Heart Attack Averted! Thankfully My GPU Is Not Dying!
With GPU’s being very costly in 2021 due to a massive shortage of silicon due to COVID—19 and other factors, when both my screens started turning black and powering off before recovering and coming back on, only to do it again every few minutes, I’m starting to panic, as this is my work rig, how I make a living.
So, I started troubleshooting, I started by removing my Asus ROG Strix RX580, cleaning it off, specifically, making sure the PCI-E contacts are clean, before reinstalling. This did not fix the issue; as within a few minutes of booting the system, it was power cycling my monitors, which are incidentally connected by two different connection methods, my main monitor is connected by DP, the second connected via DVI-D.
The next step was uninstalling the AMD Radeon drivers using DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) in safe mode, which is a pain in the ass to get into from Windows 10. I could not get the Shift-click restart from the shutdown menu, which was Google’s first suggestion, to work, so I had to try Google again, and found I could do it from Settings > Recovery > Advanced Startup, why did Microsoft remove F8 safe mode boot?
But, I digress, it seemingly did not fix the issue, even without anything other than the basic windows driver, it still power cycled my monitors. But, after a couple more monitor power cycles, Windows popped up a message which said something about changes have been made to my system and that I needed to restart. I guess it must have been installing an AMD driver from Microsoft, causing the screen cycling.
After the reboot, I used the AMD Auto Detect software to find the best driver for my devices, it downloaded the 21.3.1 driver (dated 3/10/2021), and also some other drivers for my Ryzen 1800X CPU; and after some more monitor power cycles, and computer reboots, everything looks to be good again, so it looks like there was some sort of driver corruption during the last PC shut down as it was absolutely fine before that. To be clear, I had not updated my GPU driver for several weeks, so it wasn’t a bad update.
Finally; this is not related to my issue, but the AMD Upgrade Advisor makes me laugh; despite the hardware I have, it assumes I want to upgrade to an RX 6900 XT, and an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, which of course is their top of the range products. Not to mention unobtainable for MSRP, the RX 6900 XT was selling on Amazon for $2,200+, which is more than double the MSRP. You see why I was starting to panic, I don’t have double MSRP money to buy a new GPU when my current card performs fine for my needs.
While searching for an image of my current Asus ROG Strix RX580 GPU for my featured image for this blog, I noticed that some people are trying to flog it used on eBay for $700, I bought it brand new in 2017 for $274.99. I really hope that people are not paying 2.5 times the MSRP for a four-year-old GPU!