiddle with it so much to get it stable in the first place. Shame on you AMD!

 

[Unending]

Hey Paradoxnrt

I have a R9 290 card to, and the same problem is pestering me.
I want to try you solution out, but.

Iv'e been in my bios and can seem to find anything called VCCSA ?
Is it sometimes called something else ? I have the option to alter my CPU voltage from 1.152 to something else but havn't dared touch it for lack of knowledge on possible consequenses.. :/

Can you help?
ps. if this doesnt work, I'm RMA'ing the card today.

 

[paradoxnrt]

Hi Unending!

VCCSA = System Agent voltage! Your bios might have it listed as such. Keep in mind to only raise it within the upper limit of its threshold (consult your manual or check the recommended limits in your bios 'in-bios' description).

Hope that helps!

P.S. I tried raising my memory back to stock speeds (from 1200MHz to 1250MHz), but I suffered a couple of BS crashes. Far less often than before, but 1200MHz seems to be the stable spot for my card.

 

[ginknocab]

Hi Unending!

VCCSA = System Agent voltage! Your bios might have it listed as such. Keep in mind to only raise it within the upper limit of its threshold (consult your manual or check the recommended limits in your bios 'in-bios' description).

Hope that helps!

P.S. I tried raising my memory back to stock speeds (from 1200MHz to 1250MHz), but I suffered a couple of BS crashes. Far less often than before, but 1200MHz seems to be the stable spot for my card.

After doing all of these I managed to make mine go away. When I moved it back to b1250 MHz I started having crashes again. The strange thing is that I never had this problem when I was using a 1920x1200 monitor. This all started after I got a 2560x1440..

 

[StardustNuke]

Hey, I am having the same problem. @ginkocab, the fact that it only started after you used another monitor probably has little to do with it. For me the problems started very abruptly too. I have used this card for the past 10 months and it always ran smooth as butter, but suddenly since last Wednesday it starts crashing all the time. I have tried a lot of stuff so far, but nothing worked. At one point I thought it was my RAM because I switched it out and suddenly it ran fine for a couple of hours. The whole problem is weird because sometimes it will crash almost straight away when booting up windows, while other times I can run a very demanding game for almost one and a half hour before it will crash. Regardless, I would just try to RMA if you have the possibility. Some people say every card hast this but not that many people can possibly be suffering from it. I think if more than 10% of the cards would have this problem there would have been way more media attention for this. All I can find about it now are a few internet forums and some youtube vids with less than 10k views. So yeah it's definitely not like every R9 290 is broken, and you will most likely get a good product after RMA'ing.

 

[maney266]

you wanna know what fixed it for me. I flashed my r9 290 with a powercolour bios and never got blackscreen error again. Strangest thing

 

[admad2]

I've found a solution for the black screen/freezes/artifacts on my R9 290.

The fix is pretty easy, and now my card works like a charm. Turns out that in my case, the problem was incorrect connection between GPU and Motherboard. When the PC was in vertical position, the card was being slightly pulled down by gravity(I think it was less than 1mm, it does make a difference believe me), which have caused all the problems I have experienced. So if you want to repair it, simply fix the other end of the card to the case, so it won't be pulled down when PC is in vertical position (picture below).

If you want to do a fast check, simply lay down pc horizontally, so that card is firmly in position, and do some tests.

I've found out about it when I was doing some tests in horizontal position, had the benchmark runing (working fine). Then I decided to put my PC to original vertical position (what can go wrong huh?), when I lifted the pc I got immediate artifacts and then black screen. If anyone is still sturgling with R9 290, this is worth checking out.

This is what I have experienced before the fix:

- Random black screen and "AMD driver stopped working etc..." during simple web browsing.
- At first I could play a demanding game for few hours, but right after I've quit the game, few seconds passed, then I had screen freezes, black screens, "AMD driver stopped working...". Sometimes a black strips, random artifacts, which sometimes persisted for few hours (did some restarts, nothing helped, what's interesting, uninstalling AMD drivers did fix the issue)
- After few weeks I couldn't even play longer than 5 minutes, I got weird artifacts and black screen when playing a game for 2-3 minutes.
- Tried different OS, tried different AMD drivers, sometimes it helped for a while, but nothing permanent. I did RMA the card and got reply that it's working fine.

The problems usually occured when the card was nearing 80-85 degrees, after the fix I can go to 92 and everything works. Now I don't experience any of the above issues. I hope this wil be helpful to some people still strugling with R9 290 cards.

My build is:
CPU:: Intel Core i7-4790
GPU: ASUS Radeon R9 290 DirectCUII OC
PSU: XFX Black Edition XTR 750W Modular 120mm 80+ Gold (Had Thermaltake Smart SE 630W 80+ Bronze but decided to change it, thought my issues were due to bad PSU, I was wrong...)
RAM: 16GB G.Skill TridentX 2400MHz
OS: Windows 7 / Windows 10
MoBo: GIGABYTE Z97-D3H LGA1150