Help! Kraken GPU issue.

[AlienALX]

Originally Posted by Jolly Waffles

If it was over tightened on the core, would it still be rendering stuff and just crashing? I guess I had assumed my install was okay because it was doing that.

A GPU is soldered on using little balls of solder. The GPU core is placed perfectly over these balls then heat is applied and they turn to liquid metal before cooling down and connecting the two together (the board and GPU core). If you over tighten a block or what not onto this you can crack the solder connections under the core which will lead to odd behaviour like this.

Usually it's the issues you describe. Artefacts, crashing, odd GPU spikes ETC. When an old one fails these are all of the tell-tale signs you have a BGA failure (ball grid array like I explained). Eventually you end up with a card that will crash and freeze just when the actual drivers are loaded, so you can only use them in safe mode with no drivers because once the card starts to try and act as usual it will flop.

Over tightening is the bane of cooling TBH. People think they have to tighten things until they stop ETC ETC and it's quite the art form learned over years.

Whatever is wrong with it (it may be the memory controller but IIRC they are on the die itself now) you are going to have to send it back. I would imagine it wasn't cheap....

[S_I_N]

Sounds to me more like something wasn't being cooled enough and it borked it. Put it back fully stock and test again. This will or should show if it's a cooling issue on some small part. But by now it may be totally borked. I put an artic cool accelero on my gigabyte 1080ti it would load into windows then immediately black screen. Upon removing the accelero I then noted no core contact at all lol took off the shims on the gpu die side reinstalled and gtg. But with it needing to have those to protect the pcb I returned it to amazon. This model 1080ti was a freakin heater but still worked fine so I sold it and got an Evga 1080 ftw2, which is great just waiting on funds for a water block. The gigabyte was a model em had no plans to make a block for.

[Jolly Waffles]

Update 3: Okay, so here is a twist, I took it back to stock, put it back in to test it, and Heavens Benchmark ran perfectly (3783 score.)

So, do I need to return the card, or was my install just ed somehow? If the latter, was it likely the vram heating issues?

[S_I_N]

Run it a few days and see if it fails again. It's not the first time I've heard of a aio not working on some cards. But if it stays stable then you know it's not dead. You can try seeing what you can do to cool what you suspect is the culprit.

[Jolly Waffles]

Thanks to everyone who gave some advice! I've never tried to add anything like this before, so it was quite the endeavor with lots of mini panic attacks. I'll see how it goes over the next few days and report back

[Excalabur50]

Good luck with it hopefully the card is ok