Possible Graphics Card Fault

milamber1971

milamber1971

milamber1971

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30 Mar 2011
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39
I purchased a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 WindForce OC in july of 2015 and installed it in my PC, was working fine until about 10 days or so ago when i was playing World of Warcraft the screen went black and i was unable to do anything other than reboot the PC, i've since tried this on 2 or 3 occasions since then and the same problem.
I've tested my memory to see if that would be a possible cause and the memory test came back okay, so i am wondering is it a problem with the graphics card, can someone please give me ideas or solutions as it is baffling the hell out of me
 
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Hi,

What is the full system spec.

Are you able to get into the desktop and try another game or is it totally dead?
 
i can get in to the desktop, it quite happily runs movies and also Star Trek Online which i also play, it just seems to happen with World of Warcraft
The spec is as follows:-

AMD FX 6120 @ 3.1GHz
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 WindForce OC 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card
8 GB DDR3 Ram
Akasa Venom Voodoo CPU Cooler
Cooler Master HAF 912 Case
Asrock 970 Extreme 4 Motherboard
Windows 10

Any other information that i might have missed...?
 
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A problem with a single game does not indicate any hardware faults.

Try 3Dmark and Unigen Heaven or Valley benchmarks and if it passes those then its the game install itself or maybe Nvidia driver error (try a different version).
 
Has there been a game update automatically applied over the internet?

If it can pass the synthetic benchmarks (which are visually more demanding than WOW) then its something else.
 
Try those test, try other games, if they are all spot on, then its WOW at fault and not the hardware.

Just had a look at your CPU specs, it should be running at 3.5Ghz and Turbos upto 4.1GHz
 
Any i mentioned, they all are demanding for a GFX card to run, in Heaven+valley you can set the detail settings+resolution, 3Dmark basically has a few tests that get ever increasing complexity.
 
If a card reproducibly crashes in any game and the same variety of card but different individual card with same drivers doesn't in the same game then it's the card not the game. Valley etc don't prove anything with regards to stability beyond that you can run Valley.
 
the thing that puzzles me, is why it would do it now, considering the graphics card is like 6 months old and had been running world of warcraft on max settings since i purchased it with no problems, i've tried all the things i thought it could be and it is still baffling me big time
 
was playing star trek online about an hour ago, pc was running fine, then it went relatively silent (ie quieter than normal) and the screen went black and i had to reboot the pc there was also a smell coming from the PC, would a faulty PSU cause the problems i am having...?
 
Any idea where the smell came from, sometimes in lingers after and you maybe able to sniff it out.
 
that i dont know to be honest, all i know is that there was an burnt like smell that came off the pc, i left it alone for 20 mins or so, turned PC back on, fans seem to be running okay, havent risked playing any games although i can watch movies and such fine
 
windows 10?

If so, check that windows hasn't updated your drivers for you.... you can turn off that setting so it won't automatically update drivers, uninstall whatever is in there now (run CCcleaner or similar to clean out the registry) and then use nvidia experience to install the latest nvidia drivers.
 
i made sure that it doesnt automatically update when i first got windows 10 on it, and the latest nvidia drivers have been uploaded, i'm trying to figure out if the smell i smelt was the PSU or whether it was the graphics card, the graphics card is only 6 months old whereas the PSU is older, it only seems to be suffering when i play the games i mentioned, at the time of typing this i am watching a movie quite happily
 
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