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Possible dead brand new GPU?

PaulusAugustus

PaulusAugustus

PaulusAugustus

Associate
Joined
2 Apr 2015
Posts
10
Location
Northumberland
Hi,

I recently bought a GTX 970 from overclockers (the GTA V and Witcher 3 deal)

I installed it it but I initially had a screen filled with horizontal rainbow-coloured lines almost filling the screen.

However, once the Nvidia drivers updated it and the system restarted, it was working fine and I thought nothing of it.

After using rome2 to benchtest, and then after a couple of hours of general use (not gaming, just chatting on steam, web browsing, etc), the PC suddenly restarted itself while idling on the desktop and the coloured lines came back during the 'windows loading' part of boot.

Afterwards the display changes to the following:



After swapping back to my old GPU (Radeon HD 6950) I checked event viewer and there's a load of Event 41s from when I was trying to reboot my system.

Is my new GPU dead or is this some other error?

PC:
Motherboard: M4A785TD-V EVO
AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.20ghtz
2x 8gb DDR3 1600
PSU is 750w or 850w (cant remember the model, and the damn sticker is on one of the non-visible surfaces so cant get the exact specs without completely removing, but it had two spare 6-pin cables for the GPU)

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Paulus.
 
May well be a faulty card, but have you checked if there is any issue with bios compatibility and 9 series cards with your board?

I had a simlar issue with a 5 series AMD card on an older Gigabyte motherboard - 4 series cards worked fine - Gigabyte sent me a custom bios for the motherboard (even though the board was quite old) and it worked fine after that.
 
Last edited:
Hmmm could be a faulty card or it tried to use Radeon HD 6950 driver which caused these issue.

What OS and which GTX 970 brand and model you are using?

Try boot into Safe Mode and do screen corrupt still occur? If not then you should run Display Driver Uninstaller that will remove all Nvidia and AMD display drivers. After reboot PC and you can try install GTX 970 driver with clean installation option.

http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html
 
Thanks for the replies.

Boomstick and Spirits

Having trouble confirming online if its a compatibility issue, I suspect with it being an older model mobo that nobody or few people else might have the issue.

According to the manufacturers website, I have the most up to date bios... that being said it's several years old, so I'll see if there's a newer version out there.

Not sure if I want to buy a new mobo just to test something.

Would it still have worked (albeit briefly for a couple of hours) on the first installation if it was an incompatible board?

Athlon

I'm running Win 8.1, the GPU itself is a:

OcUK GeForce GTX 970 "NVIDIA 970 Cooler Edition" 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card" manufactured by Zotac

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-205-OK&tool=3

I did a clean install of the card (twice) my friend :), used DDU to wipe the old drivers before installing new drivers using a pre-downloaded installer.

After it borked the first time, I had to safe mode into the system. The display was corrupted with the horizontal lines again after the bios screen (when the windows loading/rotating circle screen appears) but it wasn't showing the black/white screen - it was viewable enough to de-install/reboot/reinstall the drivers.

Once drivers were reinstalled, it was black and white screen time again, and then another game of safemode, de-install and back to the old Radeon.
 
Do you have enough power going to the card? Do you need 1x 8-pin and 1x 6-pin or are 2x 6-pin enough?
 
At least with a specky I would have had 8 colours.

Other than that it does look like the most advanced level of Dizzy Egg evar!

Oh those halcyon days of 5 minutes of cat screeching that makes dial-up modem sound pleasant in comparison, just to load a cassette game (I once got a birthday present of several games copied onto some cheap low quality cassette).
 
Good day Bonjour.

Unfortunately I don't have another PC I could use or know anybody who uses a similar card.

I've been looking at OC's returns policy for (suspected) faulty kit so I might just send it back and they'll test it an if it's dead I'll probably get a replacement.

If it it is working I'll have to pay shipping again (which is fair enough).

I'm debating getting a new board and a faster i7 4790k processor at the moment so might wait until I test the card on the new mobo.
 
Yeah, you can send it back.

It's disappointing, though, when they can't replicate the fault and send the card back as 'no fault found'.
 
ive just had to send back my week old msi r9 290x as was shutting my pc down when i was playing bf4 i was getting the 41 error
 
Hi Manius,

Good luck with your R9 matey. Hope it is a fualty card and that you don't need a new PSU or fans.

Just ordered a new mobo and an I7, delivery sometime tomorrow morning, so here's hoping it is just an old and incompatible board (but If it isn't, a new board plus a new, faster cpu cant hurt! :D)

I'll let you know tomorrow after lunch how it goes, but any further advise is appreciated.
 
I had almost the exact same situation recently (albeit a very different card fault) where I ended up buying a new mobo/CPU to discover my card was at fault. Still, 2500k to a 4690K was a nice boost. Also, when the RMA of my GTX780 was through I was sent a brand new GTX 970. Shame I had just bought an EVGA GTX 780 to SLI! Still, my 30th birthday present to myself ended up in my wife's PC, such is life...

Having worked initially with your motherboard the card may well be the fault and that fact makes troubleshooting harder but at least tomorrow you'll have even shinier new toy to play with. The boost you'll see will be insane!
 
Hi Kirby,

I suspect it is the card rather than the board - however I have been considering upgrading the board for some time now. It had been a choice of board/cpu over gpu/ram and I decided to boost the board and ram for now... mostly because I find swapping out a mobo to be a real pain in the rear. All those cables and the positioning and the screwing (the fiddly kind not the squishy kind too!)

Seems I've bought both upgrades... that's practically whole new rig!

I have a spare case and PSU upstairs... guess what will be getting filled up for use as a backup!
 
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