Hi all! I was playing ARC Raiders today and noticed some small white and colored dots on the screen, which I believe were artifacts. The game was running smoothly at around 130-140 FPS, and my temperatures were normal according to MSI Afterburner. After finishing a match, my PC crashed and got stuck on the TUF Gaming boot screen— the spinning circle just froze. After a few restarts, it finally booted up, but now I'm experiencing low image quality and a limited refresh rate. NVIDIA is prompting me to reinstall the drivers like they're not installed at all. In Device Manager, my RTX 5070 has a yellow warning sign.
I used DDU in Safe Mode to uninstall all NVIDIA drivers and I plan on reinstalling the latest ones with the clean installation option. Just to add:
- Temperatures were fine during gameplay.
- GPU usage was often 10-20% higher than CPU usage in most games.
- This is the first time I've encountered this issue.
- My setup includes an ASUS TUF motherboard, RTX 5070, and Windows 11 (I'll add CPU, RAM, and PSU details later).
I have a few questions:
1. Does Code 43 always indicate a hardware failure, or could it just be a driver issue?
2. Should I reinstall the drivers in Safe Mode or normal mode?
3. Is there a way to test if the GPU is still functional before assuming it's dead?
Thanks for any insights!
2 Answers
For reinstalling drivers, I'd suggest going with normal mode. Safe Mode is great for removing drivers, but normal mode tends to work better for fresh installs. Also, you can try running stress tests or benchmarks (like FurMark) to see if the GPU acts up before jumping to conclusions about damage.
Code 43 usually points to a hardware issue, but it’s known that Nvidia has had driver problems lately too. To fully rule out a software error, a clean Windows install might be a good route. Make sure to back up your data first, though! You can do this from a USB drive, delete the system partition, and then install the latest Nvidia drivers you were previously using without any issues.
I’ve heard a clean install can work wonders, but isn’t it weird how it was running fine for three months prior? It feels more likely to be a sudden hardware issue.