EVGA GTX 770 Dying?

Hardware GPU
1

Ok so this card has always been trouble it has the original EVGA ACX cooler which is notoriously bad at this point (but not at the time I bought it). When I first built the machine it would only boot 1/2 the time. Boot up once fine, boot up again VGA error light, boot up again fine, etc... I eventually fixed this by updating the BIOS on my Asus Z97-A so I assume that was the problem. I should also mention I'm running on an EVGA Supernova 750 Gold which should be more than enough power. More recently (the past month) I have been getting constant display driver crashes, screen going black for a few seconds during gameplay, freezing then red blocks and graphic glitches appearing on screen and then blue screen. The card has never been seriously overclocked for any length of time and I even tried running it at stock clocks for the reference 770. I run it on "aggressive" fan mode and the temps never get higher than normal. I have tried reseating the card in the PCI-e slot and the drivers are all up to date. The case has good airflow (two NFF12's in the front pulling, one NFF14 in the back pushing, and a H105 up top with two NFF12's on pushing.

I'm really just at the end of my rope with this and I have heard many other people are having the same problem with this card being unstable (and equally bad experiences with this motherboard). I really can’t have this computer fail because I'm in college and I'm barely getting by as it is, so if anyone has any ideas I could try to stabilize this card that would be great. An RMA could take weeks when I won’t have a working computer and if the card is broken, but if it’s just the card itself having horrible quality control they will just be sending me another of their glitchy 770’s.

2

Could well be some cold solder joints on the card somewhere that have started cracking and cause intermittent faults once hot. I don't really know if this card was known for some fault like this. I only once had a similar experience with an old GTS250, in that case it turned out that one of the PCI-e power bus capacitors on the mainboard that was bad and didn't work well under high load.

Only option to be sure whats wrong would be to test a different card in your mainboard, on a bench outside the case and also test the card in a different mainboard. But in your case that's no option I guess.

3

I have a GTX 770 SC with the ACX cooler, and its still running fine. Been heavily used as well... haven't heard anything bad about the original ACX cooler. What' supposed to be notoriously bad about it?

4
  1. test gpu in another machine if works then we'll go from there if not read on.
  2. run DDU to remove drivers on your machine
  3. reinstall drivers. ~ no betas
  4. once installed use something like msiafterburner - try bumping up the voltage a tiny bit, test, if fails, bump up some more. stop after a while as even @ stock speeds and a half nerfed gpu a slight bump in voltage should get it going.
    1. take screenshots and go through the RMA process. A few weeks without a gpu is not the end of the world. Who knows you may even get something like a 970 back in return.

best of luck mate.