I did see it work on his machine. Also, since he is willing to take it back, i think he is honest.
Ordered Corsair RM650X yesterday to give it a try. I will be upgrading the rest of the system soon, so i do have use for a new PSU.
Second PCI-E port: yes, but is has only a fraction of the PCI-E lanes.
Sounds very interesting. Now that i think of it: it usually seems to happen shortly after the fans stop (this card is able to stop its 2 fans completely when idle). Stopping 2 fans might cause a power spike.
I am using Windows10, and i did clean the drivers using that utility.
Sounds very interesting, but i have no idea what WattMan is. I will see if i can find some more info about this fix you are talking about.
And where can i lower the voltages? I havent been able to play around with the software much since it is so eager to just shut down.
The new PSU will arrive on monday. If it does not behave i will indeed bring it back.
I unplugged everything that is not needed, and the cpu is running at stock speeds.
Yeah I think its just some fairly fluke compatibility. Hopefully maybe the power supply will fix the issue.
I've noticed AMD cards can also have an idle issue. I've seen some where it caused instability at like the lowest P-state. Its odd (as I seem to recall seeing people have it where they had like the lowest 3 P-states at the lowest voltage setting, but its only at the lowest idle P-state that it causes issues, where the higher ones at higher clocks can operate at that low voltage but the lowest P-state sometimes has stability issues). But that I think was just causing the driver to crash and not system reboots. On my RX 480 I had system reboots from some voltage issue (I don't think it was idle, but rather that I'd have video playing for extended periods of time and occasional power spikes would cause it to crash) which on early versions of Windows 10 would cause the computer to reset, but later on it just caused the driver to crash (and Windows was capable of just resetting it). With a bit of tweaking it hasn't happened since. I too am on an older system (but also have a power hungry CPU, and have a lower spec power supply - its a quality unit that is capable of handling my computer's load, but its only like a 450W Antec).
Its possible that its dropping to some idle state that is reducing power (and causing a fluctuation or ripple in the power delivery). Or a spike as its leaving idle state or something.
Ok, was hoping that was the case as it helps some. But figure its worth asking to be sure.
WattMan is AMD's power adjustment feature. Right Click, then click AMD Radeon Settings to load the control center. Then under Gaming tab, the first box should say "Global Settings". Click that and it'll bring up three tabs "Global Graphics" (where you can adjust stuff like Anti-Aliasing, Anistropic Filtering, Tessellation, and several other settings), Global WattMan (which has all the power, clock speed, and fan options), and then Performance Monitoring (which lets you adjust the performance monitoring aspect, where it'll keep tabs of your performance as you game and things like that, telling you GPU load, clock speeds, framerates, and other similar).
In Global Graphics there's 3 settings that you might make note of. Radeo Chill (which just pushes the GPU into lower p-states and/or idle) to try and use less power when the game doesn't need it. Then there is Power Efficiency, which I believe was the setting originally intended to address the early Polaris PCIe compatibility issue (where it'd draw more power through the PCIe port than the spec called for, and caused crashes and things on older systems). It basically clocks the GPU lower to do so though, meaning you give up a bit of performance. I think its still more or less does that but I don't know that it is as necessary as it used to be and not sure if the later Polaris stuff had the problem or not. I personally turn that off but it might be worth trying and seeing if it resolves your issue. I believe some have reported that Radeon Chill would cause stuttering for them in games (some I think said the same for Power Efficiency too), and I did a bit so I leave it off. I do turn on Frame Rate Target Control (which just means that if the GPU is pushing framerates beyond what you have that set at that it'll throttle back; I set mine to my monitor's refresh rate of 60; haven't noticed any adverse affects from).
In WattMan you can adjust quite a few settings. Most people can lower the voltage settings by a bit (and suffer no problems, AMD is aggressive on their voltage settings, which just causes their stuff to consume more power than necessary, reducing them can even actually improve performance some if you're getting thermal throttling, since it'll be running a bit cooler it might can sustain higher p-state clock speeds more). There's guides that can do a better job of explaining all that better. For me, I just adjusted the voltage down a bit (I think around 75mV in most cases, but its best to start smaller with 25, and then maybe try 50; some people have been able to do bigger adjustments like 100mV or more). You can adjust the fan settings as well. Which I think on cards that support it there should be a toggle for letting the fans stop so you might check that and keep yours from spinning down and see if that matters. Some companies I think have their own utility to accomplish some of the same stuff (fan speeds, clock speeds, power monitoring).
My P-state settings (on an RX 480) are:
1: 610MHz with 818 mV
2: 800/800mV
3: 900/825mV
4: 1000/850mV
5: 1100/950mV
6: 1200/1025mV
7: 1275/1075mV
I didn't test mine extensively so its possible I could've dropped them more or gotten higher clock speeds at the same voltage. But they work for me. The idle one I put slightly above 800 just to be sure on the idle issue I'd mentioned. And at the higher states I pushed voltages up more just to be safe. I think the default voltage for 7 was 1150 for me, and I dropped the clock speed a bit (default is 1290, but I think I saw some instability at 1290/1075, and I value the lower voltage more than the extra 15MHz). My card is a refernce blower card and it gets noisy and I can tell the extra heat in the room even when it was mostly idle at stock speeds. The RX 580 I think was slightly different, plus with your card you won't have the same concerns since you have better cooling, so I'd recommend googling your card WattMan settings and see what others might recommend. Oh and you can also save your power settings (under the tabs there's options for saving profile, loading profile, etc). So you could save your profile so you don't have to remember the settings and adjust them every time. I think you might have to adjust the Global Graphics settings though as I'm not sure if those are saved in the profile or not.