FurMark *not* causing BSODs?

Hi all,

Recently I've been experiencing a spate of crashes and blue screens with my new Sapphire R9 280X, all suggesting ATI had something to do with it. Thing is the card is 1 week old and I haven't overclocked it at all. Tried both the latest stable (14.6) and beta (15.4) Catalyst but that didn't help. When using 15.4 (GTA V beta) I also get constant artifacts on the bottom left corner of my main screen.

In fact I tried to underclock it today; dropped the GPU clock and memory clock by 20 and 100 MHz respectively but that didn't work either. After ~15 minutes of mucking around in GTA5 either it crashes or further down the road I get a blue screen.

The thing is the distributor has an RMA location and they use FurMark to test customers' cards. I've been running it for hours and it doesn't crash the system. Not sure what to make of this - is my new graphics card faulty or something else, software or otherwise?

to OCF!

Can you please give the rest of your system specifications?

What card, etc?

What other games have you tried other than GTA5?

Hello Janus,

Intel 3570K 4.1 GHz
Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H
Sapphire R9 280X 3GB
GSkill 4x2GB DDR3-1600 (memtested, all ok)
Seasonic S12 600W
Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit

So far I haven't had time to test any other "big" games.

280x's are known to cause issues with GTA 5. No real fix yet, sorry.

Same with black screens and stuff. Just press the RMA

Hi Bob, thanks for dropping by, even if it was to deliver bad news.

I've never heard of this before (and I did alot of research before upgrading). Do you have references or where I can get more information regarding 280X + GTAV? I saw this video while researching my purchase: . It was one of the tipping factors in the decision; solid 30fps at FHD and at a pretty sweet price.

So the card isn't bad then, it just won't play nice with this specific game?

I would try some additional games to see if you have issues with anything else.

nicky9499 said:

Hi Bob, thanks for dropping by, even if it was to deliver bad news.

I've never heard of this before (and I did alot of research before upgrading). Do you have references or where I can get more information regarding 280X + GTAV? I saw this video while researching my purchase:

. It was one of the tipping factors in the decision; solid 30fps at FHD and at a pretty sweet price.

So the card isn't bad then, it just won't play nice with this specific game?

Click to expand...

With a bit of googling, it appears that the 280x seems to show artifacting when you enable MSAA. Try disabling MSAA and see if that gets rid of the artifacting in GTA5. As others have said, check other games. If the same problems persist, it may be a hardware issue, or possibly a driver issue.

That said it doesn't happen with every 280x/7970 either.

The black screens are likely a memory issue with catalyst control center from my research. With my 290, when I have CCC installed, my computer is hilariously unstable. When I install drivers manually without CCC, its been flawless since. Literally never crashed again. Im not aware of 280x's having the same issues, but it may be worth a shot. Overclocking/Underclocking, volt changes, nothing really matters. Im overclocked now, with no issues, was literally something in CCC causing the problems.

Also, download GPU-Z. My experiences with GTA is that you will be using more VRAM than its "guesstimator" predicts. For example, Im around 3.5gb vram with the prediction of 2.7. That could also cause instability and issues. On GPU-z's sensor tab, it will show actual vram usage. Click it to "Max" and play your game and see what happens (2 screens will be incredibly handy so you can watch in real time if possible).

The 280x/GTA5 thing is just something I came across, huge problem on reddit.

lol is there any game that the 280x doesnt have problems with? freaking chrome caused mine to bsod.

on another note, gpu stresses usually dont bring out the bsod like a good ole game will dunno why probably because the cpu and gpu are doing more work together.