RTX 3060 TI leads to unstable hardware behavior
RTX 3060 TI leads to unstable hardware behavior
I recently acquired a new MSI RTX 3060 TI. For several weeks everything ran smoothly until my system began crashing frequently while playing games and occasionally during normal browsing. The crashes often happen within minutes or hours after launching a game, sometimes lasting up to an hour or five minutes. They seem unpredictable. I've recently played Tetris Effect, Don't Starve Together, and AC: Origins, all of which have crashed under these conditions. The other two games aren’t particularly demanding. When the PC freezes, the last visible screen element stays until I power off it with the button. The speakers keep blaring throughout. For every third incident I need to reset the CMOS because the machine won’t boot. I’ve repeated this process about six times, trying various drivers and even performing a DDU on each change. A GPU stability program they provided didn’t trigger a crash during testing—90 minutes of use was fine. They recommend a BIOS or chipset update as a final option. What you’re experiencing could be hardware-related, though I’ve already checked for driver issues. I’m also considering an RMA. I’ve done everything I can. I’ll share a screenshot from my friend that showed the driver error message. It suggests a driver fault, but hardware failure remains a possibility.
Specs: Intel i5 7600K, MSI Ventus RTX 3060 Ti, Strix H270F, 750GB GDDR6, EVGA 16GB, Corsair Vengeance 8x2. BIOS version is unknown, last update was over five years ago. If needed, I can supply it.
Eventually they sent a return request for the card, and they exchanged it, but I’m still facing issues. I thought upgrading the DP cable might help because the old one seemed underpowered, but that didn’t work. I just updated the BIOS and am trying to figure out what else could be causing the problem since symptoms appeared after installing the new GPU. It’s possible other components aren’t coordinating properly.
Have you considered adjusting the GPU's voltage? I'm facing the same problem, and I found that lowering the voltage on the 30 series cards helped before. It improved temporarily, but now it's happening again and I'm unsure how to fix it.
I went through a lot more after that, so I upgraded to a Ryzen 5600x and also replaced the board. I left my PC for testing at a store for a week and they said there were no problems. Before that, I thought my old PSU was faulty and couldn’t handle the new GPU or had failed. But I still experienced crashes. Eventually, I stopped trying and just removed the CPU and motherboard. Now I haven’t had any issues since. Computers, man.