As I mentioned in the “Every day life stuff” topic my GPU kept crashing last week and The Witcher 3 became unplayable
It seemed like there was an issue with the GPU, because in the middle of a cutscene the screen would just turn black, but the PC itself didn’t.
When attempting to play the game/cutscene again I checked temperatures using HWMonitor and they seemed to be fairly normal: about 76°C max...
CPU temperatures were also in the 70’s range under load, although when running idle they were a running a little bit high.
I tried 2 other games to see if the GPU would crash. The Expanse also crashed during a cutscene and AC Valhalla acted really weird on startup, so the issue wasn’t with The Witcher 3 itself.
After the issue with AC Valhalla I even had to reinstall NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience as it seemed to have disappeared from my PC???
Other actions I did:
* I reverted to an older GPU driver, since I updated to the most recent one a week or so ago.
No solution.
* Used Windows System File Checker tool to scan for errors and while it did find some and repaired them it was no solution either.
* Took out the GPU and cleaned the dust that had built up on the inside of the PC and on the GPU.
It wasn’t overly bad since I clean the dust filters at least once a month.
And while the case was open anyway I also went ahead to reapply thermal paste to the CPU because of the idle CPU temperatures.
Put the GPU back in to see if the cleaning effort had made a difference, but sadly the GPU still crashed during The Witcher 3…
Idle temps for the CPU were better at least.
On a hunch I ran the 3DMark Demo “Time Spy” to see how the PC would perform.
Figured it would undoubtedly crash during this test.
But it didn’t crash??? Got good results too. Only slightly lower than when I built my PC.
The next day I removed the GPU and was about to install the GTX 1070. But of course I should have known that the 8-pin power connector for the RTX 3070 is different from the GTX 1070…
As I didn’t have much time that day it would have been too much work to reinstall the old card then and redo the cable managing, so I put everything back to how it was.
Since then there have no longer been any issues with the GPU!
I’ve been able to play The Witcher 3 without any GPU crashes again then and I have no clue why?
Computers... AAARGH!!!