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hmm. I don’t recognize that one.
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I have that one too. I have it restricted to 50% power to keep it cooler and avoid tripping the circuit breaker 
still plays anything I want
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I underclocked it and ran it at lower power as well using MSI Afterburner, which worked for a while. But it started suffering GPU crashes again a few months ago even with that on and I finally threw in the towel on simple remedies and decided to go with new thermal paste. Definitely worth it for about an hour’s work.
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The majority of my gaming this last year has been on The Long Dark, followed closely by https://planets.nu (a remake of the VGA Planets door game from the 1990s), and some Skyrim. Nothing that my NVidia 1060 can’t handle.
I was using Afterburner too. Then I switched to EVGA Precision X1… Don’t remember why. I’ve never run into trouble with the card overheating or glitching and at 50% power it plays all the Borderlands games and Diablo IV at max video quality and a very acceptable refresh rate.
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No need to go the more difficult route if you’ve found something that works, then. Sounds like the switch was a good call, for whatever reason it got your attention. Not a solution I read about, but thermal paste kept coming up, and I did computer deskside support for twenty years, including tear downs and rebuilds, so I finally decided to pull the trigger and use my old skills.
I had a bit of a nightmare with cards this year.
I noticed my trusty old RTX 2080 Super was less and less able to keep up with games at my preferred resolution of 2560x1440, so figured “What the hell, I haven’t bought an AMD card in years, and I’m still doing okay financially”, so bought a 7900XTX in March for just over £1K. In fact, I upgraded my whole sytstem to AMD, switching to a 7900X3D CPU too.
Performance was pretty good, but seemed a little unstable.
I was getting at least 1 crash-to-desktop per day, but because I was playing mostly new games (Dead Space Remake, Resident Evil 4 Remake, The Last of Us, Baldur’s Gate 3, Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 Phantom Liberty, etc.) I thought it was maybe down to the games.
But it got really bad when I started playing Starfield (at least 3-4 CTDs a day), so decided to take a deeper look at what was going on.
Turns out, my card’s “Hotspot” was reaching temperatures of 110C shortly after starting playing virtually any game.
A bit of investigation revealed that this had been a manufacturing flaw with the 7900XTX, but that AMD were trying to keep it quiet.
The card was stable enough to stay up for benchmark tests, ensuring that AMD could report that at least for non-RTX games, their top-of-the-range card was competetive with nVidia’s offering, but in real-world scenarios, consistency and reliability were zero.
On top of which, in comparison to nVidia drivers, AMD’s are absolute junk, and somehow the community have Stockholmed themselves into believing that it’s perfectly normal to be installing a different driver whenever you launch a different game and that you should expect to do things like tweak voltage, etc.
It had been coming up to 6 months when I had enough and returned the card to my reseller. They replaced it with a like-for-like replacement.
But while the replacement didn’t exhibit the 110C issue, it still crashed-to-desktop 8 times in 2 days.
Oh, and in the period where cards were in transit, I had gone back to my 2080 Super, which while not having the same level of performance (although if I’m honest, it was shocking how little the 7900XTX offered over that card), was 100% reliable and consistent.
So my reseller agreed to refund me the 7900XTX, and being completely fed up at this point (seriously, I hadn’t been this dubious of my PC’s performance since I was only able to afford cheaper, lower quality components), I spent the extra to buy an RTX 4090.
And yes, it’s a stupidly expensive card.
But it also is absolutely rock-solid and delivers mind-boggling performance. And that’s the crazy thing; if you can afford one, they offer the best price-to-performance ratio of all available cards at the moment.
I hate that I’ve spent that much on a card (even though I could quite comfortably afford it now). And I hate how Crypto and AI have warped pricing around these cards.
But:
nVidia are kicking AMD’s arse at the moment, and will be for the foreseeable future. My experience reminded me of why I moved away from AMD in the first place almost 20 years ago now.
What I will say however is that I’ve been incredibly impressed with the stability and performance of the AMD CPU.
Oh, and CDPR did a fantastic job “fixing” Cyberpunk 2077 with patch 2.0 and Phantom Liberty.
It’s a true classic now, up there with Witcher 3.
And ye gods, is it pretty with Path Tracing turned on.
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I know, I know, not the same but when you’re stuck in the 70s and 80s a Raspberry Pi with Retropie powered by the USB port on the tv and any game from that era is all I need.
MAME resided on an old 486 and then moved to a Pentium and stayed there for years until Retropie which made it extremely portable.
No need to keep doing costly uogrades, I just live in the past forever.
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I have just opted out of of gfx card arms race, i dont mine and i dont play that much these days, not even sure if any thing i play would even be classed as demanding, but some of that is the fact that once you opt out of the gfx arms race you just stop playing high end games. As they wont look like the demo, filmed on a pc that cost more than my car does…
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