MSI Afterburners Freaks Out - Adds +1000 Core/Memory Clocks - Artifacts, Freezes and Crashes

Ransome

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MSI Afterburner Suddenly decided to go batshit crazy - Overclocking my 2 GTX 980s GPUS beyond normal limits - by its own.

At first my PC was ok (before this bug occur). Then I launched a game and it froze my entire machine. At first I thought it was the game.
After 5 minutes of trying to snap out of it - I hit the reset button.
After a quick restart the desktop came up - all of the sudden the desktop was littered by hundreds of black squares - like bullet holes. Mouse stopped responding.
This time my PC crashed after a short blue screen.

The next time it booted up, I already knew what was the problem. I figured it was MSI Afterburner doing Uber-insane-over-overclock

MSI Afterburner automatically added by its own accord a gargantuan +1000 Memory and +1000 Core Clocks boosts!
This resulted in massive numerous artifacts:
Black squares, rainbow colored marks, shapes and dots flickering, spreading and growing in number. The PC will  freeze solid soon after, then the screen will go black or the entire system crashes with a short blue screen (sad face + error message).

Strangely, this is the 2nd time it happens to me on the same system. However last time was on a previous installation of Windows 10 - I did a clean install (with format) of Win10 since then (which was unrelated to the bug).

I temporarily fixed the issue by restarting several times until I could finally click on MSI Afterburner - and press RESET DEFAULTS to disable the OC. Then uninstalled it.
The problem was that it would constantly lag and freeze my system - preventing me from resetting or uninstalling the damn thing.

I am afraid MSI just burned / damaged my GPUs too - I mean +1000 (probably even more) clocks is insane :/ :fou:

Why is this happening? Has anyone else had this issue?
What exactly triggers this and how do I prevent it in the future?!
[Also how the hell do I enter Safe Mode with Windows 10 and an SSD drive?]

Should I worry about my graphics cards' health after these incidents - or are they probably fine?
 

Ransome

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Just tried restarting my PC and holding the left or right Shift - during BIOS message and during the short flickering "-" before Windows loads up. Didn't work. Are you sure that's how it is done?

Also, do you have any insight about the automatically-killer-overclocking bug?
 
I have seen bugchecks that had several different versions of the overclock driver running from different directories at the same time. I would hate to even guess what each driver did to the cards. Make sure you do not have more than one copy and it is current for your card. I tell people to remove it before I debug problems. Often the problem just goes away.

quotemsg=18315031,0,883311]


Just tried restarting my PC and holding the left or right Shift - during BIOS message and during the short flickering "-" before Windows loads up. Didn't work. Are you sure that's how it is done?

Also, do you have any insight about the automatically-killer-overclocking bug?[/quotemsg]

 

Ransome

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[/quotemsg]

Remove what ? What do you mean? What's rinning on the same time? (I came from clean installation of Windows 10 it makes little sense). I also tend to use DDU driver removal very often.

So, what I did for now was: Resetting MSI Afterburner.
Uninstalling MSI AB selecting NO to keep nothing.
Uninstalled Nvidia Driver and Nvidia's extras like HD audio, experience etc - using safe mode mostly.

I then used DDU Display Driver Uninstaller - to totally remove Nvidia graphics Driver left overs and 100% uninstall the driver.
Usually you can just use DDU driectly without uninstalling manually first.

Finally I downloaded the latest Nvidia Driver and installed the driver - using Clean Install for good measure.
Later I installed MSI Afterburner from scratch and tweaked it a bit.

Should I be good and safe now?

I fear this issue will reoccur, out of my control...
 
I am just saying I have see people install the msi overclocking software into different directories at the same time.
the driver can get loaded into memory more than once. I do not know about your actual machine. I would have to look at a memory dump to see.



Remove what ? What do you mean? What's rinning on the same time? (I came from clean installation of Windows 10 it makes little sense). I also tend to use DDU driver removal very often.

So, what I did for now was: Resetting MSI Afterburner.
Uninstalling MSI AB selecting NO to keep nothing.
Uninstalled Nvidia Driver and Nvidia's extras like HD audio, experience etc - using safe mode mostly.

I then used DDU Display Driver Uninstaller - to totally remove Nvidia graphics Driver left overs and 100% uninstall the driver.
Usually you can just use DDU driectly without uninstalling manually first.

Finally I downloaded the latest Nvidia Driver and installed the driver - using Clean Install for good measure.
Later I installed MSI Afterburner from scratch and tweaked it a bit.

Should I be good and safe now?

I fear this issue will reoccur, out of my control...[/quotemsg]