cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Gaming Discussions

vegaman
Adept I

VEGA 56 / 2600x Combo behaving badly

I have built an all AMD PC about two months ago, just as an f - you to Intel and Nvidia and I am a bit tired and need help!

My Rig:

Ryzen 2600x w/ CoolerMaster masterliquid lite 240 aio (no OC)

MSI Air Boost 8gb OC Vega 56 (running at 1622mhz clock; 800mhz memory)

Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200mhz 16gb ddr4 ram

EVGA 700w bronze power supply

Motherboard: MSI b450m pro m2 

Crucial 1TB m.2 SATA SSD

The first problem with the build was that the frame timing on some games like Apex legends or Hitman 2, CS:GO even was painfully bad, Riva tuner statistics server frame cap did not even help or v-sync for that matter, but with the newest drivers installed and some playing around with the settings I got it under control where I could say everything was pretty stable. Is anyone else experiencing bad frame timing with a vega 56, and what could have caused it?

Secondly, After about a month of solid gaming, CAD work, and photoshop, the card started overheating for no apparent reason and showed signs of bad thermal paste application or a faulty card in general as it would decide to go into "overheated mode" with fans up to 100% and computer fully off when it was at 74 degrees stable. This was simply fixed by plugging and unplugging it from the PCI-e slot and fiddling around with the power connectors. This has not happened to me yet, if it does I am RMAing the card.

The third major thing (mainly the reason I am writing this post) is that after 2-3 months of solving issue after issue, the card just started shutting off randomly, giving me black screens out of nowhere. My motherboard was giving me that it was a CPU issue, but other signs clearly showed that the GPU is shi-ting itself. As a result, I went to the forums and saw that hooking up the card to two PCI-e power connector cables instead of working with one which branches off should fix the issue, but I have run benchmarks after benchmarks and I see that there is no difference in the power delivery or anything really from the two methods. Strange...

And not to mention 6 blue screens of threads being stuck in a loop or something like that happening to me while gaming. With all of the newest Ryzen drivers, Radeon drivers and a fresh install of windows with the newest updated. I really don't want to go to Nvidia and Intel for my next build so please share your experience of working with this kind of setup.

Should I RMA the card? Maybe the problem is in the power supply? What should I do next to improve stability?

It is just a mess really, and I appreciate anyone and everyone sharing their experience and giving advice.

0 Likes
11 Replies
jay1131
Adept III

Just a couple of things i would check from my past experience is motherboard bios (be careful and follow directions if you never done it before) or try a friends motherboard. I have a msi gaming pro carbon x370 and it doesnt handle ram overclocking great or m.2 memory booting with a few things plugged in. I also have a asus b350 that is amazing but im using it for Linux build to experiment with proton so dont want to take it out. Also might sound silly but try optimized default the bios and run it alittle to see if problems stop, helped me once. then can try sending multiple crash reports to windows because i thought something was wrong but turned out windows suck, go figure. Had a random amd update come up after sending alot complaints and all problems went away. Other simple things is new motherboard battery just in case its going dead, custom fan curve on your gpu and auto undervolt. Lastly would see if its hardware related.

punk4evr
Adept III

If you have not already,  I would def have rma' the card a long time ago from your description.  2nd is,  and I'm sure you don't want to hear it,  but once you get the replacement card,  make sure the bio is flashed to the latest  version.,  Then I would tell you to load the bios defaults,  Do NOT overclock the Ram to 3200,   only max it at 2133 for now,    Then after doing all that,  (And yes, set the bios to what you need for booting to the ssd),   Do a FRESH install of windows 10,  (Please make sure you download the very latest build  first to a  USB Stick.).     Now install windows fresh,  Right after that make sure you load the Latest Chipset drivers,  Reboot as needed,   and only after rebooting from that,  Install  the latest Video Drivers.  I would suggest  only the 19.4.1  for right now.  ( 4.3 seems a little buggy still).   See order of install   is very important.    Keep it like that for now,  and see how things run.   I have heard that the 450 and 350 chipsets don't handle 3200 so well.    so just to be safe, stay at 2133 for the highest ram speeds just for stability testing, and I would suggest also that leave it at  Defaults for performance and cpu speeds.  (  I have both a 370 and 470 boards  and found default cpu settings, allow for  the auto boost, to clock higher than what you can manually set for overclock speeds)_   I boost up to 4.35 gig  where as the fixed clocks only go to 4.1)   See if that helps and works out for you. Let me know. I have been doing system  builds since 1991.   Thanks.

hello, I will start with RMAing the card and I will see what happens next, thank you for your time!

0 Likes
levi14
Journeyman III

It is clear that the RX Vega 56 is a significantly more capable high-end card that can play AAA titles at 1080p/1440p with 50-60 frames per second. It is worth noting that the RX Vega 56 is a very power hungry card and requires a decent power supply unit. In terms of memory, the RX Vega 56 's 8192 MB RAM is more than enough for modern games and should not cause any bottlenecks. This combination between RX Vega 56 and AMD Ryzen 5 2600X has less than 8% bottleneck in many games and is perfect match to avoid FPS loss. mykfcexperience

Nice to hear, but the random behavior of the Vega card just feels like I am sitting on needles all of the time and I can assure you if this card would end up in the hands of an amateur user, he would just have to bear with the instability or keep RMAing the card until he wins the silicone lottery and gets a good one. At least that is my opinion formed from my experience with a vega 56.

0 Likes
mbirdy
Journeyman III

I also have the Airboost Vega56 and had game crashes and poor performance when I first got it. Not to worry..
I don't know what your level of expertise is with PC's but if you are comfortable with it you should read about UnderVolting your card. **Do this at your own risk, you can fry the card if you just go ham changing things incorrectly or randomly** Mine runs FANTASTIC now after about 2 days of off and on testing/benchmarking/stress testing. It runs cooler, faster and demands less wattage than the out-of-box settings. The Vega series (as mentioned above) are powerful power hungry cards. That means heat. The Airboost does a great job of keeping things cool, but not on stock settings....it needs tuning.... by you. You can go with the traditional "Balanced" wattman settings from AMD but I noticed things start to get too warm for my liking and the card begins to throttle its performance sometimes until it outright crashes. Not cool.  
If you message me, I can tell you some of my conservative settings I've found to run very cool, and very stable with great performance. 
If you want the full clock speed (or real close to it) the whole time you game, you're going to need to tune your fan curves, lower your voltages a little, and leave all else alone. This will feed less voltage to the card (Vega likes this), which means less heat being produced equating to higher more stable clock speeds. Its a tuners card, and I became addicted to tuning it then I reap the benefits whenever I game
Good luck I hope this helps.

Hi, I am quite familiar with undervolting at this point, but it introduces even more issues. Since the card started randomly shutting off while not doing anything  I tried almost everything, undervolting being one of those things. I understand that undervolting improves performance and thermals which is amazing, but here is the deal. Since the card started shutting off with the computer still running, I did an experiment where I just left it on balanced and did not touch anything to see what could trigger the crashes or the shut offs. after I have done that it shut off a couple of times while playing cs:go, and the day after it started running just fine. And the day after, and the day after and so a week went by and I was left puzzled. Then I had some time to burn, so I went into Wattman and applied my custom undervolted profile to the card and after about 5 hours of gaming everything seemed just fine. When I finished gaming my girlfriend fired up photoshop and after the card basically sitting on idle it shut off again. Then I rebooted the system, it shut off again after an hour, again while doing very light tasks, and after a second reboot, everything returned to normal. 

Now the thing with this is, is that when it turned off, it was not running on an undervolted profile, moreover, when it shut off for the first time anything wattman related was reset to default, yet it still powered down with the computer itself still playing music, just with no video output. After this second shut down everything ran pretty much perfectly, but of course not OC or undervolted, but on the "balanced" preset, which makes a ton of heat and has 5% less performance than an undervolted profile does with less heat.

Then the revelation happened. I was vacuuming my room and the vacuum was plugged into the same socket as the pc was. And you won't believe what happened next haha. when I went to turn on the vacuum cleaner and then turned it off again, the video card shut off, with the computer still playing my music. On top of that, I managed to replicate this 5 times now with a lamp going into the socket next to the pc one, with a hairdryer and a 12v power supply for another lamp.

So in conclusion, I have not yet done anything to fix this, apart from not using the same socket as the pc is plugged into, but it seems that there is something wrong with the cards power delivery system as when it sees some irregularity it just decides to turn off. The reason why I'm not saying its the PSU is that the computer itself works just fine, and I can tell you for a fact that if I put a 1070ti into my computer, the card will work just fine no matter what I have plugged into the wall next to my pc. So in my opinion its the cards fault. And im going to rma it when I have the time and I can live without my vega for a couple of weeks...

What is your take on this? Please let me know and thanks! Really appreciate the help!

0 Likes
truth
Adept I

From what i can see from your picture ,, your doing a NO NO,, you need 8pin x 2 connector from the PSU not a solo 8+8 solo cable its like a rule of thumb not to use solo cables you want 2 solo 8pins from your PSU , this could be why your getting bad frame times

0 Likes

Hey, since I made this post I have connected the graphics card using 2 8pin power cables, and that did not make any difference in the performance of the card or the computer in general. The frame times have been getting better and better with new AMD drivers, but still, for some reason, a computer with a 1080 just feels like it games smoother, but I'm not giving up on AMD yet haha!

0 Likes
truth
Adept I

MSI should be good about RMA's that sucks about your AMD GPU this stuff happens ,, when GPU's travel across the world to get to your hands you never know if a box was dropped or it took some type of damage! 

Just a heads up I had a Team Force SSD that would crash my computer and GPU somewhat like you are talking about,  come to find out the SSD was bad and it just looks pretty on my desk because it was way pass the RMA time sucks but this stuff does happen, nothing is perfect we only wish it was!! 

I know for a fact if you get a good working card you will be happy with it,  I have 2 Vega 64 and the New VII there great cards!

0 Likes
truth
Adept I

Have you tried putting a different GPU in the PCIxE slot to see if its not the motherboard giving you problems , or trying pluging the GPU in the PCIxE below the top slot yes you will run at 8x PCIxE but it could let you know if the slot on motherboard is bad.  also not sure if when you said 1080 you mean you have a card you tested and it runs good,  there is a KNOW bug also if you have had NV drivers on a C: drive when you install AMD over top and do not uninstall all the GPU drivers from the other guys you can get very bad bugs , there is a program out there that can totally uninstall all drivers for you because windows uninstall does a very BAD job of it!  make sure all free sync stuff is off , vsync off and see if that is giving you same problems , when it comes to computer it could be all kinds of things that could make someone turn off, back in the day I saw a keyboard give windows a blue screen of death , YES A KEYBOARD!! 
If you have tried all this stuff you dont have to response back I am just giving you some points i learned over the years of building computers!

0 Likes