Hello everyone, I'm new to this community and I've been looking around for solutions before, back and forth for thing like drivers bios etc.
Here's the thing: been dreaming for a 1080Ti since it came off the market but couldn't afford one until the minning-fever was over. Finally one year ago managed to buy a beautiful SC Black, second-hand from Ebay of course. Outstanding card, really love it.
So I dismounted and cleaned "her" from dust, gunk and sweat from the thermal pads, replacing all of them with fresh ones from Arctic. Also custom watercooled it since I have an universal GPU waterblock from EK from my last VGA.
On this January stuff started to happen (never overclocked it by the way); nvidia drivers started to crash (kernel and yada yada) on heavy games like FO4 (super modded), The Witcher 3 and few indie games that aren't supposed to put such VGA under a heavy load at all. Drivers crashed every time there was a single spike at 100%. Tried different driver (the oldish the better lol), check VGA Bios which was actually the latest and the one that came with it, tried to switch to another bios on my motherboard (updated it in the very same month), switch to lower refresh rate, DP or HDMI and resolution because in the very same month I also changed my 1080p monitor with a 2k one. Nothing. I even though it was my shiny new NVME disk but no, it was innocent.
Then I tough about the "sagging" phenomena and did a few attemps like lifting her a bit and noticed it didn't crashed on heavy games. Perfect! Found the issue, I thought, so got a vertical stand for a few bucks on amazon to lift it for me. Surely enought it didn't help, and after like two days of trial and error decided to do a little experiment and underclock it a bit (like just a few mhz) using EVGA Precision and see what happens, leaving it lifted with the stand.
THE SCREW UP: So at this point I played a bit on a recent updated game like Besiege and voilà, no more crashes! Fantastic! It was stable so went I savage and loaded one of my FO4 saves plenty of mods and the card went "WHOA" like, she did load so fast the game I was flabbergasted on the amount of FPS boost I was looking. That was, indeed, when I felt something was REALLY wrong. After a couple of minutes in-game it died! Just plain black screen, no buzzing, no smoke or explosions, just a dark screen. Tried to reboot the computer and BIOS didn't kick-in. Retryied a couple of times and the BIOS emitted a code of 2 fast beeps followed by another 3 fast beeps when I manually lift it on the connectors side, and sometimes a single beep from the BIOS followed by a sudden reboot when leave it loose (always directly connected to the PCIE slot and holded with tool-less case claps naturally). The board is an ASUS TUF Z370 GAMING PLUS and worked flawlessly when I swapped the VGA back to my old one.
Tryied everything like changing PSU slot and cables, checking for bent or burn pins (they were in good condition),
sacrifice young virgins , check for disjointed pin plugs and I coudn't find anything phisically wrong with it. Maybe just a little orange-ish VRM weldings but no rust or actual corrosion.
What can I do now?