I have been troubleshooting an approximately one-year-old PNY GeForce RTX 5070 Ti OC for two months. During sustained heavy GPU workloads, all three connected monitors—using a mix of DisplayPort and HDMI—lose video simultaneously. Audio, Discord, networking, and the rest of the system continue working, but the displays never recover without a hard power cycle.
The failure only occurs in demanding scenarios such as Minecraft with heavy shaders, Dragon Ball Sparking Zero at maximum settings, and OCCT's 3D Adaptive test. Lighter games like Valorant, Overwatch, and Xenoverse 2 run indefinitely without problems. Temperatures peak around 78°C hotspot, voltage remains stable, power draw smoothly plateaus around 250–260W rather than reaching the card's rated limit, and the PCIe link stays at x16. I have also tested different 12V-2x6 cables, performed a clean driver reinstall, and tested with EXPO disabled. CPU and memory testing passed.
The same failure was reproduced on a completely different system with a Ryzen 5 5600X, B550 motherboard, EVGA 750W PSU, and a fresh Windows installation. In OCCT, the card fails consistently when the variable load reaches roughly 90–95% intensity. Event Viewer shows no WHEA errors or display-driver events; only Kernel-Power Event 41 with BugcheckCode 0 appears after restarting.
PNY tested the card for more than 20 hours using Steel Nomad, Superposition, and Valley across three 4K displays, but did not reproduce the issue. They noted that those are fixed benchmark workloads and may not match OCCT's variable-load behavior, and they do not use OCCT results for warranty decisions. The card also returned with a bent mounting bracket and a new temporary fan-bearing-like noise.
Does this sound like a genuine hardware fault, or is there another test or setting I should investigate?
1 Answer
You can sometimes force Windows to restart the graphics driver with Win+Ctrl+Shift+B. If the issue is only a driver hang, the screens may come back without rebooting. Given that the failure is repeatable on another system and only happens under a particular load pattern, though, this still sounds more serious than a normal recoverable driver crash.
Unfortunately, that shortcut does not recover the displays in my case. A hard restart is still the only way to get the system working again.