AMD 290 crashing, possible replacement?

[bangaho]

I have a reasonable spec machine, I5-4690k, 24GB ram and an AMD 290.

When gaming even at lower resolution the game will always crash, sometimes after 30 seconds, sometimes 30 minutes. On some occasions I can get back to the desktop, other times I have to reboot the whole system. I have tried a number of games as well as clean installs of windows 7 and windows 10. Memtest86 and CPU burn in tests all pass with and without overclock - pretty much the only thing left in my mind is the Graphics card.

In the absence of a magic driver or setting fix I think it might need to be replaced. I have an old Nvidia 470 GTX I can swap in for a few days to test with to confirm the diagnosis.

Assuming it is bad and needs replacing - what are my options here? I bought the 290 back in Dec 2013 for about £230 and looking now I find most cards are only a bit faster for a lot more money. Have things really slowed down this much? A 1070 looks to be about 50-60% faster but still costs £400. so £170 more and nearly 3 years newer for only 50% more seems like a bad deal? Is there something else out there that is better value for money?

I am not using VR yet, but I would like to at some point. I also have a 4k screen which the 290 seems to be able to handle (when it’s not crashing) in a few games, others I drop down to 2560x1440 or 1920x1080.

Can anyone offer some sage advice on an upgrade path or a possible solution to my crashing woes so I can stave of this expense for a few more months?

 

[bangaho]

I tried upping the fan speed to 60%, but not the power limit or clock speeds. I will give both the power limit change and core frequency changes a go as well.

The card was the cheapest 290 I could find at the time, a gigabyte one with the hairdryer cooler on it. Looks like this: http://cdn.videocardz.com/1/2013/10/AMD-Radeon-R9-290-2.jpg

 

[bangaho]

I took the cover off the heat sink and gave it a good clean. Although there was a bit of dust almost all of the fins were clear.

Next I increased the power to +50% and left the fan speed at 60%.

I then loaded a game with GPU-Z running until it crashed. Looks like the temp peaked at 93 degrees. When idle it would hover around 32 degrees.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4ob4hcrby7ph3c9/GPU-Z Sensor Log.txt?dl=0

As the log shows I initially ran with some browsing to check nothing untoward was utilizing the GPU and idle temps/load are OK. Looks like only 6 or so minutes of gaming was enough to crash.

There is no black screen or graphics corruption, the application just stops responding. In this instance I could still move the browser window and load pages fine but I could not get the game to end without rebooting. Next I will try dropping the clock speeds a bit.