System Info;
OS: Windows 10
GPU: RX 480 - Driver Version 19.6.1
CPU: FX 8320
RAM: 16GB G.Skill Ripjaws (4x 4GB)
PSU: Coolmax ZX-700
MB: MSI 970A Carbon
Over the past several days, I've had a gradually worsening issue of my computer freezing up, the screen going black, and the audio playing a horrendous loop of whatever audio was playing at the time of the crash. The screen will be completely black, the audio will loop for several seconds, then silence. No recovery, I have to hard reset every time. At first, this only happened when playing Ghost Recon Wildlands at my usual settings, but also happened on several less graphics intensive games such as Fallout New Vegas, and Car Mechanic Simulator 2018. I would notice the GPU temperature peak around 65C, and not get much higher than that. I assumed it was an overheating issue, so I took the computer and dusted it out thoroughly. When that didn't help, I took the side panel of the case off and left a fan next to the case to help get cold air moving through it. Still no improvement, and if anything it gradually got worse over time.
I tried several measures, such as playing with the fan settings to get the fan to stay at a constant RPM to keep the card cool, pulling the RAM chips out and resetting them in different slots, moving the GPU to the other PCI-E slot, resetting the CMOS, doing a fresh install on the AMD drivers, and updating the BIOS (which did not work as the BIOS UI froze up upon trying to load the new version in). The only thing that seemed to have any positive effect was resetting the CMOS.
Earlier in the day I set my graphics settings in Wildlands to the lowest possible settings and it ran relatively stable. FPS wasn't the best surprisingly but I did not experience any crashing. This was directly after resetting the CMOS, which had the most positive effect. I assumed that resetting the CMOS had solved the issue, as I had gone for several hours at that point without having any issues, so I turned my graphics settings back up to where they usually are (Very High with some customizing), and was able to go for about 30 minutes before experiencing the same black screen crash.
Before I was running Afterburner, but I've been told that clashes with the built in Wattman settings, so I uninstalled it. Now I changed my settings in Wattman to reflect a +50% power increase, and a -10% GPU frequency (per another thread's suggestions) and I'm about to see if this has any effect.
I've been told that this is becoming a common issue with certain BIOS versions on certain motherboards, with this particular set of AMD drivers. Is there any correlation, or am I looking at a possible hardware fault on my end?
