AMD Driver Crash Upon Playing Any Games - No Known Error

Hello,
I've constantly been getting seemingly random crashes of my AMD graphics drivers on many different versions (currently on 17.7.2) in any game I play. It generally occurs maybe an hour into gameplay, but can occur at other times as well including just minutes after launch to many hours in, or rarely, not at all. I've tried multiple times to remove the drivers and reinstall older versions that were known to be stable, but nothing seems to work. I'd rather not reinstall my operating system, and have been trying to save that as a last resort. The GPU idles at 55 degrees celsius and doesn't rise much above that when playing games oddly enough... I've taken off the shroud and blown compressed air through the fins and cleaned it out, but didn't remove the heatsink and reapply thermal compound. The GPU used to run cooler, so I'm not sure why it's running so hot, perhaps a setting changed somewhere prioritizing volume a bit more than temperature, no clue, but the fans are still working. The entire case is nice and dust free and has plenty of cooling, keeping most of the air inside at 30 degrees and the CPU, hard drives and motherboard not much hotter, or about the same. Just the graphics card is hot. The computer is also not overclocked, however XMP is enabled.
Anything to try or perhaps some way to get error log files for the driver? I checked the event viewer and couldn't seem to find it, but maybe I just missed it.
Thank you!

Hello,

This may not be a blue screen of death but we have a log collector script that provides many useful files for troubleshooting crashes.

Please use this and it might allow us to explore possible causes. Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) Posting Instructions

I think it's your RAM causing the issue....just from reading all the info out there about the Ryzen series CPU's with RAM limitations on the frequencies going over 2400 mhz. Even though your mobo supports higher RAM speeds....the CPU is the key determining factor. You should check you CPU specs for RAM compatibility.

In the mean time....manually set your XMP to 2400mhz and see if that works.

Support for DDR4 3200(O.C.)/2933(O.C.)/2667*/2400/2133 MHz memory modules​

Never heard of SolidWorks Fast Start before.........I would disable that or uninstall it (it's not needed).

Have you updated your Logitech Gaming software?

The Gigabyte App Center software.....do you use it, if not I would uninstall it. I find it cumbersome and most of the time it tries to install older/outdated drivers then the most current ones. I don't use it at all with my Gigabyte board.

If you don't use onedrive or onenote....I would turn them off from startup. I would also check your startup programs for whatever else you don't need to run at startup and turn off what you don't need.

Plankton said:

Never heard of SolidWorks Fast Start before.........I would disable that or uninstall it (it's not needed).

Have you updated your Logitech Gaming software?

The Gigabyte App Center software.....do you use it, if not I would uninstall it. I find it cumbersome and most of the time it tries to install older/outdated drivers then the most current ones. I don't use it at all with my Gigabyte board.

If you don't use onedrive or onenote....I would turn them off from startup. I would also check your startup programs for whatever else you don't need to run at startup and turn off what you don't need.

Solidworks Fast Start is a program used to help startup Solidworks faster, as the name implies. Solidworks is CAD software, for 3D modeling generally for business applications. Especially thanks to the price tag of $4000+ (Unless you get it free from a school or business like in my case :P)

I just use the Gigabyte software for the LEDs. But it doesn't seem to perform any updates other than to itself.

Also I forgot to disable the OneNote clipping thing, but other than that, nothing in startup should be affecting system stability. I'm thinking it was probably the RAM speeds as I haven't seen a crash since dropping them to the maximum specified for Corsair modules.

Great to hear on the RAM.

As far as the Gigabyte App goes......it's a personal choice to install/use.....I find it to be a system resource hog and a unnecessary system startup program. And as stated tends to update drivers incorrectly....personal experience.

Plankton said:

Great to hear on the RAM.

As far as the Gigabyte App goes......it's a personal choice to install/use.....I find it to be a system resource hog and a unnecessary system startup program. And as stated tends to update drivers incorrectly....personal experience.

Nope, didn't solve the problem, but it may have helped. I seem to be crashing less frequently, but I did still crash after a couple hours of gameplay. It only seems to happen in games too, so I was thinking it may be a certain function that games all try to run, but I'm not sure what would be consistent from the variety of games I've tested... I've tried anything from Assassins Creed IV to Overwatch to Minecraft to BeamNG.drive. Variety of game engines, with Minecraft being especially different from the others, but they all experienced a crash or two at least in a couple hours. Although, one thing I noticed was that in Overwatch and BeamNG.drive, crashes were so infrequent they were almost negligible, while in AC4 and Minecraft, they occurred pretty frequently. No clue... I don't even get that little "Your display driver has crashed and was recovered" message that Windows usually gives. Everything just freezes, the screen gets a massive tear and it goes back to normal, with any game that was running either being invisible or white as it can't reinitialize the graphics engine...

Everything just freezes, the screen gets a massive tear and it goes back to normal, with any game that was running either being invisible or white as it can't reinitialize the graphics engine...

This is a classic sign of a GPU issue and normally it's associated to an overheating issue.....normally that is. Worst case scenario, it could be that the GPU is just going bad.

I had a AMD 4850 that did the same thing.....started out exactly as yours was doing. I tore the GPU apart and replaced all the thermal paste and added thermal pads over the VRM's. It worked for about 4 months and it started doing the same thing again and more frequently. I ended up just replacing it.

Is your GPU still under warranty? If so I would strongly suggest that you contact Asus and see what can be done about fixing it or replacing it.

Plankton said:

This is a classic sign of a GPU issue and normally it's associated to an overheating issue.....normally that is. Worst case scenario, it could be that the GPU is just going bad.

I had a AMD 4850 that did the same thing.....started out exactly as yours was doing. I tore the GPU apart and replaced all the thermal paste and added thermal pads over the VRM's. It worked for about 4 months and it started doing the same thing again and more frequently. I ended up just replacing it.

Is your GPU still under warranty? If so I would strongly suggest that you contact Asus and see what can be done about fixing it or replacing it.

Stress testing my GPU, it seems to stabilize around 74 degrees, which is still around 10 degrees higher than when it was new and I even just cleaned it. Not really that bad, but I don't know why it doesn't try to cool itself better. The frequency drops at very random intervals looking at one graph, but looking at the graph on the stress test, there's a clear pattern (in the temperature, which follows the frequency pretty well) and it shows in the FPS too.

I attached a screenshot of the graphs on both the stress test as well as the AMD control software. I'm not sure why the card throttles instead of increasing fan speed though as it's hardly hitting 50% fan speed... When I increase the fan speed to full manually, the temperature quickly drops down to 62 degrees or so and performance stabilizes... So... partially bad thermal conductivity of the GPU I think in addition to stupid software. Not sure if the heat was the cause of the crashes though, although I'm thinking it was... :P

EDIT: Just contacted ASUS. Hoping they'll be able to replace it for me as from what I've read, there's a 36 month (3 year) limited warranty...