"est max" in Inspector greyed out all of a sudden

was playing witcher 3 it crashed and now this...tried reinstalling drivers

well idk what the deal is but now i can't even play anything it just seems to be stuck in P1 mode and i can tell just from looking at Inspector that something isn't right....same vbios same drivers ive been using for months

 

ill be damned...switching power adapters to the bigger one fixed the problem i think

edit: did it again after 2 hours of witcher...anyone else having to clock their gpu core down on a 980m otherwise witcher crashes to black screen?

edit2: it kind of feels like the problem is some kind of intermittent hardware failure considering ive been using the same hardware/software for a long time

 

still having this issue occasionally a game will crash from overheating and upon restart the "est. max" will be greyed out and the card won't run at max clocks

 

still having this issue, so far fallout4 and witcher3 i think are the biggest culprits...i have no idea what the problem is...i was playing arma3 for weeks and never once had the issue but at the same clocks these games will freeze but even worse after restart the clocks do not set correctly even with repeated restarts

 

ARMA 3 is cpu bound. Witcher 3 is very demanding game, GPU usage was probably constant 100% and the card crashed from too high overclock. What's weird here?

 

please don't generalize, my arma3 runs at 100% gpu almost all the time on Tanoa and in weeks hasn't crashed at the same exact gpu clock

i already lowered the clocks by 100 for these specific games and it still didn't take care of the problem

i am right now at ~10 consecutive restarts and it's still greyed out and i have no idea why, this is after letting computer sit off for 2+ hours

 

There is a good chance some component on the card is failing, because of overheating over time.
You can try and repaste and reseat the card to make sure it makes proper contact with the heat sink. If that also doesn't help, RMA.

 

im going to just get another card most likely, the thing that bothers me is that arma3 can lock up the computer 10x and the same problem doesn't occur

im interested in understanding what exactly is happening when it's pulling that "est. max" value, is it reading the vbios and if its greyed out does that mean the VBIOS chip is unresponsive?

 

Did you try a custom BIOS or re flash the BIOS once?

 

yea i tried different VBIOS it didn't seem to change anything

 

Then im afraid its probably a hardware issue.
The black screens are a good pointer that something is heating up. If those aren't taken care of in time, the component ends up failing. In most cases its the VRM's ( or sometimes MOSFETs).

 

ARMA 3 engine is total crap. It is heavily CPU bound and it's not using even 70% of CPU power so don't make judgement using data from it. Try other very demanding game like GTA V on 4K

 

like i said, i have OSD stats on screen the whole time in in a game so i know other games consistently run 100% gpu and do not suffer from the same issue, i also have tried newer drivers than 353.xx and all of them seem to result in the same greyed out problem upon startup (353.xx only does this after certain crashes) which leads me to believe the issue is more complex than just a failing card

do other people run 980m ~@1150 core without issues?

 

just as a follow-up i haven't had the issue since reverting back to stock VBIOS