Is my friends RTX 3060TI failing?
I have helped my friend build his PC 10 months ago and now he is having issues with it.
Specs are as followed:
GPU: RTX 3060TI (second hand approximately 4 years old.)
Motherboard: Gigabyte B550M DS3H
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
Ram: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB
Ssd: Crucial P3 Plus 500GB M.2
PSU: CX550 ATX 650W Power Supply
Problem:
When he starts playing any heavy games after about 10-20 mins the screen goes black but you can still hear the game in the background. After a minute the PC restarts on its own. With less heavy games this is not happening or rarely happens. This started happening when he moved from his old place to a new one. When we were building the pc we very carefully opened up the GPU and changed the thermal paste. I did notice a folded thermal pad so I unfolded it and placed it back in place. If this would cause an issue I suppose it wouldnt appear 10 months later.
What we already tried.
Checked temperatures for both CPU and GPU and they are pretty normal right before black screen happens. CPU runs a bit warm but could this cause this issue?
Installed all updates found in gigabyte center for the motherboard.
Installed the latest drivers for NVidea.
Installed the latest bios for the motherboard.
I told my friend to unplug all cables going to and from the GPU and plug them back in.
Run stress tests for CPU, GPU, Vram, Ram, and PSU but nothing failed.
Few things I would like to try when I get the chance to be there physically:
Change the GPUs power cable.
If possible switch the GPU and launch games that cause the issue.
Change the CPU cooler to a better one that is lying around.
I am considering going back to old Nvidea drivers since I read from other people new updates can cause this.
Considered buying some new thermal pads to replace the old ones.
Do you have any other suggestions? At this point I am thinking that it is a faulty GPU but before buying a new one I would like to rule out all possibilities.