R9 270 Blue / Black Screens and more

[doof205]

Hi guys, recently decided to upgrade my machine and the graphics card really doesn't want to behave running games. Interestingly it'll furmark all day long at a solid 69 degrees without a hitch.

The behaviour is really strange, mostly during games (but not only during games, i've seen it just bluescreen whilst seemingly doing nothing). It'll bluescreen almost instantly when starting RFactor. I can get away with RFactor2 for about 5 minutes and sometimes in either of them it might just black screen or minimise to desktop. If I do get any control I checked task manager and it showed 25% cpu and not responding though I don't know if that's the case with all games. Other games I've tried have let me play for 30 minutes or so (older games) while most seem to start misbehaving around 5 minutes in.

I've taken the card out, reinstalled and I can run the games fine on Intel HD Graphics so the rest of the system appears to be ok. I've had 2 lots of RAM in it and it's been crashy with both so I think that's fine, though is it definitely OK to run 1866MHz RAM at 1333MHz (max of motherboard I think).

Spec:

Asus P8H67-M LE Motherboard
EVGA 500w PSU - brand new
Intel I3-2100T (it was an HTPC before now)
Samsung 850 EVO 256Gb SSD
Asus R9 270 CU2 OC Graphics Card.
HyperX FURY Series 8GB (2x 4GB) DDR3 1866MHz CL10 DIMM

I think it might be time i ditched the card and after this experience I might be tempted to go NVidia, any suggestions on some decent second hand cards that would match the R9 270? I might be able to stretch to a second hand GTX 760?

Thanks for any help.

 

[doof205]

Been playing around with it running standard graphics for a while and it's been fine for a few hours. Tried the new card and didn't even manage to install the CCC drivers. It just hangs, gives me a black screen then ultimately blue screens. Sounds very much like a dodgy card but funny that it'll furmark for ages without a problem.

One thing it does seem to do alot is hang, reboot and then it'll freeze on the bios splash screen with the fans running at full speed.

I'm confused.

 

[PG]

I just picked up a Sapphire R9 270X from a guy on Craigslist. He bought a bunch of them probably over a year ago with the intention of mining but never used them because of work, family, and other various reasons. The card was new and sealed. It was clean, (no dust), and still had clear plastic on the shroud so I'm pretty sure he wasn't lying.

Anyway, the card has an issue. I get artifacts at stock speed in Furmark and even at the desktop sometimes. It's way too late to be covered under warranty so I did some digging. It seems this was common for some early R9 270 cards and was mostly related to the memory being overclocked from the factory too much. Since this is a Sapphire I downloaded their Trixx utility, underclocked the RAM a bit and the artifacts went away. Trixx can be set up to load itself and these same lower clocks at every boot so this is what I'm doing with it. I doubt I'm losing much in terms of framerate and the card was cheap so I don't mind.

My advice would be to do the same. Underclock the memory a bit and see if that helps. If that doesn't work, maybe try underclocking the core too.
If nothing works I'd RMA the card if possible.

 

[doof205]

PG, I can't believe I didn't try that before! Just underclocked everything to it's minimum in GPUTweak and it seems to be stable. Time to do some tests. I'll be so pleased if this is the case! Shame I can't run it at full speed but so pleased I don't need to start investing in new cards!

 

[Magic Carpet]

@PG

Just curious, what's the SAPPHIRE model, you're talking about?

The only two 270X I have found available on their website, they both seem to have memory clocked @ 1400 Mhz, which is stock. My Asus 270 features exactly the same memory clocks (5600 Mhz effective), but I am able to overclock it to 1500 Mhz (6000Mzh effective) and run it without any artifacts and that's with the Elpida memory. (artifacts are invited usually at about 1550 Mhz on this card). Wish, it had the Hynix memory though.

1400 is nothing, and if it can't handle that, I'd quickly rma that sucker. These cards are already memory bandwidth starved, you don't want to have any less of it.

 

[tweakboy]

ATI = CCC = crummy

 

[PG]

I have this one: http://www.sapphiretech.com/present...px?cid=1&gid=3&sgid=1227&pid=2088&leg=0&lid=1

R9 270X BF4 Edition, well, that's maybe not the official name, but it came with a BF4 code

Mine has the RAM at 1400 also. Keep in mind that video card RAM is GDDR5, which is effectively quad data rate, so some refer to this 1400, but others may say the 1400 X 4 number which is 5600. It's the same, but just two way of looking at the same thing.

A long time ago I had a Sapphire 7870, (which I should have just kept), and it had RAM which was clocked at 1250. I just dropped the clock speed on the new card to the 1250 to match the old one and it works fine. It was just a quick guess on my part. To be honest maybe I could try 1300 or 1350 and it would be fine, but I just wanted a really quick test to see if it would work and it did. I haven't spent any more time on it than that.