Hi all,
I've had issues with my PC since roughly May 24th. I've currently had my EVGA 2080ti FTW3 Ultra since November, 2019, and in April I replaced my motherboard with a GIGABYTE AORUS Ultra and CPU with a i9-9900K; the setup worked great until May 24th. At first, I started experiencing random crashes while playing games (War Thunder, World of Warships, Escape from Tarkov, etc). The game would suddenly freeze and become unresponsive, but not blue screen the system. I could pull up task manager on a different monitor and kill the process. If I attempted to run the game again, I would get a black screen and the process would hang until I killed it again in task manager. Windows would also log LiveKernelEvent 141 and occasionally 144.
Restarting my computer or disabling/enabling the graphics card drive in Device Manager would correct this situation and allow me to play again. Initially, I would experience one crash every few days, this steadily turned into intermittent crashes every 3-6 hours. I started testing my memory, logging my PSU & GPU power readings, and used DDU to remove my GPU drivers multiple times, using the latest and older known-good drivers, all unsuccessful in fixing the crash issue. I also tried uninstalling any programs I thought might be causing issues, these included Corsair iCUE, old ASUS motherboard applications from my previous MOBO, and recently installed GIGABYTE motherboard applications: App Center, SIV, @BIOS, and EasyTuneService, I also removed a bunch of RGB lighting programs that were installed with RGB Fusion. Finally, I ran 3DMark Timespy stress tests to test for stability while logging and everything seemed normal, 90+ FPS in the benchmarks.
On June 11th, I stopped getting display driver crashes, but instead experienced my Keyboard and Mouse cutting out while in game, LEDs on both products going out, and the Windows USB disconnect/reconnect sound in the background. The following day on June 12th, I came home from work to try and play a game to discover my FPS in Escape from Tarkov had gone from an average 110-120 FPS down to 50-60 FPS. 3DMark Time Spy benchmarks were also down between 50-60 FPS on average. My 2080ti appeared to be boosting the clock speed just fine withing Precision X1 and all HWINFO64 readings still appeared to be normal. I noticed that upon logging into Windows 10 my mouse would freeze for 5-10 seconds when first logging in and when opening some programs like Windows Explorer. I bought new RAM to replace and rule out my current RAM being the issue (although my old RAM successfully passed in Memtest64 on multiple nights of testing). I decided to reset Windows 10 using their Reset option in the Control Panel, but still had no improvement in 3DMark after the reset completed.
I contacted EVGA on June 15th, they had me attempt to flash the latest BIOS to the card which failed immediately and bricked the GPU (3 red LEDs, and center fan uncontrollable/100% speed). I received an RMA replacement the next day as well as a new EVGA PSU that I bought to rule out my Corsair PSU being the issue. Well sufficed to say, the replacement 2080ti is also only giving me 50-60 FPS in Timespy. I am truly at a loss at this point as I have replaced nearly every component in my rig at this point trying to figure this out. I may try reinstalling Windows 10 from scratch (without using the reset option) but I don't have much confidence at this point. If anyone has any ideas or can tell me if I've missed something I would greatly appreciate it, this is really upsetting me.