Crazy R9 290 system instability

[Tengis]

It has gotten slowly worse over time. Monitor will click off and the rest of the PC will freeze after about 10 seconds. For example, if I am playing a game, on Skype, or doing anything with audio I can hear it going for about another ten seconds.

For some reason the computer did this twice while trying to post this.

I have adjusted my CPU overclock up, down, and back to stock.
I have increased voltage by a tiny bit and raised the power limit with clocks still stock.
Installed/reinstalled tons of driver versions.

At one point I actually COULD NOT install the driver. Every single time I attempted to install it the screen would black out as described above.

I cleaned all of the drivers on the system, booted into safe mode, remove all remnants of AMD video card drives, and then installed the driver only through device manager without the CCC profile.

My card is a reference Asus R9 290. I have actually had this problem since day one but it only happened once every couple of weeks and I thought it was something else causing the issue.

I currently have a brand new power supply hooked up just in case it is that. I have done a CPU/ram stress test in Linux and it works fine.

Its 3:30am where I live so I may just be rambling right now... but I am sure you get the point. In my googling this apparently might have something to do with the lower power mode of the video card.

Thoughts?

 

[xBanzai89]

My 290 out the blue would cause me to get black screens as well. Nothing I could do with the keyboard would recover the screen.

After googling enough I found a solution that worked for me. When I first setup the 290 I was using one cord line that had two 8 pin pci-e connects to connect into the card in order to power it. Having read this can cause black screen issues and you should be using separate cord lines with 8 pin pci-e connectors. Since I have resorted to using that method I have not had a single black screen occur.

 

[Araxie]

is the bios up to date?.. if not that's the first to try, update to latest and reset CMOS after update.

 

[Tengis]

My motherboard bios? Yes, it is up to date. System is in sig.

 

[Tengis]

Yes, I have separate power cables for each connector.

 

[Tengis]

For some reason I thought Asus video cards only have a 1 year warranty... apparently it is a 3 year. I think I am going to tough it out without PC gaming for a month and try to RMA it.

 

[hajalie24]

I have a similar issue too, and what sucks is I can't pinpoint it. Sometimes I'll be gaming for hours, but pause the game and play around the menus and suddenly it freezes, sound keeps playing but eventually loops, and I have to reset. I think mine might be a crossfire issue though,

 

[pgaster]

RMA is the way to go if that is still an option.

Yes, black screens with r9 290 cards are very, very common. I have a Powercolor and finally asked them for a bios update for the card and they sent me one. It works and works well, but the fan speed is insane now by default. Instead of 47% max it's 80%. After some experimenting I found I can turn down the fan with Afterburner and that helps a lot.

Anyway, my whole story is here: http://www.overclock.net/t/1441349/290-290x-black-screen-poll/1540
My handle there is gaster.
I posted the bios for my card there in case anyone wants to try it. My card is a reference card so it should work on other reference cards too. Just be prepared in terms of noise because of the increased fan speed.

I think the fan curve I have set up now is like this:
flat line 30% from temp of 0 to 50 C
next point, 50% at 60 C
next point, 55% at 70 C
next point, 62% at 90 C
flat after that

I could maybe even turn it down more, but that is cooler than the previous bios temp at load, (around 47% fan speed stock), and it's less loud than the new stock 80% fan speed. It seemed like a decent compromise.

 

[pgaster]

I have a similar issue too, and what sucks is I can't pinpoint it. Sometimes I'll be gaming for hours, but pause the game and play around the menus and suddenly it freezes, sound keeps playing but eventually loops, and I have to reset. I think mine might be a crossfire issue though,

Nope, not a crossfire issue, just the typical black screen issue. I had the same thing until I updated the card bios.

 

[Tengis]

I never updated the bios unfortunately. I mailed it off today to have it repaired/replaced. I have about 5 friends with R9 290 or 290x... and 3 of us have had to RMA our cards because of issues with black screens or crashes that all pointed towards the video card.

I had a custom fan profile that usually kept my fan speed at about 40% and upwards of 60% at load. I game with headphones on so the noise didnt bother me at all.

 

[cageymaru]

Mine used to do the blackout thing. Then I bought a new Displayport cable and it was cured. Might want to disable ULPS in MSI Afterburner. The freezing is caused by old bios that sets the fan speed to 20% on old reference cards. If you monitor your card's speed I bet it is throttling to 700MHz when it hits 90+C. Updated bios will set it to 40%, but I didn't bother to change it. I just set it to 40% in MSI Afterburner.

Also my card sometimes doesn't make great connection with the PCI-E slot due to it getting damaged in shipping. So every so often I have to shove it in a little tighter. One day I'm going to change the thermal paste on it. Whenever I feel up to the task.

 

[Tengis]

I actually have used it on a few different monitors with different cables. Also, my card stayed pretty cool at all times. This room is usually about 64f and the fan speed settings in Afterburner that I set ramp up pretty good once it starts to warm up.