Something is dying on me

Hi. Something is dying on me, and i cant figure out.
Well its easy to figure it out, but i have no 2nd pc around anymore to try out the suspicious components.


So i bought a r9 290 back when they were released, and bought a new heatsink for it (very very heavy heatsink)
I knew i had to support the card but didnt find a nice solution so i used a wire to have it rest on it. A wire running from top of the cabinet
down to the Gcard supporting it.

I have no clue how but that wasnt even enough.


A year later i got artifacts, bluescreens, and rainbow colored stripes / distortion all over the screen, and the monitor went black when playing any game.



I moved the card 1 slot down, and everything worked as normal!
The upper pcislot has become a bit loose.


it worked for another year in the 2nd slot.
until recently, when i started getting distortion and stripes over the screen.
[It acts like: after startup, on desktop. As soon as i open google chrome and load up youtube the problem seem to be gone, like when i put load on the card]

even though these graphical glitches disappear after a while, games doesnt feel that smooth anymore.


Thats probably because i went on the 3rd slot now as the 2nd also failed.

The 3rd slot is fine, never used. but i still get the gliches.

May my gfx card be about to die?


Or is the 3rd slot too slow to even manage my games properly?

Despite the poor performance my games doesnt have any graphical glitches or anything. In the worst case i might have a blackscreen or crash now and then.


My mainboard is a MSI g45 with 16gb vengeance memory and a i5 4670k

I got a luckychip and been running the card at 1155mhz easily with aircooling ever since. I have pushed the card only once. up to 1180mhz but never used it there as it went unstable.
I also had the VRM overheat to 110c twice before getting the proper vrm cooler which ive used ever since.
Never had high temps on the card after that. And never had any problems with the card in that year period after fiddling with the card.

Problems came 1 year later. when i first had to change pci port.


The two upper Pci ports feels more loose than the 3rd port. but i just cant confirm them being dead.
I have them working both, but as soon as i start gaming on the 1st port my pc crashes.


Video: pay attention how the visual annoyance takes a sudden stop when i open my internet browser.......
[video]https://www.dropbox.com/s/7v83ca8r3e22io9/error.mp4?dl=0[/video]

Sounds like you need a new motherboard for sure and maybe a new video card.

Just posted a video link. Shows stuff.

I could get a new Graphics card, if thats the case.
Or take a look at the motherboard and eventually solder the pins for the upper pci port.

If both are broken that would be sad.

They lasted since 2013. not very long.

You have to start somewhere and it seems obvious to me that the motherboard has problems. That is a known. The video card is not a known issue at this point. But you've got two bad PCI-e slots on that motherboard. Time to get a new one, dude.

trents said:

You have to start somewhere and it seems obvious to me that the motherboard has problems. That is a known. The video card is not a known issue at this point. But you've got two bad PCI-e slots on that motherboard. Time to get a new one, dude.

Click to expand...

So even though the mainboard had trouble with loose ports, it didnt seem to be the issue.
Maybe loose but not broken.

I upgraded yesterday into new skylake mobo, cpu and memory.

Moved the gpu over to the new motherboard.

Problem still there.

Games runs smooth, now as i run at 16x speed.

The flickering and distortion on screen still there. so the gpu might be trouble. or hopefully the drivers.