PC Drivers & Software

[ridley1911]

As the title states, my rx480 started showing this issue 3 days ago, whenever i'm playing a game it microstutters every 1 second.

This is very obvious while playing WoW, specially in the character selection screen,  the stuttering is so bad there it causes my screen to go black and my machine to reboot.

This only fixes itself if i set my wattman power settings to -50%, leaving it a 0% will cause issues already.

To be noted here -

-I have never overclocked my gpu or cpu

-I owned this card for over a year without a single problem

-I tested it with 2 different power supplies

-I already tried different drivers

-This problem started out of nowhere, no changed were made on my software or hardware

-My temperatures are all fine, never going above 65c

-I have tested this in both my Windows7 and Windows10 installs (each on a different hard drive)

Specs  :

i72600k @ 3.4ghz

MSI RX480 Gaming X 8GB

8gigs of ram

Gigabyte B75m-D3H

Corsair CX650 /EVGA supernova 750w

As stated before, i had this card for more than a year and i never had any problems, this suddently started happening a few days ago.

Has any one experienced this and found a proper fix other than gimping the card?

[ridley1911]

Upon further inspections i noticed that my card is throttling , HEAVILY while i have my powe limit above -45%.

I ran a test on Serious Sam 3, with the power limit set to -48% the core clock remained at a steady 975ish MHZ, when i set my power limit to 0% (default), the clock boosted to around 1200mhz (as it should) but it started throttling like CRAZY, being at 1250~MHZ and in the next frame dropping to 550mhz then going back to 1250mhz.

Now, i don't know what could be causing this, i don't know if this is software or hardware related anymore, My temps are very cool, never going passed 62c under load.

I have a quality PSU as well.

Any light on this subject?

**EDIT

What would be the correct amount of watts the card should be pulling while operating normally at it's default clocks?

I fear the power delivery system on this card is actually dying.

[ridley1911]

*EDIT 2, PROBLEM HAS BEEN FIXED!

Following my suspicion of power delivery issues i took some time to study the PCB of this card, knowing where the power delivery system was i carefully took the card apart.

With a toothbrush and isopropyl alcohol i gently scrubbed all the mosfets in the power delivery system, i left the card drying for about 30 minutes and re-assembled it.

What do you know? IT WORKED, the card is now pulling the voltage needed to run at it's default boost clocks again, no more stutter or crashing.

So, if your rx480 is throttling and not pulling enough power to boost, try cleaning your pcb with isopropyl alcohol

[scuttlemagoon]

I've had the same problem with my MSI RX480 4gb and another solution to the stutter is to go back to driver version 16.12.1 or 17.1.2.

I tried 18.3.3 as well, but as you can see from Wattman after running Witcher 3 at high settings the GPU usage jumps all over the place, contributing to a stutter every second or so.