Computer crashing as of late (Fedora 26)

This is what I ended up doing, I sold my Nvidia card and bought and RX 480. It was a good decision for me.

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@DrewSaga

I’m not sure if it’s still an issue, but there was a bug with the auto pstate implementation that linux had, specifically for the 290(X)/390(X) cards.

What would happen is once the card went from a high to low state, it would bug out and halt the system. Anything at all could trigger it; leaving a game, close a heavy browser tab, etc. Which would cause strange symptoms like working perfectly fine on boot most times, then being able to play a video game for like 6 hours, then when you exited it boom. System halt. I did a butt ton of research into it because at the time that’s the only card I had and couldn’t afford to without one. Bellow are the only two lines of code you need to enable the ‘fix’.

sudo echo high > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level
sudo echo performance > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_state

What this does is lock you GPU into a high/performance state so it won’t switch automatically. Note you lose power efficiency because your card will always be at max clock. Not max utilization, just max clock.


footnote: enabling the fix is not permanent, once the system reboots the performance modes go back to normal, so no harm done if you don’t like it.

If you want to make the fix permanent, then you need to add it to your .bashrc, so it is applied during startup.

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I think I saw something about the p-state not being quite right for Linux

Honestly, I am just going to change GPUs, cause I am downsizing to save up on a new laptop cause my Surface Pro’s battery is beginning to give in, battery life is starting to get pretty bad, already charged the tablet twice. If I am lucky I can sell my R9 390 for a decent amount seeing the mining craze that occured and go for a 4 GB RX 470.