I often travel by airline and I bring a full desktop with me out of stubbornness. I've noticed that, while I can protect against everything else with sufficient padding, 4-5 trips through an airline baggage system produces a fairly predictable set of symptoms in a graphics card. This same issue has happened several times with multiple different cards with different models, different motherboards, etc. It has always been fixed by replacing the card.
It will intermittently have brief black screens, registered in the event log as display driver crashes and recoveries. Then it will begin crashing the entire computer, which will immediately crash again shortly after restart unless I take out the graphics card and reseat it. There's no particular rhyme or reason to any of these crashes, sometimes under load, sometimes not under load, sometimes right after the load stops. As soon as I feel like I've spotted a pattern, it'll change. It will also instantly crash if the PC is nudged at all, for example if I were to hit the table with a fist the computer will immediately crash. These problems get progressively worse over time and especially if I travel with it again until the card becomes unusable.
When it's not crashing it appears to function completely normally. Temps are fine. The problem must be with the graphics card(and not the PSU or motherboard or whatever else) because I've had the same problem before and replacing the graphics card with an identical model always fixes it completely.
The card, like previous cards, displays no external signs of damage except for the contacts. The contacts have black marks on them, which I know other people have reported and been told are nothing to worry about. In this case(and prior cases), however, they're quite pronounced and I think they could possibly explain the issue. Could the vibrations from air travel have caused excessive marking on the contacts, resulting in this problem? If so, is there a way for me to safely demark the contacts?
It will intermittently have brief black screens, registered in the event log as display driver crashes and recoveries. Then it will begin crashing the entire computer, which will immediately crash again shortly after restart unless I take out the graphics card and reseat it. There's no particular rhyme or reason to any of these crashes, sometimes under load, sometimes not under load, sometimes right after the load stops. As soon as I feel like I've spotted a pattern, it'll change. It will also instantly crash if the PC is nudged at all, for example if I were to hit the table with a fist the computer will immediately crash. These problems get progressively worse over time and especially if I travel with it again until the card becomes unusable.
When it's not crashing it appears to function completely normally. Temps are fine. The problem must be with the graphics card(and not the PSU or motherboard or whatever else) because I've had the same problem before and replacing the graphics card with an identical model always fixes it completely.
The card, like previous cards, displays no external signs of damage except for the contacts. The contacts have black marks on them, which I know other people have reported and been told are nothing to worry about. In this case(and prior cases), however, they're quite pronounced and I think they could possibly explain the issue. Could the vibrations from air travel have caused excessive marking on the contacts, resulting in this problem? If so, is there a way for me to safely demark the contacts?