Head-scratcher: why am I having performance issues that are solved by reseating the video card?

A

Aix

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 17, 2006
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For ~7 months I was running an asus gtx1070 with absolutely zero issues, then recently I sold the card and bought an asus gtx1080 ti, and now I'm experiencing a problem I'd never seen before.

A few days ago, during normal desktop operation, my screen went black yet my computer did not reboot or lock up. After force rebooting, everything appeared normal until I opened up a game and it was suddenly running incredibly slowly. Benchmarks showed that I was down to ~15% performance prior to the incident.

The fix that worked was simply reseating the video card. I realized this after putting in a different card for testing. Today the exact same thing happened again, I tried reseating as the first action and it worked immediately.

Has anyone heard about, or experienced this? Why do you guys think could be causing this problem? I noticed that the screw holes are not well aligned with my case's holes and I'm not screwing it in very tightly. Could this heavy card be gradually coming loose in the slot? Feels like I'm really reaching here...
 
Is it reseating the card or removing it from standby power that's doing it? Try unplugging the PC and holding down the powere button for a few seconds while unplugged to see if it does the same thing
 
If the video card is sagging or otherwise exerting force on the PCI-E slot there could be damage or the pins are simply out of alignment. Reseating the card could also be reseating the plastic bracket for the PCI-E pins and thus be fixing the issue temporarily until gravity forces it out of alignment again. There is a reason GPU brackets are now a thing, or people otherwise using common household objects to support the video card.

Other than that, did you properly uninstall the 1070 before installing the 1080 Ti? If not, I would DDU and reinstall from scratch. Swapping video cards without a clean driver install can also cause anomalies.
 
ecmaster76 said:
Is it reseating the card or removing it from standby power that's doing it? Try unplugging the PC and holding down the powere button for a few seconds while unplugged to see if it does the same thing
Click to expand...

Interesting thought, I will try this next time. Unfortunately I don't know how to trigger this problem myself, so have to wait until it happens.

Armenius said:
If the video card is sagging or otherwise exerting force on the PCI-E slot there could be damage or the pins are simply out of alignment. Reseating the card could also be reseating the plastic bracket for the PCI-E pins and thus be fixing the issue temporarily until gravity forces it out of alignment again. There is a reason GPU brackets are now a thing, or people otherwise using common household objects to support the video card.

Other than that, did you properly uninstall the 1070 before installing the 1080 Ti? If not, I would DDU and reinstall from scratch. Swapping video cards without a clean driver install can also cause anomalies.
Click to expand...

It's definitely exerting force on the PCI-E slot, this card is freaking massive. As far as drivers go, yes I reinstalled from safe mode with DDU.
 
depending on your case and how far from the bottom the card is you could try using a pencil/pen or something along those lines to hold the card up so it's not putting as much force on the pcie slot and see what happens. i had to do that back in the day with an old GF4 card that had a gigantic full card aluminum heatsink on it that cracked the plastic around the agp slot from the weight. then eventually rigged something more permanent to support the card.
 
Are you overclocking your PCIe bus at all by proxy of overclocking your BCLK?

Sounds maybe like your last card could handle it, where this one can't possibly.
 
As others have hinted towards, sounds like the sag is causing something to physically come out of alignment, that'd explain why re-seating temporarily fixes the issue until the weight pulls it back out again.

Instead of propping the card up from the bottom, another way is to use clear fishing line and tie a knot around a sturdy place on the end of the card, and then to a place on the top of your case to keep the card in position. Really discrete solution, and no one will know it's there unless they're looking for it.
 
Thank you everyone for the ideas. I've addressed the sag, we'll see if the issue pops up again.

AlphaQup said:
As others have hinted towards, sounds like the sag is causing something to physically come out of alignment, that'd explain why re-seating temporarily fixes the issue until the weight pulls it back out again.

Instead of propping the card up from the bottom, another way is to use clear fishing line and tie a knot around a sturdy place on the end of the card, and then to a place on the top of your case to keep the card in position. Really discrete solution, and no one will know it's there unless they're looking for it.
Click to expand...

That's almost exactly what I ended up doing, except I ran the line under the card like a noose right past the end of the PCI-E slot and then tied the two ends at the top after threading through the case.
 
Why not tip your tower over so its flat on the floor/desk?
Jebus, talk about making things harder than it needs to be..
 
My CPU back plate interferes with the way my motherboard tray was designed and it causes a warp on the mobo that causes similar issues to what you describe.
 
I had a similar problem with an old HD6970. Turns out when it finally gave out, one of the smd capacitors was burning out until it finally gave way.
 
I had to use an old sound card to prop up the tail end of my 3 foot long 30 pound Gigabyte GTX 980 G! lol.
 
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