GPU upgrade leads to freezing, crashing and other strange behaviour

napoke

Commendable
Oct 26, 2016
5
0
1,520
Hi all.

Upgraded my old R9 390 to GTX 1070 just few days ago and since then it's been mostly crashes and freezes between some even hours long sessions of smooth gaming at high FPS. Everything else is seemingly fine, GPU temp lower than before (I managed to max it at 75 C degrees under heavy load), power consumption down, X5670 CPU as cool as ever and 1440p gaming at almost rock solid 60 fps. Everything is running at default clocks except for the built in boosting of the GPU that happens when gaming.

The first mistake I may have made is not cleaning everything AMD properly before swapping in the new card. However I've run the cleaning tool since then and updated the GeForce drivers.

I'm running Win 10 Pro 64 bit and the crashes and freezes are of various kinds. I get simple black screen reboots, freezes to black screen with hard boot needed, once a scrambled (like too heavy jpg compression) BSOD I could not read and often they are accompanied by whatever sound was playing going into a buzzing micro loop. Sometimes I just get a short half second buzz from Windows sounds or game music and it recovers after that. In gaming I may have had 3-4 second buzz while the game ran smoothly all the time. Event log shows nothing really but the Kernel Power Event 41 and that the previous system shutdown was unexpected. Only other frequent errors are from source DistributedCOM and mean nothing to me.

This all seems completely random, not related to load. It might happen right after powering on, under heavy gaming or while the computer is idling with nothing but browser on the desktop.

Any help would be appreciated.
 
Solution
Final update to this in case someone wonders. Removing NVIDIA HD Audio only stabilized the system some and it froze still maybe once or twice a day but usually I was able to run it for 8 hours straight. Not satisfied with that I finally had to do a clean Win 10 installation and now everything seems to be working fine. Ended up disabling the onboard Realtek Audio since the Nvidia one was harder to keep from coming back and it works just fine since I use Display Port to connect my main monitor and have 3,5 mm cable from there to the speakers. Easier in fact since I also use PS4 in similar manner.

napoke

Commendable
Oct 26, 2016
5
0
1,520
I wonder if I fixed this myself? Keeping fingers crossed but it has been running without a glitch and even the strange fps drop in Fallout 4 that happened after 30-60 minutes is gone.

I noticed the horribly distorted sound had come from Nvidia HD Audio that had installed itself with the 1070. I did not notice it was set as default since I run cable from monitor to my speakers too for PS4 gaming and the sound was on even though I thought I was still listening to sound from my Realtek HD through 3,5mm analog jack. I disabled that and also uninstalled Asus GPU TweakII that was messing up my keyboard.

Don't know which one it was but strongly suspect Nvidia HD Audio since the freezes were accompanied by distorted and looping sound.

Now I have another issue however: The Nvidia HD Audio drivers keep reinstalling themselves every time I boot up and I have to manually go remove them. How do I keep it from reinstalling?
 

napoke

Commendable
Oct 26, 2016
5
0
1,520
Final update to this in case someone wonders. Removing NVIDIA HD Audio only stabilized the system some and it froze still maybe once or twice a day but usually I was able to run it for 8 hours straight. Not satisfied with that I finally had to do a clean Win 10 installation and now everything seems to be working fine. Ended up disabling the onboard Realtek Audio since the Nvidia one was harder to keep from coming back and it works just fine since I use Display Port to connect my main monitor and have 3,5 mm cable from there to the speakers. Easier in fact since I also use PS4 in similar manner.
 
Solution