Christmas curse on gtx 960 ssc. Now crashes.

[tenpole]

My own self built set up has been running sweet for months. However just before christmas while playing Total war Warhammer the screen went blank, sound still running but system locked out as no ctrl alt delete would bring me to the task screen. It did this a few times, sometimes within half an hour sometimes not at all during an evening play.
Sometimes it could play a few hours without problem.
Recently the card has been crashing more frequently, only with games. I have updated drivers, roll back drivers, reset windows.
I did wonder if this was a RAM problem or maybe CPU so tried without the graphics card. The onboard graphics work fine even under stress so I eliminated these as the culprits. The power supply is a 500w evga so plenty of power.
Different drivers still produce same crash. I have not yet tried a driver from 6 months ago yet. I think it is the card fault but strangely it does work when I freshly boot the system. When it does fail criticaly the card is not picked up on the bios. I dont want to RMA the card and find it was not at fault.

 

[96Firebird]

First step would be to monitor temps, since you mentioned it works fine on a fresh boot. You can download a monitoring software such as MSI Afterburner and monitor your GPU temps up until crash. Also, check the card's heatsink for excess dust, along with your case fans.

 

[bigboxes]

Have you tried the card in your wife's pc? If it works without issue in your wife's pc then maybe your power supply is acting up. Do you have more than one PCIe slot on your mobo to troubleshoot? If all that fails then RMA the video card.

 

[tenpole]

First step would be to monitor temps, since you mentioned it works fine on a fresh boot. You can download a monitoring software such as MSI Afterburner and monitor your GPU temps up until crash. Also, check the card's heatsink for excess dust, along with your case fans.

The heatsink did not seem hot on touch, just normal warm. I will download afterburner.

 

[tenpole]

Have you tried the card in your wife's pc? If it works without issue in your wife's pc then maybe your power supply is acting up. Do you have more than one PCIe slot on your mobo to troubleshoot? If all that fails then RMA the video card.

Not allowed to touch the wifes pc. She claims I break it when I touch it.

 

[tenpole]

I have been running Afterburner all evening to monitor the temp. It crept up to 60 °c and for some reason the fans were not kicking in. I played about with the afterburner controls and got the fans spinning. All evening it has been cool with no crashes.

 

[96Firebird]

That's actually normal, a lot of new cards have a feature where the fans won't kick on until 60°C or so to keep idle noise level down. However, your new fan profile might be keeping the temperature below the troublesome spot where it would crash before... I would switch it back to the stock fan profile and watch the temps to see how high they go. If it gets too hot before crashing, it is either a build-up of dust or bad TIM paste that might need to be replaced. If that is what it is and you don't feel comfortable replacing it, EVGA has great customer service and should be able to help out.