I have been experiencing unexpected shutdowns on my machine after installing a Radeon R9 380X Gigabyte graphics card on my 970A-D3P Gigabyte motherboard. The machine is currently dual boot windows 10 and Ubuntu 14.04LTS

The problem occurs playing games in windows though I have had some shutdowns, even on old games like Open Arena, in Ubuntu. The fact it occurs on both OS makes me think it is a hardware issue- but im not totally sure.

There is no blue screen or memory dump (at least not reported in 'whocrashed' or reliability monitor in Windows.)

I have stresses the GPU using furmark in several different resolutions and have not been able to induce a crash.

I have also run memtest a few times and no issues were found as well as stressing HD and processor in Ubuntu using “stress”, none of which produced shutdowns or crashes.

I have reinstalled several operating systems (win 7, 8 and 10 with Ubuntu) several times and the problem persists. I have also installed the latest drivers each time and the games are up to date.

I have also installed both operating system in legacy BIOS mode and UEFI mode. This has not resolved the issue. It is currently in UEFI mode.

The BIOS version is the latest.

This may be relevant.

I had difficulty installing and using Ubuntu due to system crashes however I was able to fix some of the issues by following these instructions:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/76591...-ubuntu/765935

(enabling IOMMU, installing Ubuntu, and adding GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="iommu=soft to the grub file.)

Ubuntu seems to work ok provided I use the fglrx proprietary driver. The xserver-xorg-video-ati causes the system to become unstable. Also tried updating to the latest proprietary drivers but I couldn't resolve the package dependencies and ended up reinstalling Ubuntu.

Before changing the graphics card these issues did not occur.

GPU Temperatures idle in the low 50s and maybe get up to low 70s or at least high 60s after an hour or so playing (if I can manage play that long).

The PSU is rated 600 watts and the system pulls no more than 300 watts when the system is maxed out.

I have 32 GB of RAM onboard.


Any suggestions?

Cheers

Did you hook up the power cable? It is likely the motherboard cannot supply enough power thru PCI.

+1

Also note that the actual PSU may also not be able to produce enough juice if the card is a power hog.

Yes the power cable is connected to the gpu.

The PSU is a 600W Aerocool and the whole machine only pulls 320 watts maximum. I measured it with a watt meter. If there is a problem how would I tell beyond this?

Cheers.

Unlikely to be power related then.

Every power rail has its own wattage capability. One can overload a rail without exceeding the total wattage.

How would I check if that is the case?

Read the specs and do the math