Death of a R9 270X

murrpoosa23

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Dec 27, 2015
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Hello!

This is my very very first Tom's Hardware forum question. So bare with me if I am a little rusty.

I built my current gaming PC back in 2014 March,

( Spec : Asus z87-k, Core i5 4670k, R9 270x 2GB, 8 GB Fury RAM , 128 Intel SSD, 500G and 1 TB WD hard disks, Corsair CX600M PSU and five 120 mm case fans and Noctua DH-14 Cooler with 2 fans, Windows 10)

And I've been using it every single day ever since. without a single glitch. that was until last night where I was playing Fallout 4 on full settings with a couple of mods, mostly texture mods. where all of a sudden the screen became filled with very small colored squares (Visual artifacts I believe? ) and froze. and crashed to the desktop with a pop up error "AMD driver has stopped responding and has recovered) I was surprised as this was the first time got this error. I proceeded to restart the game, which ended in the same result, Removed all the mods Still the same result. Loaded two different games, Still the same. and Then it just went black. So I proceeded to reboot.

At this point I removed the HDMI and plugged it to the Onboard VGA out. and the screen was still black. I opened up the case, took out the GPU and booted with On board. Then it proceeded to boot with out an issue. So I refreshed my windows copy, Reinstalled all the drivers, hooked up the GPU, nothing. its still giving out black. I went in to BIOS and set iGPU as priority and hooked up the GPU and booted again, Then I could see the GPU in the device manager, but the minute I opened up AMD Catalyst Control Center, the PC would just freeze and cause a hang freeze.

I kept the GPU overnight and woke up today and researched every where I can to figure out whats wrong with it. I re-seated the RAM, did a very very thorough cleaning of the GPU , including re applying the thermal paste. Mind you this GPU was never cleaned properly as I was afraid to open it up , there was a considerable amount of dust. I tried it all, but no avail.

I think its Dead, (ITS DEAD JIM!). And I think it was my incompetence that killed the 270X, I always clean my fans and mobo but never ever opened up the GPU cause I was afraid.

RIP ASUS Radeon R9 270X-DDC2T-2GD5, You were a good Card.

tl;dr. GPU died, too much dust probably killed it.

 

murrpoosa23

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Dec 27, 2015
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4,510


No, I just let the auto update take care it for me, I think messed with the GPU tweak too much and maybe that caused a lack of power as well. anyway planning on moving to NVIDIA