7950 Crashing My System

G

Gronnie

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 8, 2013
Messages
115
Hello all. I purchased a HIS 7950 IceQ Boost Clock 3GB GDDR5 PCI-E Graphics Card H795QC3G2M less than 3 months ago (mid-October). Ran great at first. Cool, quiet, no crashes. Card has never been overclocked and never used for mining.

Starting yesterday this thing is crashing my system. I had a couple of friends over and they are just getting into PC building so I showed them my system and ran Unigine Heaven, and much to my surprise about 15 seconds in my screen went black. Very embarassing.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling drivers, setting bios to optimized defaults, reseating the card, etc. Everything I could think of. I have tried running Unigine Heaven, 3DMark, and Furmark. All three crash the system after varying degrees of time. I am also getting coil whine when the card is at load, which I have never noticed before. I ran Intel Burn Test 50x on Very High to try to rule out CPU and to a lesser extent PSU and it completed just fine.

Recent Newegg reviews seem to indicate this isn't a problem that only I have had. Is there anything else I can try or is it time to RMA? I am dreading RMA as HIS does it through a third party and I have read that the experience is terrible.

System specs:

Corsair 500R
ASRock Z87 Extreme4
Intel i7 4770k
Zalman CNPS9900ALED Cooler
Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD
2x8GB Crucial Ballistix Low Profile DDR1600 CL8 RAM
3x1TB WD Caviar Green HDD
HIS IceQ 7950
3x LG BD drive, 1x Samsung DVD drive
XFX P1-650X-XXB9 650W 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply
2x Acer P235Hbmid monitors
Windows 7 Ultimate x64
 
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7950s are known to sometimes overheat their VRMs. You might be SOL and have to RMA it. Happenend to my xfx 7950 just last week.
 
do a new windows installation to rule out any driver problem first, you might have some software/driver causing problem in the system, because it only happens recently so you have to rule out the software problem first, it's very hard to say it's the video card from your description.
 
System was able to run OCCT GPU test and OCCT PSU test for 5+ minutes without crashing.

Tried uninstalling GPU drivers and trying older ones, still no dice.

Temps don't seem too bad, they max at 76C. Voltage never seems to go above 1.25. Still crashing to black screen in Unigine Heaven and 3DMark.

I am doing a fresh Windows 7 install now and will try again.
 
I have that same card, and I believe it has active VRM cooling so that shouldn't be the problem, it could of just be a bad card, but does it crash during gaming?
 
Fresh install of Windows doesn't work, still crashes.

Only game I have played on it since I bought it is about 10 hours of DiRT 3. I though I was going to have more time for gaming, but other things have gotten in the way.

So as you can probably imagine, this card hasn't been through too much stress. Never overclocked, never mined with, and not even much gaming on it. It also had no problem running Unigine Heaven on extreme when I first installed it, and also completed 3DMark no problem.

I am going to try to stick it in a different system to to try and rule out PSU. Probably won't get around to that until tomorrow.
 
Oh, and I tried all the same tests with onboard video before reformatting and no crashes.
 
you can lower the core frequency to see if it draw too much power from PSU, put the core frequency at 600MHz and see if it crashes, that will only draw about 2/3 of the power, roughtly 100w, even if you have a 350W PSU it should be running okay. If it continues with crash, time for RMA I would say.
 
Gronnie said:
Starting yesterday this thing is crashing my system
Click to expand...

What's changed? Recent driver swapping (even non-GPU drivers)? Any recent hardware/software?

When do the crashes happen? How far into the tests? Are the crashes happening in the same places (e.g., when benchmarkers hit GPU-intensive spots)?

I'd suggest removing all non-essential devices, downloading DDU -- a great AMD driver uninstaller/cleaner (http://www.wagnardmobile.com/DDU/), and running it in safe mode, then installing the latest beta drivers (http://twitter.com/asder00). Run your crash-culprit app(s) again. Drivers and driver-clashes are often the culprit, particularly with video cards.

Still crashing? Pop open MSI Afterburner and downclock your core/mem speeds. Keep an eye on temps -- what are they peaking at? Bump voltage a smidgen or two. Test again.

Load MemTest86+ onto a bootable USB (I use Hiren's) and run your system memory through a few passes.

The "new" presence of coil whine could be in lieu of a dying PSU, but could also just be that you were never attuned to it before in lack of issues.
 
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So I never ended up RMAing as I have been very busy and not been gaming, and it never crashed my computer when not under load.

Decided to try Heaven and Valley benchmarks today again, and it runs them fine w/ absolutely no issues.

Any idea what the heck happened between then and now? Is there such thing as "breaking in" a GPU?
 
Kinda.

I have had stuff do the same thing, I always blame the thermal interface material. But I have always had this feeling that you need to break in video cards, mobos, and CPUs. There is no logical reason you should though.

In my head I relate stuff to combustion engines, and you have to break those in.
 
OCCT GPu test for only 5 min is not enough, its based off Crysis 2 engine. Make sure you set the right shader complexity and tick the check for errors box
 
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