Strange PC 'crashing' issue

Hey there guys,

So for the past day there has been a weird issue with my PC. It boots up fine, no problems, but after some time of use, maybe 45 minutes to an hour, my monitors suddenly go blank and there is no signal. When that happens, the LED light for my CPU goes red, when it was not lit before. The power stays on, fans are still working ETC.

I just installed an R9 390, but with the CPU LED turning red, I feel like it is not the GPU. Here are my specs below. Not to mention the PC was fine when I installed the GPU 2 weeks ago, and has been fine since until now.

CPU: Intel I7 4930k
Mobo: Asus Sabertooth X79
GPU: Sapphire Nitro R9 390
RAM: 16 GB, 1866 Mhz
Boot drive: Kingston HyperX 3K
OS: Windows 10 64-Bit

I do not know what's going on, it's kind of a crash, but the screen doesn't freeze, just goes blank, with no signal. Any tips would be awesome!

EDIT: Actually one of two things can happen, it can go blank as stated above, or sometimes (less likely) the computer just restarts on it's own and boots up normally.

Sounds a lot like the r9 elpidia memory issue. Try putting something other than an r9 card on and see if it still happens, or use msi afterburner to slightly overclock the card. Let me see if I can find an article about how people get around this, personally I just returned my R9 and picked up an nvidia card when I found out about the bug.

I still have my 770 to test with, but I got the R9 390 for a reason, and want to keep it.

Again like I said, it's been fine for about 2 weeks until now.

yeah, still sounds a lot like the issue I've had a lot of customers come in with, and I have a friend with a vapor x card that has the same issue. It has something to do with an early batch of r9 cards with elpidia memory and something to do with a power saving feature that causes the problem. I'm trying to find an article for you now. I don't know if it applies to the 300 series though

Thanks, you may be onto something.

Last time it 'crashed', I looked at the GPU fan, it wasn't on. I assumed it wasn't because of that "if it's below 60 degrees it wouldn't spin the fans" but now that it's currently working, the fans are on.

try running something with sound, like a 10 hour youtube video. One thing I've noticed is that the machine somewhat locks up but skype calls and audio and what not keeps working, even through hdmi.

I'll just turn on some music, spotify or something, and just use the PC normally, I'll report what happens if anything. Thanks Penguin.

Found some information over here, google yields similar results mostly on linus and oc.net's forums. Also I got it mixed up, it's the cards with Hynix memory that are the problems. Give the afterburner trick a shot and see if that fixes it, but like I said, I'm not sure this actually pertains to the 300 series. What's the exact model to your card? Maybe we can see if they reused an old batch of memory.

Oops I posted it to the wrong topic somehow and now it won't let me post unless I change the text some blah blah blah.

So it hasn't happened since I made the topic, however you never know, could happen again.

Here's the page for the exact card: http://www.sapphiretech.com/productdetial.asp?pid=C436E37C-8A09-48B6-9F2B-F4AF86E377B6&lang=eng

Saw a review from Jayztwocents on it, he said it was fricken awesome, so I assumed it would be fine. I'll try doing that slight overclock if it happens again.

"Memory of model SAPPHIRE NITRO R9 390 8G D5 (total 8 GB) is realized
with the help of 16 chips SK hynix H5GC4H24AJR-T2C with capacity of 4 GB
each" http://en.gecid.com/video/sapphire_nitro_r9_390_8g_d5/

I thought they learned better the first time. They must be getting a pretty slick deal on memory modules from Hynix. I'm pretty confident this will fix your issue, time will tell. Best of luck to you!

Thanks for sharing that info.

It's actually run just fine in the last 3 hours, so not sure what happened as I did not update anything or OC the GPU in any way, hopefully it'll stay good! Thanks for your help Penguin. :)

Did you update the drivers? 15.7.1 is the current version
I really hope it is not the Hynix-Problem penguinairlines mentioned!

Yep, all updated. Not sure if my GPU went through a bad moment or something, truly weird though.