I upgraded from an RTX 3070 to a Gigabyte Radeon 9070 XT in June, and ever since then games such as Hunt: Showdown and Battlefield 6 have randomly crashed to a black screen. The system usually needs a hard reboot, followed by a driver cleanup and reinstall. Crashes can happen within 30 seconds or after several hours.
My system uses a Phanteks P500A case, an i5-12600KF at stock settings, a 1TB WD Blue SN570, 32GB of DDR4-3600 memory with XMP enabled, a Z690-P motherboard, and a Cooler Master Gold 750 V2 power supply. The GPU is connected with three separate PCIe power cables; I initially used a daisy-chained connection for about a week while waiting for a third cable.
I've used DDU several times, tested driver versions 26.8.1 and 26.3.1, blocked Windows from automatically replacing the drivers, run SFC and the Windows memory test, passed a one-hour FurMark test, tried a 200 MHz underclock, reset Windows 10, reseated the card, and updated the motherboard BIOS. The older driver is somewhat more stable, but the crashes still happen. I have not tried undervolting or replacing any hardware. What would you test next?
4 Answers
When you say you reinstalled Windows, was it a full clean installation after formatting the system partition, or just the reset option inside Windows? A reset may leave some underlying driver or configuration issues behind.
If the problem is driver-related, try going back to a known-stable driver rather than using the newest release. I'm still running 25.9.1 because it has been reliable for me, even though it is older.
That makes sense. I chose 26.3.1 because 26.8.1 was much worse, but I'll try an older release if changing the PCIe setting doesn't help.
Go into the motherboard BIOS and manually set the PCIe slot to Gen 4 instead of Auto. Sometimes forcing the link speed helps with newer GPUs and can rule out PCIe negotiation issues.
I'll try that first. Unfortunately, I sold my old RTX 3070, so I can't use it as a comparison card.
Are you using a PCIe riser cable or vertical GPU mount? If so, remove it and test the card directly in the motherboard's primary slot, since risers can introduce signal-integrity problems.
No riser is involved. The card is installed directly in the motherboard in the normal horizontal position.
I used the factory-reset option from Windows Settings rather than completely formatting the partition.