So, some of you may know I’ve been slowly chipping my way through Rise of the Tomb Raider during my work hours, I’m lucky enough to have a job that affords some time to do that.
Well this week that all changed. It started with an increase in AMD Display Driver dumps & recoveries, but each time the game would become unresponsive, to be honest this may just be due to me trying to run it on sub par hardware. But it would generally sort itself out & I’d get an hour or two of play time in.
Yesterday I played for about 10minutes before I encountered a huge GPU hit - the grey screen & stuck audio that we all dread.
I had to restart the PC, boots into Win7 fine, but any type of load on the GPU - game, benchmark or Kombustor caused the Grey screen of death. I cleaned out the drivers & reinstalled the latest in the tiniest hope of saving it. Also gave the PC a good de-dust & checked all the connections etc.
It was all for nothing, I started to notice artifacting on the POST & the Windows splash screens, the PC could boot into Safe mode but not into standard mode at all - flashing black screen & no response from anything.
My mobo has no onboard video, so I’ve had to install an old EVGA GTX460 to even prove that my PC is fine, but only on a single screen.
So the Boss gives me a $NZD500 budget to purchase immediately to get my PC back up & running…
So my choices(due to local stock) were:
GTX950’s @ $250 - 300
GTX960’s @ $360-380
R9 380’s @ $300
R9 380X’s @ $330
RX 480’s @ $500.
Can you guess what I got?
If your boss gives you a budget, always hit that amount, because if you constantly come in under budget, when you finally need it he’ll short change you.
The PC was built by a local PC shop & they put the effort in. Probably the main issue is the change in GPU’s means that the routing position of PCI power cables needs to change.