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AMD 290 crashing, possible replacement?

Associate
Joined
26 Nov 2003
Posts
63
Location
Sussex
I have a reasonable spec machine, I5-4690k, 24GB ram and an AMD 290.

When gaming even at lower resolution the game will always crash, sometimes after 30 seconds, sometimes 30 minutes. On some occasions I can get back to the desktop, other times I have to reboot the whole system. I have tried a number of games as well as clean installs of windows 7 and windows 10. Memtest86 and CPU burn in tests all pass with and without overclock - pretty much the only thing left in my mind is the Graphics card.

In the absence of a magic driver or setting fix I think it might need to be replaced. I have an old Nvidia 470 GTX I can swap in for a few days to test with to confirm the diagnosis.

Assuming it is bad and needs replacing - what are my options here? I bought the 290 back in Dec 2013 for about £230 and looking now I find most cards are only a bit faster for a lot more money. Have things really slowed down this much? A 1070 looks to be about 50-60% faster but still costs £400. so £170 more and nearly 3 years newer for only 50% more seems like a bad deal? Is there something else out there that is better value for money?

I am not using VR yet, but I would like to at some point. I also have a 4k screen which the 290 seems to be able to handle (when it’s not crashing) in a few games, others I drop down to 2560x1440 or 1920x1080.

Can anyone offer some sage advice on an upgrade path or a possible solution to my crashing woes so I can stave of this expense for a few more months?
 
Soldato
Joined
19 Nov 2015
Posts
4,867
Location
Glasgow Area
and looking now I find most cards are only a bit faster for a lot more money. Have things really slowed down this much? A 1070 looks to be about 50-60% faster but still costs £400. so £170 more and nearly 3 years newer for only 50% more seems like a bad deal?

Welcome to the world of a 1 company GPU market...
Yes it sucks.

If I were you I would buy a second hand 290 until the market hopefully recovers.
 
Caporegime
Joined
12 Jul 2007
Posts
40,421
Location
United Kingdom
I have a reasonable spec machine, I5-4690k, 24GB ram and an AMD 290.

When gaming even at lower resolution the game will always crash, sometimes after 30 seconds, sometimes 30 minutes. On some occasions I can get back to the desktop, other times I have to reboot the whole system. I have tried a number of games as well as clean installs of windows 7 and windows 10. Memtest86 and CPU burn in tests all pass with and without overclock - pretty much the only thing left in my mind is the Graphics card.

In the absence of a magic driver or setting fix I think it might need to be replaced...

Can anyone offer some sage advice on an upgrade path or a possible solution to my crashing woes so I can stave of this expense for a few more months?

Reference or AIB 290?

Have you set the power limit to +50% in Overdrive?

Temps?

Depending on answers to the above, try underclocking the Core by 100-200Mhz to see if that reduces the frequency of the crashing.
 
Permabanned
Joined
23 Jan 2014
Posts
465
Location
Beerwah, QLD Australia
I tried upping the fan speed to 60%, but not the power limit or clock speeds. I will give both the power limit change and core frequency changes a go as well.

The card was the cheapest 290 I could find at the time, a gigabyte one with the hairdryer cooler on it. Looks like this: http://cdn.videocardz.com/1/2013/10/AMD-Radeon-R9-290-2.jpg

They are a breeze to disassemble. Take it apart and clean the dust out of it and then carry on.
 
Soldato
Joined
27 Mar 2010
Posts
3,069
No, first thing is monitor the clock speed, core vddc, gpu usage and fanspeed and temps in afterburner or gpu-z. Then from the observations you're not second guessing.
There was this thread on crashing/chugging 290.where no-one took on board he had high idle temps, and made him do uneeded cleaning, when i asked him to comfirm idle clockspeed and gpu usage it was clear some malware was using the gpu at 100% load.
 
Associate
OP
Joined
26 Nov 2003
Posts
63
Location
Sussex
I took the cover off the heat sink and gave it a good clean. Although there was a bit of dust almost all of the fins were clear.

Next I increased the power to +50% and left the fan speed at 60%.

I then loaded a game with GPU-Z running until it crashed. Looks like the temp peaked at 93 degrees. When idle it would hover around 32 degrees.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4ob4hcrby7ph3c9/GPU-Z Sensor Log.txt?dl=0

As the log shows I initially ran with some browsing to check nothing untoward was utilizing the GPU and idle temps/load are OK. Looks like only 6 or so minutes of gaming was enough to crash.

There is no black screen or graphics corruption, the application just stops responding. In this instance I could still move the browser window and load pages fine but I could not get the game to end without rebooting. Next I will try dropping the clock speeds a bit.
 
Soldato
Joined
13 Mar 2004
Posts
3,029
Location
Norfolk
my 290 gave me all sorts of grief when AMD introduced crimson drivers. I had to pretty much beg sapphire to give me an updated bios which sorted it out.

Try using DDU (Display driver uninstaller) to remove your drivers and try to go back to the newest pre crimson drivers. If your drivers are already old try updating to the newest crimsons.
 
Permabanned
Joined
12 Sep 2013
Posts
9,221
Location
Knowhere
I have a reasonable spec machine, I5-4690k, 24GB ram and an AMD 290.

When gaming even at lower resolution the game will always crash, sometimes after 30 seconds, sometimes 30 minutes. On some occasions I can get back to the desktop, other times I have to reboot the whole system. I have tried a number of games as well as clean installs of windows 7 and windows 10. Memtest86 and CPU burn in tests all pass with and without overclock - pretty much the only thing left in my mind is the Graphics card.

In the absence of a magic driver or setting fix I think it might need to be replaced. I have an old Nvidia 470 GTX I can swap in for a few days to test with to confirm the diagnosis.

Assuming it is bad and needs replacing - what are my options here? I bought the 290 back in Dec 2013 for about £230 and looking now I find most cards are only a bit faster for a lot more money. Have things really slowed down this much? A 1070 looks to be about 50-60% faster but still costs £400. so £170 more and nearly 3 years newer for only 50% more seems like a bad deal? Is there something else out there that is better value for money?

I am not using VR yet, but I would like to at some point. I also have a 4k screen which the 290 seems to be able to handle (when it’s not crashing) in a few games, others I drop down to 2560x1440 or 1920x1080.

Can anyone offer some sage advice on an upgrade path or a possible solution to my crashing woes so I can stave of this expense for a few more months?

Of the currently available 16 & 14 nm generation of cards I think the 1070 is the best deal of the bunch taking into account cost and performance. If I was you and I only wanted to spend around what I did last time the 480 or 1060 are the only options, unless of course you don't mind next to no extra performance, in which case look at a 470 maybe.
Personally I'd add the extra for one of the cheapest aftermarket 1070's.
That way you get a respectable performance increase. Or buy a cheap secondhand card for now and wait till Easter for Vega to come and shake the pricing up a bit..
 
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