PC Graphics

[WearyGuardsman]

I bought a 6950xt last month as my 3070 was dying and since then, whenever I've played a game that was particularly taxing on the system the game will eventually freeze and the entire system would lock up. The fans immediately cut out on the gpu, if I am lucky the mouse will be movable and sometimes already opened tabs will be accessible though new images will not be processed when interacted with if interacting with them does anything at all. I've reinstalled drivers for the chipset drivers numerous times and uninstalled gpu drivers numerous times using ddu, I've tried reinstalling them on different drives, I've tried reinstalling Windows twice, I've tried reinserting the gpu and power cables, I've tried shuffling around the game files between drives to determine if it was an ssd issue (I keep most of my games on one drive), I've disabled MPO and none of it has seen any major success besides a single fluke session after disabling the MPO. I have a two year old 850watt psu of rather good quality, I've made sure nothing in the system overheats when under heavy use and there just seems to be nothing to explain what is causing this issue. And it isn't like I can just go into event viewer and see if anything pops up because nothing is noted when this happens and the soft restart after ends up being the only thing noted in the system.

[Aria__]

Are you using double-rail PCIe power cables? try using a single cable for each socket on the card if that's not the case, sometimes it can cause inadequate power distribution.

[WearyGuardsman]

My power cables do have a second plug on them, but I've never felt comfortable just using one cable so I use two individual power cables for the 6950xt. If it is of any use, it is one of the XFX Speedster versions and it seems to be pulling ~300w on heavy loads at stock just fine.

[WearyGuardsman]

Update: I ran an OCCT 3D Adaptive test for about 27 minutes at steady heavy load. At somepoint during the test, the system became unresponsive; however, the OCCT tab was still interactable, I was able to stop the test and OCCT reported no errors during the test.

[WearyGuardsman]

Further, the windows error tab appeared as the system was being unresponsive. Eventually the screen went black and the cursor went from the loading icon to the standard mouse icon.

[WearyGuardsman · Accepted solution]

I've done two Windows reinstalls since opening this thread and I seem to have stopped both the OCCT freeze and the game freeze. Apparently, despite numerous checks of disk health, drive endurance checks and etc, the drive I was installing the OS onto was causing the system hangs. It makes some degree of sense when thinking on it, sorry for wasting time.