2 dead GPUs, is my PSU at fault here?

[Sin_Chase]

Does the system hard lock or remain usable? As in, while the image is corrupt, can you still see a mouse pointer moving about in the sea of crap?

Dodgy PCI-E lane perhaps? Tried in different slots or only have one? Perhaps the act of swapping cards seated the GPU in a working position and, over time, it's shifted or otherwise and has failed with the same result?

Seems a little unlucky to have 2 cards fail with the exact same symptoms.

Are you sure it's not the monitor and/or monitor cabling? Tried swapping them out?

 

[Kavalree]

Shot in the dark here. Tried flashing them to their latest GPU bios?

We had an issue with ALL our stock of R9 290's. We wrote 5 or 6 cards off before we tried it.

The issues we had were black screens, lock ups, artifacts and random 'white noise'. We now flash them to the latest bios (I don't, some other guy does) and they work fine now.

Could give it a go?

 

[snips86x]

Thanks for your omments and feedback. I've been testing different games over the last few days and as pointed out by Matt, the issue seems consistent with the fluctuation of the core clock. Battlefield 3 and CSS are perfectly stable as the core doesnt seem to change.