How to confirm Graphics cards broke?

[rebel rebel]

Afternoon, I have an old PC.. i7 920, Asus P6T Deluxe motherboard, 6gig ram and an AMD 7950 gpu.

Lately the pc crashes to a black or corrupted screen every time I try to play a game. Obviously I'm not trying to play anything too advanced.. Cities, Oblivion and Football Manager. Oblivion crashes as soon as I try to go outside, Cities crashes instantly, and Football Manager crashes when a game starts.

I did think maybe it was a driver issue, so have tried 3 different drivers, same outcome.

Also after I reset it after a crash I get horizontal lines across the screen on all the startup screens.

I've also tried putting the card into a different pci slot, same thing happens.

I'm guessing the card is broke, is there a way to confirm this? I know its an old PC, i'll be building my first water cooled system soon.

 

[rebel rebel]

Can you test another card in the machine?

No, unfortunately I don't have any others laying around.

 

[rebel rebel]

Long shot, but you could try replacing the thermal paste. Maybe it's become particularly degraded for some reason.

Do you mean thermal paste on the GPU? I never realised that was a thing! That has reminded me that I redid the paste on the cpu right before this started to happen, so maybe that wasn't applied well enough.

Have you monitored GPU temps? You can install GPU-Z for this if not already.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

I had GPU-Z open the last few times it crashed, and didn't see any high temps or any sudden raises.

 

[rebel rebel]

Swing a hammer at it

I feel like doing that to the whole PC, i've basically been nursing it through life for about 5 years!

Can't say I never got my moneys worth from it though.*

*This is helping justify an approx 3k spend on my next machine.

 

[rebel rebel]

I would try replacing thermal paste on the graphics card and make sure the graphics card and pc is dust free and all fans are working.

Also I like to do a clean install of windows when I cannot resolve an issue. Usually works. Apart from that, just buy a cheap card from members market to keep you going until you upgrade.

Funnily enough this problem started after I installed a fan controller to make sure all fans were running. At the same time I reinstalled windows 10, cleaned away all the dust and redid the cpu.

I'm going to order some thermal paste for the gpu and cpu.

Thanks to everyone for your input.

 

[rebel rebel]

Right I've ordered 2 TM30 PERFORMANCE CPU / GPU THERMAL PASTE - 3G, so will update when I've tried that.

 

[rebel rebel]

I just want to play a few games until I upgrade in the next few months.