Is my R9 290 dying? 30-50% drop in performance unless I restart a few times.

C

crackshot91

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Oct 17, 2009
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Ever since last Friday, I've been struggling with this odd loss in performance. First I thought it was relegated to GTAV only, as that was the only game I was trying to troubleshoot and play, but then I discovered a marked decrease in performance across the board. My 3DMark Firestrike score dropped from 9900 points to anywhere from 8100 to 5000 points, depending on whatever the hell, apparently. GPU Z shows full card utilization and clocks are fine. Temp never goes above 80c. (It's a reference card)

I thought it was Afterburner interacting oddly with the 15.4 drivers at first, but disabling and uninstalling afterburner doesn't seem to make a difference, as performance comes and goes depending on the number of restarts (also inconsistent).

Then I tried fully uninstalling (using DDU) and reinstalling 15.4 and 14.12 drivers, to no avail.

GPU Z reports that PCIe 3 is being used and it's running at 16x when under any load.

What could this mean? Sporadic performance which is ONLY consistent within a single session? IF I get normal performance and don't restart, performance remains solid until restart. If I get poor performance, I notice it can vary from a severe to moderate decrease during a session. It never reaches normal until I restart a random number of times. (sometimes twice, sometimes five times.)

Specs:

Gigabyte Z97X-SLI
i7 4790K stock (turbo and HT enabled)
16GB DDR3-1866 RAM (2x8GB)
XFX R9 290 (Reference, no OC)
Samsung 840 Series SSD 250GB
SeaSonic S12D 850w PSU
Windows 8.1 Pro x64
 
Got the same exact issue just then. What I did to fix it was change the core and memory speed in MSI Afterburner by one MHZ. Then the card seemed to come to life again. Project Cars was a slideshow until I did this. Now it's butter again. ;) I haven't tried to update MSI Afterburner lately so it might be my fault.

I would have just been pissed at AMD without you mentioning this! Thank you very much for starting the topic. ;) Hopefully this bug in Afterburner or the AMD driver will get fixed. I guess they aren't playing nice together after the last driver release. I guess someone should report it ASAP. :)
 
That almost sounds like a RAM issue. Is it just in games that you are experiencing the slow downs or are other programs acting weird or opening slow or something?
 
In games my R9 290 will drop down to 943 MHz even though it is set for 1025 MHz. Eventually it will even drop to 700 MHz. All the time it will ping pong between 1000 MHz and 300 MHz. The temps are currently at 43c, so I doubt it is a heat issue. I had set my fan to 60% earlier because I thought the card was throttling. I also want to add that I am still running the original bios so quiet mode is 20% fan. It will throttle at 20%, but not at 40% where the new bios sets quiet mode. Of course my card hasn't seen 20% since the day I bought it. ;)
 
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MacLeod said:
That almost sounds like a RAM issue. Is it just in games that you are experiencing the slow downs or are other programs acting weird or opening slow or something?
Click to expand...

MacLeod it's just games. The system is as responsive as ever but 3d games seem to take a hit in performance more often than not. Memtest shows no errors... :(
 
cageymaru said:
In games my R9 290 will drop down to 943 MHz even though it is set for 1025 MHz. Eventually it will even drop to 700 MHz. All the time it will ping pong between 1000 MHz and 300 MHz. The temps are currently at 43c, so I doubt it is a heat issue. I had set my fan to 60% earlier because I thought the card was throttling. I also want to add that I am still running the original bios so quiet mode is 20% fan. It will throttle at 20%, but not at 40% where the new bios sets quiet mode. Of course my card hasn't seen 20% since the day I bought it. ;)
Click to expand...

For me, throttling doesn't seem to be the issue as the loss in performance is *immediate*, even as the clocks are at the normal 947/1250 and temps are below 60 degrees.This isn't performance starting off well and becoming worse as the card heats up... This is performance being consistently terrible.

TRIXX doesn't seem to make a difference as I discovered afterburner is not the culprit, since I have it uninstalled and am using the catalyst 14.12 drivers. which worked flawlessly when I used them a few months ago...
 
crackshot91 said:
Ever since last Friday, I've been struggling with this odd loss in performance. First I thought it was relegated to GTAV only, as that was the only game I was trying to troubleshoot and play, but then I discovered a marked decrease in performance across the board. My 3DMark Firestrike score dropped from 9900 points to anywhere from 8100 to 5000 points, depending on whatever the hell, apparently. GPU Z shows full card utilization and clocks are fine. Temp never goes above 80c. (It's a reference card)

I thought it was Afterburner interacting oddly with the 15.4 drivers at first, but disabling and uninstalling afterburner doesn't seem to make a difference, as performance comes and goes depending on the number of restarts (also inconsistent).

Then I tried fully uninstalling (using DDU) and reinstalling 15.4 and 14.12 drivers, to no avail.

GPU Z reports that PCIe 3 is being used and it's running at 16x when under any load.

What could this mean? Sporadic performance which is ONLY consistent within a single session? IF I get normal performance and don't restart, performance remains solid until restart. If I get poor performance, I notice it can vary from a severe to moderate decrease during a session. It never reaches normal until I restart a random number of times. (sometimes twice, sometimes five times.)

Specs:

Gigabyte Z97X-SLI
i7 4790K stock (turbo and HT enabled)
16GB DDR3-1866 RAM (2x8GB)
XFX R9 290 (Reference, no OC)
Samsung 840 Series SSD 250GB
SeaSonic S12D 850w PSU
Windows 8.1 Pro x64
Click to expand...

i find it odd that you have a ref card and the temps stays at 80c. when i had the stock cooler on my ref card it would 94c after about 2 minutes.
 
Haha, yeah. I put the fan to work....

Anyway, I tried the second PCIe slot in my motherboard (It's a 3.0 x8 slot) and performance is still shoddy most of the time. How can I determine what is at fault? I don't really have access to other parts at the moment...
 
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You know when I got a 290 not long ago and decided to benchmark my system using the unigine valley benchmark. I was getting a very low score. Turned out that even though I had "use application settings" in the anti-aliasing mode set, I also had the anti-aliasing method set to super sampling and that still affected things.

That probably has nothing to do with your issue but it was a damn difficult one to figure out myself as I though those setting only came into play when set to override application settings.
 
When the problem occurs, what is your GPU and CPU use?
You can add CPU use to Afterburners graph.
 
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