**WARNING: DO NOT BUY POWERCOLOR 290 PCS+ CARDS FOR MINING (NOW RESOLVED THESE CARDS ARE FINE)!!**

[LtMatt]

Really sorry to bump such an old thread but I was wondering if you could help me with one of these cards. A friend bought one from Overclockers over christmas and it was faulty so it was replaced, but the new card is highly unstable with his motherboard (An ASUS M5A97 LE R2.0).

This is his first PC build and he's really disappointed having spent so much on it that it has been so unusable and crashy. I noticed some of you mentioned an updated BIOS from PowerColor? Can you point me in the direction of this as I wonder if it could possibly alleviate any of the issues he's having?

Cheers,

Rich

EDIT:

Just to clarify, the rest of the PC is flawless with another graphics card, and the R9 290+ woks perfectly on another system, so I'm totally confused by the whole situation.

Is any part of the computer overclocked?

 

[richb93]

Is any part of the computer overclocked?

The PCI-E bus has been overclocked as on stock settings the card would completely crash the system when attempting driver installation under Windows.

I'd like to think I'm quite competent when it comes to computers, but I've never seen such a problem before.

Stock settings are completely unstable; PCI-E bus speed increase has made it more stable.

The other card used on this machine to test it extensively was an XFX Radeon 6670; with this card (and the same Catalyst 14.12 Omega drivers) the machine ran stress tests flawlessly for hours on end. Likewise, the R9 290X card was tested in another machine (a much older Athlon X2 machine) with default settings and happily ran FurMark for extended periods.

 

[LtMatt]

The PCI-E bus has been overclocked as on stock settings the card would completely crash the system when attempting driver installation under Windows.

I'd like to think I'm quite competent when it comes to computers, but I've never seen such a problem before.

Stock settings are completely unstable; PCI-E bus speed increase has made it more stable.

The other card used on this machine to test it extensively was an XFX Radeon 6670; with this card (and the same Catalyst 14.12 Omega drivers) the machine ran stress tests flawlessly for hours on end. Likewise, the card was tested in another machine (a much older Athlon X2 machine) with default settings and happily ran FurMark for extended periods.

I'd suggest using the motherboard bios optimised defaults. You should not need to overclock the PCI-E bus to make things stable. Sounds like something else is amiss there.

 

[richb93]

BIOS has been completely reset without any change in stability sadly. Multiple re-installs of Windows hasn't helped either both via UEFI and standard BIOS methods. I can only assume that the motherboard doesn't like the card, but it's running the latest BIOS from ASUS.