GPU Acting Very Strangely - Is It In Trouble?

[regis9 4,014]

Hello, tonight I was watching a YouTube video - so a very non GPU intensive task - and suddenly I heard the GPU fans spool up to full speed.  I had never heard the fans this loud before.  

After a few seconds of this I lost my video signal to my monitor, but the computer was still running.  I could hear my video continuing to play.

I hit the reset button, when the computer rebooted it made it to my desktop then I lost the video signal again.  I did a full power off and back on, this time I was able to stay at the desktop so I took advantage and updated my drivers.

So far so good, I haven't had a repeat now after about 10 minutes, fan volume seems normal.

Any idea what might have happened?  Something to worry about?  My RTX4080 isn't that old...had it just over a year.

Thanks,

Dave

[stans 703]

Might be a video card driver issue, did you recently change drivers?  It could be the video card failing.  My only experience with a failing video card was that it started with pixelated images after running for a while, then would go black after a short amount of use, then it completely died.

[regis9 4,014]

Thanks I hadn’t actually upgraded the drivers in a while.

[stans 703]

My question about video drivers was actually regarding any recent upgrades.  Also, what are the video card temperatures looking like?  If a video card gets too hot, it may throttle itself.  Is there dust inside the card's cooler?

[regis9 4,014]

I’ll have to take a look and see if some dust has accumulated.  I did clean it all quite well a few months ago and my case is pretty good about keeping dust off the card but I’ll have a look.

I’m not sure about the temps, but it was doing pretty basic stuff (YouTube) and the ambient temperature in my basement is quite cool this time of year (around 19-21C) so I’d be surprised if it was overheating (unless for some very unusual reason).

So far there hasn’t been a recurrance but I will have a look inside more closely.

Thanks for the suggestions, I do appreciate it. 

[Nick M 106]

Hello Dave,

I'm having exactly the same issue with my 4070 GPU: fans run up to full speed and the video display is lost forcing a hard restart. (Resetting the GPU with Ctrl + Shift + Start + B doesn't work.) No apparent pattern as to when it happens, sometimes when the card isn't under load, although on other occasions it will happen when running MSFS or other games. Anyway, as you'll have discovered, it's rather annoying! 

Mine is a Gigagbyte GeForce RTX 4070 GAMING OC 12GB which was purchased around 6 months ago. I'm curious if Gigabyte is the manufacturer in your case too?

For what it's worth, I've tried replugging/changing power cables, updating drivers, and most recently updating the GPU bios. Not sure yet if the latter will make any difference but we'll see.

Cheers,

Nick

[regis9 4,014]

Hi Nick, yes mine is a Gigabyte card...that's interesting!  

Have you contacted support?  I haven't had a recurrence of the issue but I'm thinking maybe I should so they have a log of the issue in case it ends up requiring a warranty replacement or something down the line. 

[Nick M 106]

Thanks for confirming Dave. Yes, I've found a few other discussion relating to this issue such as this one.

New RTX 4070 Ti will stop displaying and go full fan speed out of nowhere. HELP : r/gigabyte (reddit.com)

I haven't contacted support yet, but an RMA may be on the card. However, I am going to experiment with undervolting the card beforehand.

[regis9 4,014]

Please let me know how you make out!  If I can avoid an RMA I’m all over it.

[regis9 4,014]

So after posting this I wet a month without the issue, and this weekend I had it happen three times in two days.  @Nick M, how are you making out?

[G-RFRY 1,712]

Latest driver 551.76 working OK. one off the resent driver releases included a security patch hackers may get through your driver software.

Nvidia publishes eight security flaws patched by new drivers — update to fix the issues | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)

Edited March 11 by G-RFRY

[Nick M 106]

Unfortunately I haven't been able to diagnose or resolve the issue yet @regis9. It's very sporadic, sometimes the PC will run GPU-intensive software like MSFS happily all day and on other days, the lockup will occur at least once in the space of an hour.

I had a little hunch it had something to do with the fan controller side of the software rather than a hardware fault (in general, I'd say Gigabyte's software is pretty diabolical) but I've been away from home a fair bit with the day job recently, so this has limited the amount of time I've been able to spend tinkering with my sim PC. Hoping I'll have a bit more time at the end of the month to investigate properly.

[regis9 4,014]

Thanks Nick, what you describe is exactly what I’m experiencing.  I go a month with nothing, then three occurrences in rapid succession, now two full days with nothing again.  Each time it happens I was just at the desktop not doing anything intensive, but also a few days ago I was flying the Fenix A320 out of JFK with AI traffic etc and no issues.

I did submit a support request to see what they say but I’ll be very interested to see what you can find out.

Do you have an ASUS motherboard by chance?

[Nick M 106]

On 3/11/2024 at 10:59 PM, regis9 said:

Do you have an ASUS motherboard by chance?

Hello Dave,

Just dropped in to find out how you're faring with this issue, and with a small update from my end, and realised I overlooked your last post. Sorry about that. No, it's a Gigabyte MB I've got, as well as the GPU.

For me the issue seemed to be increasing in frequency, and I was also able to reproduce it fairly consistent by stress testing the GPU. Typically after just a few minutes at 100% utilization (just over 200 watts in my case) the dreaded black screen with fans going to max would result. I experimented with undervolting too, but this didn't resolve the issue.

Being a bit reluctant to go through the hassle of a RTM and not being too confident it would even resolve the situation, I decided to replace the power cable instead. This was based on some comments I read somewhere and 'only' set me back £18 (though I really thing something like this should have been included with the GPU itself).

Although I'm hesitant to jinx things, this does seem to have fixed the issue. I've been able to run the GPU at max for over and hour on a few occasions and it's remained stable.

For info, this is the replacement cable I purchased and it's a much neater solution than the NVIDIA adaptor going into for my PSU cable.

12VHPWR Cable | 600W PCIe 5.0 Power Adapter Cable (corsair.com)

When the cable arrived, the box also contained a little sachet of dielectric grease which may also have helped. Anyway, will let you know if I'm celebrating too soon. I'll also stick with the undervolt for now too, at it reduces power usage by around 30-40W and seems pretty stable.

Cheers,
Nick

[regis9 4,014]

Thanks Nick, I was hesitant to post because I also didn’t want to jinx anything, but I tried taking the side cover off my case as I thought it might be pushing up against the power cord.  That was about a month ago and I haven’t had a recurrence since.  I’ll need to try a few things (like pushing on the cable while it’s running to see if I can duplicate the issue) but the results when I took off the side panel were immediate and complete so I think that must be it.

I would say though that I have a pretty new GPU and it came with the 12VHPWR connector so I didn’t need to use an adapter or anything.  Maybe mine is just an issue of the cable having some sort of weird electrical contact if pressure is applied?  I need to figure out how I can get things to a state where I can get my side panel back on or my next issue will be all of my components clogged up with pet hair haha!

Glad to hear you’ve made good progress!

Edited April 10 by regis9