Hi everyone,
I have been experiencing issues with my 1080ti SC2 for 3 days now. It's gonna take a while to explain, please bear with me.
It all happened after I pulled the card out to reach some sata ports on the mobo to connect an extra hdd.
After I put everything back together, I started having these annoying freezes every minute or so that lasted 3-5 seconds while gaming. The card would ramp up to 100% while they were occurring and then drop to 10% for about 2 seconds before going back to 95-98% where it normally sits (at least according to task manager numbers, if they are to be trusted).
First things I did was reinstall graphics driver, reinstalled game (been mostly playing WoW, but affected all games) and made sure windows was updated too. Nothing changed.
Then I reset bios to default, cancelling all the overclocks (the card was NOT overclocked, processor and ram were). Again no change.
Then while in game I got a new error for the first time - windows was saying it cannot read my graphics driver.
After some googling, it all pointed to serious windows corruption. I input some CMD lines I found on google and the diagnostic confirmed there is indeed corruption in windows files. The command prompt could not fix it.
I ultimately formatted the disk and installed a fresh version of windows, updated it and installed all new drivers for mobo and GPU.
Right now all games are unplayable, they crash as soon as the GPU ramps up to any kind of load, after like 30 seconds, citing video driver or video hardware related errors.
I ran furmark at 2k - got 109 fps at 77c max temp.
Ran furmark stress test for some minutes - no instability of any kind, max temp 79c.
These results are identical to the ones pre malfunction.
The card normally sits at about 95-98% usage while gaming, between 75-79c.
It was paired with ryzen 5 1600@3.8ghz and 16GB of ram at 3200 with xmp. These are not overclocked at the moment.
Airflow is good, nothing was ever overheating.
I took the card out again and inspected it visually, there isn't any apparent damage. I cleaned the entire system about 2 weeks ago.
All this makes me think there was an electrostatic discharge somewhere, somehow, even though I was careful to be grounded the whole time. Then again, why would furmark stress be completely stable, but only games affected? Everything was pointing at hardware damage, but windows did find corrupt files. These conflicting results are what got me so confused and frustrated.
I know ideally I should test the GPU in another system, but currently this is not possible.
If anyone more experienced or more educated than I ever saw something similar before I would be extremely grateful for any information.
Thank you.