My Gigabyte 3060 video card has failed
My Gigabyte 3060 video card has failed 18 months after installation and well within its warranty period. I'm wondering if anyone else has has problems with this card.
I was busy creating a scene in Studio when the screen went black, and the monitor told me 'no video input'. The machine was still going so I shut it down and started it up again, everything worked fine. The next day, yesterday, same scenario...busy in studio, black screen, no video input. This time things did not return to normal. It could have been either the power supply or the card so I tested both. It turned out to be the card. It's going back to PB Tech under warranty. I have always monitored its temp with Afterburner and it's run between 55 and 65C under load, depending on how big a scene it had. The scene I was working on was quite small, it fits onto the 1050 I have temporarily replaced the 3060 with.
Has this happened to anyone else?
Comments
do you have enough power supply for it?
my 2080Ti will blackscreen my computer if I don't underclock correction undervolt (is what I meant) it with MSI Afterburner
I edit the curve to level off at 200W
yes, my power supply is a 650w and the minimum recommended for a 3060 is a 550w.
mine 650W too, the card blackscreens it when it draws over 300W, I logged it on GPU-Z, the CPU and drives are also using power
Dying video cards caused by something that's not user error certainly isn't as common as it used to be but it does happen, but yours is still covered so you should be fine. I have an eVGA 3060, the fans when they spin up sound like a croaking frog but besides that it hasn't let me down.
eVGA isn't making video cards anymore thoughm so I hope this card will last me a few more years.
I just missed out on getting an eVGA when I was purchasing my 3060, sadly. That's why I have a Gigabyte.
Try stress testing with OCCT
https://www.ocbase.com/features
650W isn't much, you may be running out.
I tried it with a 700w and it still blackscreened. And would it take 18 months for that to show up?
Hmmm... could it be iron-poor 'lectrons? Perhaps a spoonfull of Geritol would help? (an ancient person's joke)
But seriously, I have two machines (an i5-8600, and an i5-11400) with an overclocked(OC) ASUS RTX-3060. Both have 650w power supplies. Neither have shown any hint of trouble. But still..., if your card still basically works, monitor it and your CPU thoroughly before sending for repair. if only to understand its behavior under stress. Think happy thoughts.
Are the 3060 fans working OK, and spinning up when they should? Is the cooling in the case itself working OK? Any change of environment recently?
Oops, nevermind. I finally reread your post and grasped that the card had completely failed on 2nd try. Bummer! But check your case cooling anyway.
I have a 650W PSU in my i5-13600 with RTX3060 & the place making the machine queried how big the PSU was, saying 550W was plenty.
I think you're right, the card's gorked.
Regards,
Richard
Just based on my past (10+years ago) experience as a PC hardware tech, the thing that could happen sometimes back then was that each "rail" of the PSU could only provide so much current, and over time if a component kept trying to draw more than whatever rail it was powered from, either the component or the PSU would be stressed and have a shorter service life. (I think this is why modern GPUs have an additional power plug connection.)
Remember that the MB, CPU, RAM, drives, etc. all consume power as well.
When building a PC I always leave excess capacity in the PSU for operational stability. It costs more money upfront, but I keep my PCs a LONG time and keep upgrading them rather than replace every few years. (For instance my rendering PC with a 3060 12GB has a 1000W PSU which even with 64GB of RAM and a mechanical storage HDD on top of the OS SSD is clearly overkill, but if finances ever allow something like a 4070 TI Super or maybe even a pair of them would be nice if ever got serious about trying to make a bit from rendering by doing commssions or a Patreon or something.)
They sell replacement fans.
That is funny LOL. I tend to watch temps on my cards when rendering and run fans on a agressive curve. I do not think anything stresses a gpu like rendering iray. It is nice to render with fliament and then have some free ai fill in the colors and shading. Seems like the future of rendering still and animation is letting the free ai do the coloring. I dont like any ai choosing the subject matter because it does a horrible job, and I want to do that myself.
I used to get this "black screen" issue with my RTX 2060, when I had first purchased it along with a 600W PSU. I upgraded to an 850W PSU about 6 months after that, in anticipation of getting a better GPU (at the time I didn't think the PSU was the problem). Well, I'm still running the RTX 2060 for a couple years now with the EVGA 850W PSU, and the black screen problem never happened again since. It used to happen every couple days at least with the 600W PSU. So these cards definitely need a lot more power than advertised.
Thank you everyone for your comments. I shall let you know what the shop tells me regarding the card. I am leaning toward getting a bigger power supply considering an 850w Corsair Gold is only $235NZ.