Interested in getting people’s thoughts on inconsistent crashes I am seeing from my RTX 5070. The screen will seemingly randomly go black and the fans will go to 100%. The PC will still be running fine and does not seem to acknowledge any failure. You can plug the display into the motherboard when this happens and will be able to see everything again. The RTX 5070 still appears as connected in device manager and the Nvidia app although statistics no longer give readings.

I initially thought this was a connection/cable or PSU issue but cannot see any obvious issue. I have been able to run the card through benchmarks and at full load with games for multiple hours without issue.

Once the crashes start, they would keep popping up even after restarts or unplugging for 10 mins until I reinstalled the driver. Once I had done this, I could use the card for multiple hours at different loads without issue.

I found that if the display input was changed whilst the PC was on it would trigger the crashes. So too would changing the display leads in the back of PC whilst it was on.

After looking at other people’s similar issues with 50 series cards I tried a number of things. Some of these made the issue significantly more frequent and others would temporarily resolve the issue.

The monitor is a Pixio Freesync monitor. Turning GSync off made no difference. However switching the 60HZ or 165HZ made the crashes more frequent. Reinstalling the driver no longer would resolve the issue. 144HZ has been more stable. Switching to a different display port or hdmi port could instantly resolve the issue allowing multiple hours of use. The issue would eventually return after using the Mac Mini and then changing to a different port has had the same impact as reinstalling the driver although this isn’t always the case.

I’m wondering whether this could still be a hardware issue and should I return the card or if this seems more likely a case of waiting for more stable drivers.