9070 XT Causes Black-Screen Crashes During Games Despite Troubleshooting
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MellowPine42!
I upgraded from an RTX 3070 to a Gigabyte Radeon 9070 XT in June, and ever since then I've been dealing with frequent black-screen crashes in Hunt: Showdown and Battlefield 6. Sometimes the game crashes within 30 seconds, while other times it runs for several hours. The system usually needs a hard reboot, followed by a DDU driver cleanup and reinstall.
My system includes a Phanteks P500A case, an i5-12600KF with no overclock or undervolt, a 1TB WD Blue SN570 M.2 SSD, 32GB of DDR4-3600 memory using XMP, a Z690-P motherboard, and a Cooler Master Gold 750 V2 power supply. The graphics card is connected with three separate PCIe power cables; I used a daisy-chained cable briefly while waiting for the third cable to arrive.
I've tried several driver versions, including 26.8.1 and 26.3.1, with the latter being somewhat more stable. I've used DDU from Safe Mode, prevented Windows from automatically replacing the drivers, run SFC and Windows Memory Diagnostic, stress-tested the GPU with FurMark for about an hour, underclocked the card by 200 MHz, reinstalled Windows 10 using the built-in reset option, reseated the graphics card, and updated the motherboard BIOS.
I haven't tried undervolting or replacing any hardware yet. What else should I test to determine whether this is a driver issue, PCIe configuration problem, power issue, or defective graphics card?
Answers
A Windows reset through Settings isn’t the same as completely wiping the system partition and performing a clean installation. If the problem continues, a true clean install with only the chipset, graphics, and essential motherboard drivers could help rule out leftover software or configuration issues.
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Try entering the motherboard BIOS and manually setting the PCIe slot to Gen 4 instead of Auto. Auto-negotiation can occasionally cause instability with newer graphics cards. If that doesn’t help, testing with another GPU would be useful, although I understand you no longer have the RTX 3070.
MellowPine42!: I’ll try forcing the slot to Gen 4. Unfortunately, I sold the RTX 3070, so I can’t use it as a comparison card anymore.
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Don’t assume the newest driver is the best one for stability. If the current version still crashes, try rolling back through older releases and keep the first version that proves reliable in the affected games. A driver that’s several months old can sometimes be more stable than a newer release.
MellowPine42!: That’s worth trying. I moved to 26.3.1 because 26.8.1 crashed even earlier, but I can test an older release if the PCIe setting doesn’t help.
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If you were using a PCIe riser, I’d recommend removing it and testing the card directly in the motherboard slot, since risers can cause link stability problems. Since yours is installed directly and horizontally, that particular cause probably doesn’t apply here.
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MellowPine42!: I only used the reset option in Windows, so I haven’t done a full partition wipe and clean installation yet.