Significant stability issues since installing 5700 XT

Centauri

2[H]4U
Joined
Mar 1, 2003
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Hey guys,

When I installed this card back in August, I attributed some stability issues to the freshness of the drivers. But they've continued to plague me. Even with regular usage of DDU and updates to the chipset and GPU drivers, I am now in a spot where I can barely load into the menus for stuff like Doom or even World of Warships without freezing, followed by the driver telling me it had instability, or the screen just going black and needing to do a forced reboot.

It was bad enough that I was worrying it was the card, but I'm pretty positive it's not. For kicks I decided to manually install the driver-only from the latest WHQL Adrenalin release a few nights ago and got in a solid few hours off issue free gaming. But now things are back on the fritz.

I would REALLY like to avoid clean installing Windows to attempt to fix this.

Any suggestions?
 
Try underclocking the card and see if it goes away. If it does RMA.

Who’s excited for the nuclear attack subs coming to WoWs? ;)
 
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Why do you think it's not a bunk card? It certainly should be a possibility.

I had one crash/lockup on the original release driver, but that was it.

Also, make sure you disable MSI Afterburner or any similar programs as they conflict with the Navi driver.
 
Hey guys,

When I installed this card back in August, I attributed some stability issues to the freshness of the drivers. But they've continued to plague me. Even with regular usage of DDU and updates to the chipset and GPU drivers, I am now in a spot where I can barely load into the menus for stuff like Doom or even World of Warships without freezing, followed by the driver telling me it had instability, or the screen just going black and needing to do a forced reboot.

It was bad enough that I was worrying it was the card, but I'm pretty positive it's not. For kicks I decided to manually install the driver-only from the latest WHQL Adrenalin release a few nights ago and got in a solid few hours off issue free gaming. But now things are back on the fritz.

I would REALLY like to avoid clean installing Windows to attempt to fix this.

Any suggestions?

Try to isolate the problem. Run a cpu only stress test for many hours and see what happens. However if you had problems since Aug and the only change was the gpu you probably already know what it is.
 
Try underclocking the card and see if it goes away. If it does RMA.

Who’s excited for the nuclear attack subs coming to WoWs? ;)

I'll try here later.

WOWS has so many balance issues, especially with the onslaught of bullshit paper ships. I wish they'd fix those before rollout whole new classes.

Why do you think it's not a bunk card? It certainly should be a possibility.

I had one crash/lockup on the original release driver, but that was it.

Also, make sure you disable MSI Afterburner or any similar programs as they conflict with the Navi driver.

Because it has held up to multiple Time Spy stress tests and as recently as two nights ago hours of gaming between BF1 and Doom.

But I have to screw with drivers and uninstalls to get it there.

No afterburner.

Try to isolate the problem. Run a cpu only stress test for many hours and see what happens. However if you had problems since Aug and the only change was the gpu you probably already know what it is.

Yeah, already kinda started in that direction. Went through 24hrs of Memtest successfully a few days ago.
 
Well, I had a bad 2080 Ti card at release, that would work for 1 or 2 days at a time and then start crashing. I tried everything, including an all new PSU, before doing the RMA.

And I had an issue with the replacement Ti card as well, but that ended up being due to my aggressive RAM overclock. Not sure why it worked before (w/ a GTX 1080) but setting 4133 for RAM speed caused crashes.

When I set my RAM back to default (2133) then everything was golden. I have since put the speed back to 4133 but with more voltage and that seemed to get it stable. You can also try Intel Burn Test to see about the CPU (not sure if you are on an OC).

Also, have you used WattMan to check your clocks and temps? Maybe the card is getting too hot, or there is something else you can tweak like the fan speed? Try setting fan to 100% as a test and see if it helps.
 
The card is exceptionally cool, oddly. Did a heatsink mod on it with liquid metal and true idle temps are close to 30 degrees now. Load, with my fan profile, never makes it out of the 60s anymore. Junction stays in the low 80s

As we speak I am most of the way through the 20min Time Spy Extreme stress test and all is well.

I feel like this HAS to be software related...
 
The card is exceptionally cool, oddly. Did a heatsink mod on it with liquid metal and true idle temps are close to 30 degrees now. Load, with my fan profile, never makes it out of the 60s anymore. Junction stays in the low 80s

As we speak I am most of the way through the 20min Time Spy Extreme stress test and all is well.

I feel like this HAS to be software related...

If the issues stopped after the mod that helped temps then it can still be a card stability issue.

The same Mhz and voltage, a chip can be stable at 60C and unstable at 80C.
 
Huh? I created the thread today to report issues. I didn't simultaneously mod a card that was having issues this afternoon. It's had issues before and since the mod, which I did weeks ago.
 
That said, I took it apart again a few hours ago to do a visual. All looked well. Though I did notice that on the PCB side of the back plate, where the plate makes contact (or gets close) to the line of VRM chips(?), the chips and the back plate had a charcoaly residue on them. I don't recall seeing that on my initial teardown. And the card never came with pads under the backplate.

So I thermal pad'd the backsides of the memory and that VRM area. Threw it back in and I've been issue free since... Hmm...
 
If you can't install it in another machine to test it out, then the only way you will know for sure if it's a hardware fault is to do a full windows reinstall.
 
I was plagued with seemingly random lock-ups and crashes with my 5700 XT, and in my case it was something with Radeon Wattman and overlay causing it. If you're using Wattman, do not have it open while running a game and especially do NOT use the Wattman overlay (ctrl+shift+O , IIRC). There are several recommendations from others on the r/AMD subreddit who've had the same issues and it just seems overlays in general may cause system freezes or app crashes.

In my case, I always had Wattman open for monitoring on my second display, so I haven't had a crash since I stopped doing that and stopped using the Wattman monitoring overlay.
 
Yeah, I thought that too which is why I tried running driver only. Which worked initially. But instability started again within a day.

I'm also still running stable since putting pads between the backplate and PCB. Which is really interesting to me...
 
Yeah, I thought that too which is why I tried running driver only. Which worked initially. But instability started again within a day.

I'm also still running stable since putting pads between the backplate and PCB. Which is really interesting to me...

If that proves true I’d RMA it.
 
I know people don't like FurMark, but have you tried FurMark?

Maybe something a little more demanding like SuperPosition on Stress Mode?
 
Disable V Sync on everything and turn Free Sync off at display also .. update your Afterburner

I am back running my RX 5700 after pulling a 290x as reset cmos .. system was already stable with 19.9.2 and all windows /chipset for Ryzen 3600 / bios is up to date .. after RX 5700 was reinstalled to windows.. I updated to 19.10.1 and everything is good as I can run Afterburner now .
 
I had issues initially with my 5700xt on my ASRock x470 Master SLI.. it would auto detect on PCIe vid card slot ..card wanted PCIe 4.0 and mobo didn't know how to handle that so I had to force to GEN 2 mode until BIOS update corrected it..

I put thermal pads between my vrm's and backplate as well just because I had thermal pads laying around ..there is also the "washer mod" if you haven't done that already
 
Still running without issue. Very interesting.

Why would VRMs making contact with the backplate cause this potentially?
 
Yeah, I thought that too which is why I tried running driver only. Which worked initially. But instability started again within a day.

I'm also still running stable since putting pads between the backplate and PCB. Which is really interesting to me...

only thing i can think of is maybe some sort of flex in the card where the back plate was shorting on something? but even then if it's a reference pcb it shouldn't have anything that could short.. maybe one or more of the tantalum polymers is failing due to high temps? or bad soldering point and the thermal pads are now holding it in place?
 
Or could just be coincidence and maybe reseating card cleared out some dust in pci-e slot or loose power connections, maybe allowed MB bios to detect the card again and set PCI-E mode to Gen2 or Gen3. The last one is a guess, but I do remember when I was testing a 5700xt that GPU-z would fail the PCI-E test (test popup would dissappear and/or pc would freeze until I set PCI-E to Gen3 in BIOS). To me not worth testing your hypothesis by taking out the pads to confirm.
 
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I had issues initially with my 5700xt on my ASRock x470 Master SLI.. it would auto detect on PCIe vid card slot ..card wanted PCIe 4.0 and mobo didn't know how to handle that so I had to force to GEN 2 mode until BIOS update corrected it..

I put thermal pads between my vrm's and backplate as well just because I had thermal pads laying around ..there is also the "washer mod" if you haven't done that already

The washer mod is mostly nonsense and only applies if your card somehow was fucked up from the factory. I tried 2 different washer sizes on the VII and neither improved cooling, it was either the same or slightly worse.
 
Why do you think it's not a bunk card? It certainly should be a possibility.

I had one crash/lockup on the original release driver, but that was it.

Also, make sure you disable MSI Afterburner or any similar programs as they conflict with the Navi driver.
You can't use afterburner with Navi? Man I hate AMD cards always issues like that.
 
Correct. I haven't tested the latest driver, but it's been busted for a while (screen flickering and/or crashing). Even the AMD built-in OSD flickers, lol.
Dang that sucks. I don't like when I get a gpu that can't use AB. Although I probably want the numbers way too much.
 
I have a XFX RX 5700 ref card and as I said above I think you need a good cmos reset with a DDU .. get everything up to date as F42a bios on my Gigabyte B350 board and the AGESA 1003 with all updates even Afterburner .. this is driver 19.10.1 and been rock stable ..
 
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I moved the card to my other 3700x and right off the bat it blue screen rebooted and then a black shut down from desktop ...

What fixed it for me .. Power Supply was Corsair CX 650 M = take 8 pin and put it on one PCI Express connection on PS , then take the other 6 or 8 pin and hook it to the other PCI Express connection on PS

100% fixed it .
 
You can't use afterburner with Navi? Man I hate AMD cards always issues like that.

You can just don't touch wattman otherwise you have to ddu the drivers and reinstall. Wattman takes setting priority over 3rd party apps.
 
You can just don't touch wattman otherwise you have to ddu the drivers and reinstall. Wattman takes setting priority over 3rd party apps.

I been running AB fan profile because it ramps up better and keeps my now flashed RX 5700 Blower around mid 70's .
 
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