PC keeps restarting with new graphics card Please Help Me!

Hey
I had previously checked all power cables were securely and correctly in place, so I put in a spare, albeit very lightweight GPU I had (Radeon HD 6570), as of then the crashing no longer occurs, so I doubt it's an issue with my RAM or something.

Do you know what this means in regards to my R9 290? (btw it's specifically the Asus OC DirectCU II edition)

The only other PSUs I have available are 500W, so I don't know if that would be optimal for testing the GPU, but I could potentially borrow another 750W from a friend.

Thank you for your advice so far, please do let me know if you have any idea what I should do next.

EDIT: I should add that I discovered from my friend who helped me assemble the PC that a screw actually fell into the PSU whilst he was helping install it. I've turned off the PC and removed the PSU and will work on removing the screw tomorrow. I don't know if that could be the culprit for the reboots, I'm unsure if a screw affect the PC rebooting only under heavy load.

I will try the 500W PSU to see if that it works with that.

I recorded my R9 290 with GPU-Z when it was idle, and found that the memory clock randomly spiked to maximum, and GPU Load also randomly spiked up to 70%.

I have the log from the recording if you care to take a looksie.

Hang on a second, as I said in my post, I had no idea there was a screw in the PSU as I wasn't the one who dropped it in there in the first place. I know better than to leave a piece of metal somewhere inside an active PSU, and as I also said in my post, as soon as I was alerted to that fact, I removed the PSU.

I know that the screw could potentially do some serious damage, but I think it may not be the problem.

My motherboard is updated to the latest BIOS and has all the latest drivers and chipset installed, and I reset before installing my new GPU, so I don't think it's the cause of the issue.

Thank you for the advice, I will do as you suggested and check the PSU for damage.

If my GPU isn't DOA I'll let you know if the solution you posted helped, and pass it on to anyone else I see with similar problems.

Very much appreciate the info

Hey I changed the settings in BIOS, and the crash/rebooting became a lot less frequent, hours apart.

I decided to update the GPU BIOS to the latest version from the ASUS website, then cleared my drivers with DDU and reinstalled them.

Now, instead of crashing and rebooting, the drivers crashes but then recovers, which is some progress, but still an issue as gaming in this condition is out of the question.

I don't know what this means, I'm happy that the cold reboots have stopped but I'm still concerned.

Using GPU-Z I can see that the memory clock still jumps up to max but the GPU load is much steadier.

Is it possible that changing the BIOS settings as suggested in the solution you linked back to Auto would have any effect?

I'm aware it's potentially an issue with either the PSU or GPU itself but I've tested the PSU in another machine and it was fine, and seeing as their's been a relative improvement in the performance of the GPU (no more reboots) I would like to

a) Rule out driver/software issues before moving on to the hardware

b) Find out why the reboots have stopped and if there's a possible solution to the crash/recovering.

I've tested the card for a short while in game, the temperature is fine, never going above 41°C and it performed fine, right up until the crash and recovery.

Thanks again for your post and I'd really appreciate any further input you might have.

Bad news, I'm afraid

I changed my new 750W Corsair PSU for my old 500W (again Corsair, perhaps Corsair really are awful at making power supplies) and the crashing stopped completely.

I was unsure, but for 11 hours the machine ran absolutely perfect, heavy stress and no.

Then it crashed, similarly to how it had originally, a freeze accompanied with audio loop and hard reboot. I wondered if potentially the BIOS settings I had altered were the cause (I did NOT check up on this, which I definitely should have, but I was quite heartbroken that it had crashed again and am very, very tired from troubleshooting and the ups and downs of inconsistent hardware failure) so I reset the options to Auto and when the PC booted back up, it almost instantaneously crashed, this time accompanied by an ominous pink graphical error ribbon across part of the screen.

Because of this I reset the BIOS in case there was an error with the old 500W PSU, changed the settings back in the BIOS, and added increased the PCI clock to 130 just in case, and I also unplugged one of my 3 chassis fans, as I'm unsure of the power draw that is currently being asked of the 500W. I also now using DVI-D cable instead of HDMI to connect the GPU to a monitor, just because I had one available, but I'm too afraid to actually do much other than turn on the system and monitor it with HWMonitor, the last time I saw graphical glitches such as the one I saw my previous GPU was dying, with the same 500W PSU being involved at the time.

So, I'm fairly sure that the motherboard is the main root of the problems, but it seems that either one of or both of my 1-year-old/brand new PSUs are faulty, OR my GPU is faulty, but I can't determine that until I take it to a friends and test it there.

If you've any ideas on what might be occurring, keeping in mind the system (and specifically GPU) ran fine for at least 10 hours under stress, please let me know.

Soon after posting this I'll box my GPU up in it's anti-static packaging and head off to test it in a friend's rig which surpasses all the requirements.

Unfortunate that I had to meet your positivity with this crap, but what can you do. Next time I post hopefully I'll be able to confirm if it's a GPU issue, and the sticky conundrum of whether the 750W PSU is faulty, but the 500W isn't enough for the rig, or neither are an issue, but I think it may be my Asus motherboard that's the root of all evil.

Hopefully will have some useful news soon


EDIT: It may not be incredibly accurate, but using Cooler Master's power supply calculator web app, it puts my system at 567W minimum, I think I have done something incredibly stupid by playing games in max settings with this current config :/.