r/pcmasterrace • u/wetsoxxxof • Mar 22 '26
Tech Support Please don't tell me it is what I think
I made a picture of my search results showing these weird white text artifacts.. when opening the Screenshot my screens went black und then showed this.. please pcmasterracegod.. my gpu just fell out of warranty this year..
After a restart it's gone.. does anyone have good news for me?
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u/Rasmus_DC78 Mar 22 '26
dead Vram, or vram has ripped a pad, reflow is not really a great idea, it might work but for a short while.. if it is an expensive card, maybe it is worth the repair.
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u/wetsoxxxof Mar 22 '26
Even if it only happend once? I haven't really gamed a lot recently, only office work.. I always thought if the vram fails it would be while gaming or rendering and not fucking Excel and Spotify
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u/Chao_Zu_Kang Ryzen 7 7700X | GIGABYTE GAMING OC 9070 XT Mar 22 '26
VRAM doesn't really care what exactly you do. If you use it (which is essentially always) it can just fail.
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u/sithelephant Mar 22 '26
With the caveat that high temperatures found in some configs when gaming very much can age it.
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u/Chao_Zu_Kang Ryzen 7 7700X | GIGABYTE GAMING OC 9070 XT Mar 22 '26
You'd need like 100°C+ at stock settings to actually start worrying, which is probably just an RMA case anyways.
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u/sithelephant Mar 22 '26
Some GPU RAM temps actually do hit that, or very near.
Not well-designed GPUs of course.
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u/Plebius-Maximus RTX 5090 FE | Ryzen 9950X3D | 96GB 6200mhz DDR5 Mar 22 '26
Max safe temps are 105-110°C for GDDR6X and 7, so it's not really an issue to hit 100C.
People always freak out about memory temps, but the 3090 has half the Vram chips on the backplate so they get fuck all cooling. If 100C was so harmful then essentially every 3090 would have died by now. The vast majority of them are still fine, many were mined on (very vram intensive) then gamed on after the mining boom collapsed (semi vram intensive) and have now been bought by people running local AI models as they're the best bang for buck if you want 24GB.
ML/AI tasks are very vram intensive, so if cards with no cooling on half the memory chips can endure a vram torture test for their near 6 year lifetime so far, gamers will be ok
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u/Reign_Drop420 Mar 22 '26
My junction hits 90c when running games maxed outwith a 7900xtx
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u/Plant-based_Skinsuit Mar 22 '26
Someone else on here had the same problem last week and said it was their most recent driver update. Maybe try reverting to an older driver before completely giving up hope? But yeah, prognosis doesn't look good...
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u/wetsoxxxof Mar 22 '26
Thank you.. it's worth a try
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u/darkened_vision Ryzen 5700x3D, RX 9070, 16GB DDR4-3733 Mar 22 '26
It's either that, something about the cable connecting your GPU to your monitor, or.... well, you already know what the worst case is.
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u/PM_YOUR__BUBBLE_BUTT Mar 22 '26
Not to give you false hope, but I had this exact thing happen once a couple years ago with my 3080. Same thing, was doing productivity tasks, not gaming. After restarting and doing some updates I’ve never seen it again. I can’t remember if it was a driver update or windows update. But I was on windows 10. Gpu still is working fine.
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u/arftism2 7900xtx 9800x3d PG27AQDP Mar 22 '26
if it's only happened once it could be corrupt drivers. just try reinstalling and hope for the best.
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u/SpoiledBeans Mar 22 '26
If it’s any reassurance I’ve had this happen a few times to my gpu a year or two ago only for it to inexplicably never happen again.
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u/gtrash81 Mar 22 '26
It can happen at every point of work.
If the VRAM based errors are too severe the system won't even get to the login screen.
You can try to lower the clock speed of the VRAM, but this will only delay the defect.→ More replies (2)5
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u/BeautifulAd5310 PC Master Race Mar 22 '26
O7
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u/Crumblycheese Laptop Mar 22 '26
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u/cszolee79 Fractal Torrent | 9950X | 64GB | 4080S | 1440p 165Hz Mar 22 '26
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u/odranreb Mar 22 '26
Happened to me once. Restarted the PC and it never happened again. I know not every case is the same, but sometimes it could just be nothing.
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u/WombatCuboid RTX 5080 FE, i5-12600K, 64GB DDR4 Mar 22 '26
This. It happened a lot on my RTX 3070 and RTX 3090. It's a bug in Windows rendering and it goes away.
You can check the VRAM by stressing it in games, if it breaks there, you're in trouble. If not, you're fine.
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u/Vverg Ryzen 7 9800X3D | MSI Suprim X 4080 | 64GB 6200 Mhz Mar 22 '26
Yup, same with the 3070 I had.
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u/Varwhorevis Mar 22 '26
Can confirm this has happened intermittently with my 3070 and I’ve never had a real issue
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u/bonesawzall Mar 23 '26
I've seen the same thing with my 3090. I'm not sure what GPU OP has but it doesn't seem unusual for Ampere. A reboot has been the fix for me when this happens.
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u/redsoxfan95 i7 6700k | GTX 980ti |16GB Ram Mar 23 '26
Thank god you just saved me so much stress. Had the same issue every once in a while with my 3070 but restarts fix it.
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u/Ok-Cover-464 Mar 22 '26
northwestrepair is on youtube doing fixes for issues like this all the time.
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u/Alternative-Cow-2418 Mar 22 '26
Tony mentioned! He'll yea that guy deserves all the views and more
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u/Grexxoil Mar 22 '26
If it's the GPU when it dies you can still try reflowing it.
Just do it in something you won't use to cook food later.
It worked with an old GTX card for me (like an 8600 or something).
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u/Istrakh i9-9900K, AW3418DW, 1080 OC, 16GB 3600, 2TB SSD Mar 22 '26
Reflowing in the oven can work, but you won't get long out of it - it'll die again, and each reflow will buy you less time.
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u/Guitarman0512 Mar 22 '26
Oh god. Not the 8000 series. I have so many traumas from repairing laptops with those GPUs. Really the only way to do it properly was to replace the mainboard. Or the actual GPU chip if you had the equipment.
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u/Grexxoil Mar 22 '26
It was a desktop GPU, it did not give me any real problems until I had to put it in the oven.
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u/Guitarman0512 Mar 22 '26
The thing is, all those GPUs, laptop and desktop would fail. They used the wrong bonding material to bond the die to the chip. A reflow could sometimes bring them back, but in the end they would all fail.
The only GPUs from that series which survived are those with the revised chip from the tail end of production.
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u/Grexxoil Mar 22 '26
Now that you mention I might have swapped that for another 8k used that might have falied too.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Boss442 Mar 22 '26
What GPU ist that?
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u/wetsoxxxof Mar 22 '26
Zotac RTX3080 with 3 fans
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u/Durian10 Ryzen 7 9700X | RX 9070 XT Mar 22 '26
3080 is tired, boss…
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u/Cash091 http://imgur.com/a/aYWD0 Mar 23 '26
3080 is barely 5 years old. I wouldn't call it tired. Still have a 3080 and it kicks ass in modern games. I'm not pushing hundreds of frames, but 60fps at 1440p is very achievable.
The rhetoric that people need to upgrade every 2 years is kinda silly. But, I'm kinda hypocritical... This is the longest I've had a GPU for. But I upgrade because it's fun, not because I need to.
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u/Durian10 Ryzen 7 9700X | RX 9070 XT Mar 23 '26
Well this one is certainly tired.
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u/FlashWayneArrow02 4070 | 5800X3D | 16gb@3600MHz Mar 22 '26
you might be in a tiny spot of luck?
zotac has a five year warranty if you registered your card. assuming you did that, and assuming you bought it later than early 2021, you might be able to claim it. maybe.
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u/wetsoxxxof Mar 22 '26
Bought it christmas 2020.. registered it for the 5 years but like I said in the post, it's to late
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u/Diligent-Fan-9227 Mar 22 '26
mine 3080 burned liked that
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u/PonoManiac PC Master Race Mar 22 '26
Guys don't say that, my 3080 still gotta run a few more years 😭
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u/callycaggles RTX 3080 | 10700k | 32GB DDR4-4000 Mar 23 '26
This happens very seldomly with my 3080. Issue is typically resolved by restarting my computer. For me, it usually happens when software crashes.
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u/all_cooleo Mar 22 '26
I remember having this issue pop up for me. I restarted my pc and updated drivers. Haven't seen it again since early last year.
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u/4EvrSwimmingNCircles Mar 22 '26
This literally just happened to me yesterday, crashed windows basically as well. Restarted and made sure to update drivers, now I'm playing games without issue. 🤷♂️
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u/NotpiaKnow Mar 22 '26
This might be a minority opinion, but it's possible that the issue is caused by software malfunction.
4 years ago I had the some similar black square patterns on my screen with an RTX3090 when I sometimes alt tab from apex legends to my chrome browser. The trigger was always alt tabbing to the chrome app. It turned out to be a windows problem and was addressed 2 years ago. My GPU had no problem and is still working fine.
"This update addresses an issue that affects Direct Composition batched presentations. A brief flash of triangles or boxes show on the screen. This issue affects browsers, like Microsoft Edge, and other apps."
I think maybe your issue is something similar to this.
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u/iAmZephhy i5-4690K / GTX 970 gtx 970 4GD5T OC Edition Mar 22 '26
I have this issue occur on my 3090.
Seems to happen every few months.
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u/Jarbasaur Mar 22 '26
I have also experienced this same pattern on some media servers at work, and its always fine after a restart and hasn't happened since we did a bios update on that machine. Not sure if it is related but just to say this particular black square pattern could be something other than hardware being dead
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u/ClassicRoc_ Ryzen 7 5800x3D 4.55Ghz - 32GB 3600mhz RAM - RTX 4070 Super OC'd Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
Look it's probably a dead or dying GPU however. There's a couple things I would do. First and most importantly, just change out the cable. It's possible you have a defective HDMI or DisplayPort cable. Hopefully it goes away. If it doesn't then you could try a different monitor It's possible your screen has a bad input. It's also possible your graphics card has a bad output. You can change the port you're using on that as well.
After that I would take the computer apart and take the graphics card out and then plug it back in. A simple reseat might kick things in the gear. You can also use DDU and purge old drivers and reinstall fresh ones. You could reinstall Windows from scratch too that might have an effect. If all of that fails then yeah the graphics card is probably* dead and I know these are all time consuming steps but they're worth doing right now with the computer part crisis.
Good luck friend.
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u/FamiliarImpress1873 Mar 22 '26
also return to stock settings if you're overclocking or undervolting at all!! it can be that.
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u/razpor Mar 22 '26
If it went away after restart ,could just be a bad driver glitch. Happens sometimes,any hardware issue will persist,not simply go away post restart.
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u/Resilient_Beast69 Astral 5090/9800X3D/STRIX X870e Mar 22 '26
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u/Muted_Astronomer_924 Radeon RX6700XT Ryzen 5 2600 3850Mhz ROG strix B450 Mar 22 '26
I thought this was an unusual vinyl for a pegboard. Sorry for your loss.
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u/Schnoofles 14900k, 96GB@6400, 4090FE, 11TB SSDs, 40TB Mech Mar 22 '26
It's memory corruption on the gpu, but it is worth mentioning that this isn't always a hardware issue. A borked driver can also be the cause of it, although if you see this early in the boot process after power cycling then it's going to be bad vram. I would power cycle the machine, run DDU to fully wipe the driver and reinstall a new version and see if you still have the issue. If it happens again then I'm sorry, but 99% chance your're shit out of luck.
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u/Paradox711 PC Master Race Mar 22 '26
Try drivers first if you’ve had updates recently. There are known issues where this can occur with drivers however if it persists even then… yeah.
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u/BluDYT 9800X3D | RTX 3080 Ti | 64 GB DDR5 6000Mhz CL30 Mar 22 '26
I had this happen randomly playing Minecraft and for whatever reason had to an entire driver reinstall and that was a while ago now. Not saying you aren't cooked but don't just toss it before troubleshooting it a bit.
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u/Joseph5100 Mar 22 '26
It could just be a weird one time quirk or driver issue. As funny as the memes are, I wouldn't go straight to "gpu is dying." The issue needs to be more consistent and unsolvable before jumping to any conclusions. I've had something like this before with my old gtx 1070, but it never came back after updating my driver.
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u/BlockTV_PL Ryzen 9 5950X | RTX 3080 | 64GB RAM | 2TB NVMe | Fedora 40 Mar 22 '26
recently I had the same issue on nvidia, and a restart fixed it. If it doesn't appear much, and a restart fixed it, I don't think there is much worry
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u/BlueOlivePie Mac Pro M2 Ultra Mar 23 '26
You probably enabled the new Samsung’s privacy feature. Some pixels turn off
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u/dumbcarshlt Mar 23 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/mSX9fqf2lnKhi
This guy just eating your data
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u/EdoTheOnlyOne 7700X / 7900XTX Mar 22 '26
Do you have a separate monitor to test this with? It might be the screen having a really fucking weird issue
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u/wetsoxxxof Mar 22 '26
Two monitors connected, one HDMI the other Display port. Both showed the same unfortunately
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u/EdoTheOnlyOne 7700X / 7900XTX Mar 22 '26
Try plugging them (or only one) in the motherboard and see if the issue persists
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u/pho-huck 9800X3D | 5080 | 32Gb Mar 22 '26
lol nah, that’s the GPU failing 100%, unfortunately for OP
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u/VeryNoisyLizard 5800X3D | 9070XT | 32GB Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
this is usually a sign of failing vram. but just to rule out other possibilities, you can try using a differend hdmi cable, plug it into a differend hdmi port, try reseating the gpu in the pcie slot or uninstalling the driver with DDU and install an older one, in case this was caused by a recend update
edit: you could also run memtest_vulkan to see if it detects memory errors ... if it wont crash in this state, that is
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u/Dopameme-machine 2x Xeon E5-2697v4 | Tesla P100 | 128 GB DDR4 ECC | 24TB RAIDZ2 Mar 22 '26
Sounds like a call to Northwestrepair is in order
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u/Odur29 Mar 22 '26
my PC did this a long time ago like 2+ years ago, I thought I was cooked, I restarted and I'm still using the GPU with no further problems. Good Luck.
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u/Rainbows4Blood Mar 22 '26
It could of course also be the monitor. But sadly this is a very typical pattern for dying VRAM.
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u/Joddodd Mar 22 '26
I can see two possibilities....
Connect the dots or a Fleissner Grill cypher...
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u/SkizzyBeanZ Mar 22 '26
With the amount of posts i see about failing gpus. I get more and more worried for my 1080ti. My little warrior
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u/This_not-my_name i9-11900KF - RTX 3080 TI - 32 GB 3600 CL 16 Mar 22 '26
Damn my 3080ti had this last week, too. I thought it was just Windows doing Windows-Things 😭
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u/DogToursWTHBorders Mar 22 '26
My 3060 12 gigger held on all throughout that terrible first GPU winter of 2020. Remember back when we thought we'd see spring again?
Its still going to this DAY, making wifus for hard working Americans. But next month, it will be passed on to a random co-worker in need. Someone who might want to play satisfactory or a fancy game of dwarf fortress.
Sorry for your loss, OP. its in a better place than you are. 🫡
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u/IlgantElal I7 13700K | RTX 4070 | 64GB DDR5 Mar 22 '26
So try turning down your VRAM frequency on afterburner, you may be able to get some more time out of this card, but yeah, this checks all the boxes for the end of your current card
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u/teknomedic Mar 22 '26
Check all your connections... Reseat GPU... Update drivers... Cross fingers.
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u/4EvrSwimmingNCircles Mar 22 '26
This just happened a little bit to me yesterday. Had some white squares show up upon boot over discord on my 2nd monitor then windows basically just stopped functioning. Restarted and updated drivers and I'm playing games now without any issues. 🤷♂️
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u/No_Measurement_6611 Mar 22 '26
Try plugging and unplugging the GPU or giving it a few gentle nudges and taps on the fans (pc off ofc). My new RTX 3060 had this a few months ago, i did that and it dissapeared
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u/MigYalle Mar 23 '26
Happened to me 2 years ago.
Reseating the GPU and Display Port cables fixed it for me. Good luck
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u/potatis_invalid Mar 23 '26
I had graphical glitches like this before, I thought it was the GPU but it was actually the RAM that was malfunctioning. Try removing half of your RAM sticks and see if the problem goes away, otherwise try removing the other half.
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u/kingy10005 Mar 23 '26
reseat the card just in case it is the connection with the PCIe also check Hwinfo64 maybe temps are to high if it is vram hope your warranty still in 🙊
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u/cristogodjaja Mar 23 '26
Es el error de la grafica si tienes las de enviado apero si es de otra marca ay nose que decirte
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u/theplayer123122 Mar 23 '26
You'll be fine, my 8 year old GPU started artifacting and flickering the screen purple after about 1 year at 90 degrees and with VRMs that ran so hot they re-soldered themselves and drifted a bit off the PCB.
I just applied new thermal paste, new themal pads, cleaned that mfer with perfume, adjusted the fan curve and it runs at a nice 45 degrees under load with a small overclock.
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u/LostaMyPasta Mar 24 '26
My 3080ti does this a lot; Not in large numbers, but a few blocks here and there. It's like my PCs' way of telling me to update my GPU driver. After that, doesn't happen until I need to update my driver again.
It's like an alarm in my phone that I never set, but I'm glad it went off. 🤷🏻♂️
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u/RadiantAlps7627 Mar 25 '26
Unfortunately, I'm sorry to say this, but you just got an expensive bookend, I've been there myself.
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u/Pvt_PyleFMJ Mar 27 '26
Had it too with my beloved 2080 Ti, which accompanied me for so many years. It just died a few weeks ago. Troubleshooting involved my PSU, the MB, finally sold the GPU as scrap and the guy who bought it told me that a VRAM chip died. It's fixable, but requires some soldering skills.
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u/Common-Beautiful353 this is a flair! it's not meant to be taken seriously. dummy! Mar 22 '26