R9 290x Keeps crashing PC

Matthew McCormick

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Oct 3, 2013
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Ok so my R9290x keeps either:
A) Giving me the Blue Screen o Death
or
B) Restarting the PC.

I have a 6 core AMD Processor (6100 no OC) and a 600W PSU (Been told it will run no problem).

Whats my problem ehre.

I freshly installed the R9 by wiping my old HD 7770 OC Drivers and even reinstaleld Catalyst.
 
Solution
Well, I bought a Seasonic 850W 80 Plus Gold and the problem remained.

So looking at past threads, I found an issue with the 2D GPU clock being too low and causing issues with older ATI cards.

I downloaded GPU Tweak and raised the GPU clock to 420 and Memory clock to 225... Haven't had one random reboot since Sunday Night when I applied the new settings. With the problem before, I couldn't go a day without at least two to three reboots.



maxalge

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Depends on the unit.

You need at least 41amps on the +12 rail.
 

Matthew McCormick

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Oct 3, 2013
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Ive underclocked my card. Need to wait 14 days and ill have a 750w PSU
http://gyazo.com/f159a897613cfb15114c2a9ed9e84581

My UC - think it'll need more?
 

The Brad

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Feb 11, 2014
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Matt,

I have almost the same exact issue! Is your issue mainly random reboots?

The following is my current set up:

FX6100@4.3
Asus m5a78l LX Plus Motherboard
Antec NeoEco 620 PSU
XFX 290 unlocked 290X
PNY 1033 DDR

I've tried pretty much everything under the sun and nothing seems to work.


 


Did the problem occur before flashing?
There is no guarantee the locked shaders work properly.

Lets put it this way. Some fully working 290Xs are cut down to make 290s. But some
of the cut down cards may not be fully working and have some bad shaders.
 

The Brad

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Feb 11, 2014
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I flashed it back to the original bios with default settings and the random reboots are still an issue.

So I assume it is hardware but I can run in safe mode with networking and everything is fine. The random reboots are so random as I can play AC4 or BF4 for hours and everything is fine or I can just start browsing web pages and the computer randomly reboots or vice versa.


 

Matthew McCormick

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Oct 3, 2013
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ts the PSU Brad - we need 750's
 

The Brad

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Feb 11, 2014
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Well, I bought a Seasonic 850W 80 Plus Gold and the problem remained.

So looking at past threads, I found an issue with the 2D GPU clock being too low and causing issues with older ATI cards.

I downloaded GPU Tweak and raised the GPU clock to 420 and Memory clock to 225... Haven't had one random reboot since Sunday Night when I applied the new settings. With the problem before, I couldn't go a day without at least two to three reboots.



 
Solution

Shane Johnson

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May 25, 2013
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Might have something here... I ended up after all day playing around downclocking my gpu and I managed to get into Crysis 2 and I have not been able to be in a game all day untill the clock I streamed what I was doing as I couldnt record normaly as when it crash I would lose the footage so i streamed so it saves check this out http://en-gb.twitch.tv/dzwrealkiller/b/512566177




Its not much but I have GPU-Z up showing temps and shit and I show where I downclocked the card and ran the game in 720p windowed then upped it to 1080p windowed and then 1080p full screen and I was happy then tried battlefiled 4 and it crashed right away :( but could be onto something... I think the OC that came on the card might just be unstable. but i need someone that know what there looking at to take a look at the gpu-z so yes i would defo say its all to do with the clock speeds....
 

james50cal

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Jun 3, 2014
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I have the same issues I was running it on a smaller psu so i got an rm850 and still having the same issues. Iset the power to constant and it didnt reset for a whole day and i thought i had fixed it but its back!! I dont think its a psu issue but some sort of driver issue.
I play bf4 using mantle instead of direct x and that runs fine?
 

290x user

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Jun 12, 2014
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Hi,

I recently replaced my AMD HD5850 card with a Club3D G9 290x and I have the exact same problem described by the thread starter.

PC reboots randomly while in Windows. While playing Hearthstone the screen sometimes turns black for a second and comes back, and I've had a couple of BSOD while playing Hearthstone as well.

I have a 600w modular PSU. When the crashes started to happen I immediately thought it had to do with the PSU since I've never experienced crashes like this before with my HD5850 that has been running for 6 years without any issues.

The crashes never happened when I played Watch_Dogs all day long, which i thought was strange.

I have changed the GPU clock for 2D to maximum 600mhz with Asus GPU Tweak (instead of the default 300mhz), and been playing Hearthstone all day to check if my system would crash, but that didn't happen anymore.

If others could also try this and post their findings here, that would be great.

Edit:

Sorry to inform, but the BSOD still happens. Even bought a complete new PSU, CPU, Ram, MB, SSD and they still happen. I'm beginning to believe this is just a bad GPU release. Tried 2 diffetent R9 290x cards. Both BSOD with same error 0xa0000001 atikmdag.sys, ntoskrnl.exe.

Always when playing Hearthstone of browsing (youtube). Tried all drivers 13.2, 14.4, 14.6 with and without CCC. Reinstalled W7 10 times. Tried different VBIOS (asus, club3d). Problem still occurs.

I even tried installing W7 clean with ONLY the 14.4 driver and Hearthstone game. Still BSOD.
 

morreale

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Jun 17, 2014
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I have the ASUS R9290X-DC2OC-4GD5 version of the card and I get blacks screens randomly and at least 3 BSODs each day doing anything from browsing, youtube, games, etc

Corsair Professional Series AX860i PSU so I know power is not an issue

 

Rilex

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Dec 19, 2013
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The answer is, stop using Firefox. You could also stop using hard wareacceleration on Firefox, but instead of BSOD flash will crash more often.
 

Rexer

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Hello.
I just modified my HD7950 last month to get cooler temps and higher overclock. It was a miserable job but needful one. When I started it for the first time after, I would enter a game (BF3) and it would crash and reboot to start up. Such a pain. I research the crash and I found their is a fail-safe built into the motherboard bios; if a current draw is too excessive (or surge) the mobo's protection circuit triggers (like a programmed circuit breaker) and cuts off power. Judging from what the techs and factory tech said, you need to turn it off in the bios. The Asus company tech guy said it's really too sensitive and if you have protection along the circuit path (UPS to PSU to motherboard to video card), you don't need it. But before I did this, I thought it was working fine with the original bios. So I REINSTALLED the latest bios driver. It worked. HOLA! I haven't seen a crash in 4 weeks!
But just to keep it from happening again, I re-routed 2 added fans to the PSU and ordered a Gelid fan controller. Hope this helps.
If that doesn't work, we may have to go startup F-8 for an error code.
 

dadilus

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Feb 14, 2012
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I gave up. Had an EVGA Nvidia GTX 680 2gb. A friend offered to buy it if I was going to upgrade, so I bought an XFX R290X. Cleaned all the old drivers off and started fresh. Computer ran for a half hour, no problem, then my wife called me into the room because the computer BSOD while she was on the internet. The system blue screened so often that i could only make adjustments in safe mode. Put my nvidia back in, loaded the drivers and smooth sailing. So I RMA'd the card to newegg and they sent another. Same thing happened a few times and then the card stopped posting. RMA'd that card and they gave me newegg giftcard. I bought the EVGA GTX 780 OC 6gb. popped it in, loaded the divers and off I go!. Asus MB, 8 GB Patriot ram, 1000 watt power supply, I used to have SLi! I don't think any card should take that much work to get it to run! Sorry ATI, you lost another customer!
 

fir3w0rx

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Oct 24, 2014
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What worked for me...

1. Uninstalled Catalyst Control Center (CCC).
2. Disabled Hardware Acceleration in Adobe Flash (mainly used for YouTube).

When I first got this gfx card (Gigabyte Radeon R9 290x), I was getting blue screens every 2-3 days on average. They would occur weather I'm running a high gfx demanding game or a game that can be run on 256 colors or watching YouTube videos. They didn't seem to occur when my PC was idle though. After doing the above 2 things, I haven't got a BSoD in months :)

My specs:
CPU: Intel Core i7 960 @ 3.2 GHz
OS: Win 7 Ultimate x64
GPU: Gigabyte Radeon R9 290x
GPU Driver: version 14.301.1001.0
PSU: 950 watts.
RAM: 12GB
Browser: Internet Explorer 11

*EDIT: It turns out that my CPU was overheating. After replacing the cooler with a more powerful one, I've been able to use hardware acceleration, CCC and everything else with no problems. It's been several months now :)
 

coole

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Feb 21, 2015
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Thank you very much for this post, it fixed my issues with Sapphire r9 290. I just want to know does that mean I underclocked my GPU? Because you said you raised the gpu clock to 420 and memory clock to 2250, but mine was actually at 947 and 5000 so i lowered it. It is working fine since then, but I think I am using only half of the power.

Edit: I changed 3D GPU clock, not the 2D. Sorry and thank you once again. After 3 weeks of searching various forums my r9 290 is finally working properly.
 

kawwee

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Mar 15, 2015
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This worked for me - not a single reboot or driver crash as long as GPU Tweak is running (I set 2D GPU core to 450 and Memory to 600 - maybe overkill but it is working and core temp only goes up from 30C to 38C) . I was ready to RMA the Powercolor PCS+ 290X I just bought, but it seems perhaps my motherboard is sensitive to the voltages used (or not) at the video card? My motherboard is an old ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO. Maybe it's time for a new 990X board that hopefully won't have this problem?
 

kawwee

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Mar 15, 2015
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Just changed out the MB for a 990X chipset board (Gigabyte for the power stability) - upgraded to a FX8350 too - and have had no crashes WITHOUT GPU Tweak - there is definitely a power issue with some older MB's. I understand there can be many possible causes of crashing, but this one is easy to check for.
 

tawilson007

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Aug 7, 2015
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I tried all solutions to no avail: increasing/decreasing clocks, voltage, power envelope; downclocking cpu; increased vram voltage; etc. Nothing worked.

As I was swapping the 290x into different PCIe slots to see if that was the problem, I noticed that some of the mobo screws were loose. Turns out, almost all of them were loose (just came back from quakecon). Tightened everything, no more problems. Guess the mobo wasn't grounded well enough and was shorting the system. Easy thing to check for before you start in on the above suggestions.