# Stress testing a graphics card



## DEL 707 (Oct 26, 2007)

I built myself a new machine at the end of October last year, sadly it's been giving me nothing but trouble.

These are the specs:


AMD Ryzen 7 Eight Core 2700X 4.35GHz (Socket AM4) Processor
Super Flower Leadex Platinum 850W Fully Modular "80 Plus Platinum" Power Supply
Team Group Dark Pro "8Pack Edition" 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 PC4-25600C14 3200MHz Dual Channel Kit
Gigabyte Radeon RX VEGA 64 WindForce OC 8GB HBM2 PCI-Express Graphics Card
Gigabyte Aorus GA-AX370-Gaming K7 AMD X370 (Socket AM4) DDR4 ATX Motherboard

I've been having crashes since day 1. The infurating thing is that it's so random, can work fine for 3 days, then I'll have a load of crashes in a row.

So far, I've replaced the PSU, which was a 750W, and recently I've replaced the RAM, because the original RAM wasn't Samsung B-Die. But I'm still crashing.

There have been several types of crashing. Sometimes the screen will go black, then the fans will spin full whack. I have to turn off the machine eventually.
The other type of crash is when the screen goes black, I can still talk to people on discord/teamspeak for a few seconds, then every stops and I have to restart.

I'm not running any overclock, only thing I'm doing is running XMP on my RAM. I've also tried upping the limiter on my GPU but it hasn't help.

I'm trying to pinpoint the fault, but I'm not having much luck. I'm have serious about throwing my toys out the pram and going back to Intel/Nvidia.

A little bit of reading suggests that my fault could be the GPU itself, what's the best way to stress test it? I want to be able to make my PC crash on command.


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## Masterchiefxx17 (Feb 27, 2010)

Could you explain the crashes? Does the system turn black, turn off, or just lock up?


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## SpareChange (Mar 7, 2019)

A could of things come to mind that I would try in your situation with your setup as stated. 

1. Disable XMP, go manual, set your DDR4 3200 to run @ DDR4 2666 or DDR4 2400 speeds.

2. In AMD Wattman, raise your power limit by about 5% (very small boost for stability) could be a GPU issue, one way to know is to run a different GPU, preferably an nVIDA based one to test with. Any model will work even a cheap one key is to see if it affects system stability.


Try number 1. first, you can even try to run it at 2133, the key here is to see how your system behaves with a DRAM settings change. There are some boards, more specifically certain models of boards that don't run well with certain modules (specific kits) under XMP mode. Sometimes a BIOS update addresses that later on. Also, regarding a BIOS update make sure you have looked into updating your BIOS it could very well address memory compatibility under certain situations where XMP is enabled to handle overclocking the memory.


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