Help troubleshooting graphics issue / BSOD

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Joined
14 Sep 2017
Posts
5
Hi gang. This has been driving me nuts. I have a desktop PC with an MSI Geforce 970 and Windows 10 and it started behaving erratically this month. The system has been running fine for 2.5 years and I haven't installed any new hardware recently.

I've been getting random, frequent BSODs (VIDEO_SCHEDULER_INTERNAL_ERROR). Sometimes during gaming, sometimes when browsing. Can happen 5 minutes into a session, or an hour, or the machine can get into an infinite reboot loop. Sometimes it'll run fine an entire session until I shut down. At times I get the BSOD, other times I get a sudden reboot. Sometimes it will happen from a cold start, so I don't think it's temperature related. Sometimes you'll see it coming because artifacts will start appearing on screen (coloured boxes or vertical/horizontal lines), followed by the BSOD a few seconds later. The artifacts will sometimes appear on the UEFI screen as well.

Obviously it appears to be a graphics card issue, or so I thought. I RMA'd it to OcUK and while that happened I used the onboard graphics, my system ran stably during that time. OcUK came back a day later and said they've put the gfx card through their tests and all came back A-OK. They sent the card back to me. I slotted it back in and my system ran fine for almost a week, so I thought maybe this had all been user error - the card wasn't seated properly or some components were touching each other or whatever.

That was until a couple of days ago, when the problems started happening again.

I've no clue. What should I try next? Thanks!

Here's a couple of shots to show what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/1BcC3 . After the artifacts appear Windows crashes within seconds.
 
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My full spec is

CA-003-SF SuperFlower Golden Green HX 550W "80 Plus Gold" Power Supply
HD-191-SA Samsung 250GB 850 EVO SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps
2 more SSD drives I installed later on
GX-259-MS MSI GeForce GTX 970 Gaming Edition 4096MB GDDR5
MY-033-TG TeamGroup Elite Black 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11
2x4GB Crucial RAM
HS-041-PL Prolimatech 81 CPU Cooler - 120mm
MB-616-AS Asus Z97M-Plus Intel Z97 (Socket 1150)
CP-539-IN Intel Core i7-4790K 4.00GHz (Devil's Canyon) Socket LGA1150

Everything running stock, I haven't done any overclocking.

I hadn't thought of RAM being the issue, could well be. But OcUK ran the graphics card through benchmarks, so that would have caught it, right? Also while I ran onboard graphics my system ran fine. It's worth a try though, so I will - thanks.

Only have one PCI-e slot that I can use.
 
Thanks for your help so far! Sorry I didn't check back in earlier.

The night I posted my system was refusing to boot (at most I got to the Windows logon screen followed by BSOD, but generally it was in a reboot loop) so I couldn't install CPU-Z. Then I opened up the case to remove a pair of RAM sticks, but before I did that, I decided to remove the graphics card and re-seat it. It's been running stably since! Will see how it goes over the next couple of weeks.

Here are my CPU-Z stats: https://imgur.com/2PyWheq

I did a pass of Memtest and came back 100% green. Does that rule out RAM issues?
 
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