cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Graphics Cards

HighSton3r
Journeyman III

Sapphire R9 280X - Defect VRAM?

Hey Guys.

I am pretty desperate with my Sapphire R9 280X. What error occurs?

In Windows / Office / CAD and even Benchmarking Tools (like 3D Mark) there is no problem at all.

But: As soon as I start playing Games (e.g. Battlefield 4, Total War: Troy etc.), right after a few minutes my PC crashes without Bluescreen. All of the sudden the image on my two monitors is stuck in a greenish colour and I can only restart by the main power button.

 

Now I've tried to figure out the cause for this. There were no driver updates made before the crashes. After the problems started 4 days ago, I installed the new Radeon Adrenalin 20.12.1. It didn't help, same error. Also I updated my Win10 to the latest Updates. Didn't fix it.

 

I have no artifacts or any other graphical problems at all, but the sudden crashes out of nowhere. I've been monitoring my PC specs all the time on my second display. Temperatures (at least the detectables) never rise above 75° for all components.

 

The last time the crash occured, I saw that the VideoRAM (VRAM) was close to 2GB and then the crash happened.

So I asked myself if maybe the VRAM could be the problem? But in all other discussion on the internet, people were talking about artifacts in some kind at least. But since I have none, I am pretty clueless right now.

 

Testing all other components with several tools (Memtest, HDD test, Benchmarking) was okay with no faults and crashes.

Also, now I have detached my R9 280X and started all the testing and gaming again with my Rizen 5 3400G (which I buyed, because I knew such a situation would come and I would need to save up money for a new graphics card then....) with integrated graphics chip, there was no crash at all. 

 

So I guess it definitely has something to do with the graphics card. But how can it work flawlessly in Benchmarking and even Raytrace-CAD-Rendering, but crash in games with 2/3 of memory used?

 

My specs are the following:

Win10 64 bit

Gigabyte Aorus B450 Elite (AM4)

AMD Ryzen 5 3400G with Radeon RX Vega 11 (manually deactivated in BIOS when running with graphics card)

32 GB G.Skill AEGIS DDR4-3000 (working on 2666 Mhz)

Sapphire R9 280X (with or without the Legacy/UEFI Switch > error occurs)

Thermaltake 750W Power Supply

1TB HDD and 250 GB SSD

 

Guys, I am glad for your help and I thank you all in advance. Honestly, I already settled with the need to buy a new graphics card, also because this one is 8 years old now. But I am so **bleep** interested in how this can happen and which part may be the problem on the technical side, but I know it is unbelievably hard to make a diagnose on PC problems over the internet, especially on such specific ones.

 

But maybe one of your giant brains can help me figure out what the heck happened and why my card will not work on gaming, but is perfectly fine with rendering, benchmarking etc without even one single artifact...

 

Greetings out of Germany,

thank's in advance!

 

Robin

PS: tomorrow I will make a last try, built in the graphics card and try a VRAM testing with a specific tool (OCCT), to see if it crashes again when the VRAM is getting full by time...

 

 

0 Replies