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GPU or PSU failing? - A mystery to be solved!

Tags:
  • Corsair
  • Power Supplies
  • Driver Failure
  • Homebuilt
  • Gigabyte
  • Systems
  • Geforce
  • Nvidia
  • GPUs
  • Graphics Cards
Last response: in Systems
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July 29, 2014 9:05:11 AM

Hey, guys!

I have a problem to solve and I can't quite figure it out by myself. Maybe you could help me with this. Let me preface a bit!

In March, 2011 I bought my current setup. In my signature, you can see the rough layout of my build. Maybe about a year in I started getting GPU crashes, albeit very, very seldom. Maybe once in a month or two. What would happen was my screen would go black and the picture would be restored in roughly 1 - 3 seconds. I didn't think too much of this, since it didn't really affect what I was doing. Over the course of last year, it had become a bit more frequent. This would happen let's say once in 3 - 4 weeks.

It was a beautiful evening maybe 6 or so weeks ago. I was laying on my bed with my PC running at the other side of the room. Suddenly, my ear would catch a tiny crackling sound that was clearly coming from the direction of my PC. I had been cleaning my PC from dust earlier the same day and I had forgotten to close the side panel, due to which every little noise the PC made was very audible. I was starting to be rather alarmed at this point and I pounced through my room to make a diagnosis. The sound was very faint and I though it was coming from the direction of my PSU. It was late and I decided to call it a night and shut down my PC.

The next morning, I observed the sound more. I tried pinpointing the location of the sound and finally determined that it had to be one of my hard drives. I thought that as long as no absolutely necessary component was malfunctioning, I shouldn't be too worried.

About 10 days ago, we had a LAN party with a group of friends. The crackling sound was now almost ever-present, whereas before it had only been occasional. For the first time in a long, long time, my computer froze. I wasn't doing anything specific at that time. Just surfing the web. My mouse wouldn't move but I could still all the sounds that were on. This happened I guess twice during the two-day party. The GPU errors would also happen a few times and a message along the following lines would be displayed - just as it had always: "NVIDIA xxx.x Kernel Mode Driver has stopped working, and has recovered".

I started growing uneasy and these problems would become ever more frequent. Yesterday I had two freeze-ups in two hours and a couple of driver malfunctions. Today, I've had three.

With this in mind, I started running test. Here are some results:

Windows Memory Diagnostic: Pass
Seatools short and long generic tests for SSD and two HDDs: Pass
Furmark: My video card GIGABYTE GV-N560OC-1GI GeForce GTX 560 Ti OC would run different sorts of tests but always the temps would go up to 95 degrees celcius. The device probably has a self-turn mechanism and the PC would reboot itself always, and only at this point. I'm not sure what to make out of these results. I would have thought that at some low benchmark settings, I would have gotten a stabilised temperature and a decent framerate. Or does Furmark always try to squeeze every last bit of power from the card.
Prime95: The program wouldn't run the Blend test at all due to hardware malfunction, at first. I tried twice. Then I tried the Small FFTs test, which would run okay for 30 minutes. Also Blend would run now and it worked fine for 90 - 120 minutes or so.

Today, I observed the sound again. I still can't tell if it was coming from the PSU or the GPU but I'm pretty sure one of them is failing. I decided to unplug the GPU in order to clean it up. The sound disappeared and I'm now writing this message with my CPU on-board graphics and I haven't heard a thing during this whole time. However, I'm not 100 % convinced. It might be that now that the PSU is under a decreased amount of stress, it is working fine and my rig has only been overloading the thing. My power supply is a Corsair Builder Series CX500 V2, 500 Watt. I've sometimes wondered that my PSU might not give enough power to the components although I haven't overclocked anything as of yet. Could I be running out of power here? I don't have any extra PCI-E cards. Just an SSD, two HDDs, GPU, CPU, case fans, 3 sticks of RAM, an aftermarket cooler and a fan controller.

I'm was going to upgrade my GPU at some point but I would like to invest that money to the component that is actually failing.

What do you guys think of this? Have you had similar problems? Can I run more tests to test out the GPU or the PSU? Can we draw a conclusion?


Thank you in advance your input!
-mon4ro

More about : gpu psu failing mystery solved

July 29, 2014 9:22:05 AM

Dear mon4ro don't do anything to your pc right now, send it to a repair shop for a professional point of view and diagnose, sure you might have to spend a bit, but your pc would be in safe hands and trying to do anything to the pc right now by yourself might just kill it. The Forum community will gladly help but since we can be there to tell what is wrong it will be an advice but a not so good one.
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July 29, 2014 10:11:32 AM

Yuna said:
Dear mon4ro don't do anything to your pc right now, send it to a repair shop for a professional point of view and diagnose, sure you might have to spend a bit, but your pc would be in safe hands and trying to do anything to the pc right now by yourself might just kill it. The Forum community will gladly help but since we can be there to tell what is wrong it will be an advice but a not so good one.


Thanks for an honest answer. I think I will just wait and see what happens now that I have the GPU unplugged. If all the symptons disappear, I think it's safe bet to replace both the GPU and the CPU. But sure, it could be something else enterily. We'll see! I'm reckless and confident enough to tinker around a bit since I have a decent knowledge in electronics.

-mon4ro
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July 29, 2014 10:30:13 AM

mon4ro said:
Yuna said:
Dear mon4ro don't do anything to your pc right now, send it to a repair shop for a professional point of view and diagnose, sure you might have to spend a bit, but your pc would be in safe hands and trying to do anything to the pc right now by yourself might just kill it. The Forum community will gladly help but since we can be there to tell what is wrong it will be an advice but a not so good one.


Thanks for an honest answer. I think I will just wait and see what happens now that I have the GPU unplugged. If all the symptons disappear, I think it's safe bet to replace both the GPU and the CPU. But sure, it could be something else enterily. We'll see! I'm reckless and confident enough to tinker around a bit since I have a decent knowledge in electronics.

-mon4ro


nice! Good Luck to you :) 
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