Part Riser card/cable causing system instability

[Midiamp]

There's a heated topic on discussion at Techpowerup forum on whether or not people will change their AMD Radeon to an Nvidia product because of drive issue. I'm one of the contributor that wanted to change my 5700XT to 2070 Super because recently I just migrate my system back to SFF and having MAJOR crashes with atikmdag.sys (obvious GPU driver crash), plenty of system thread exception not handled and system service exception BSODs. I did have some crashes on my ATX system, but the amount of crashes on my ITX system is worse.

At first I thought the components are overheating because the Sapphire Nitro+ 5700XT transverse/vertical heatsinks blows hot air inside the case, but I underclocked and undervolt to 1800 MHz and 950 MHz. Yet the crashes keeps coming at random times, I rolled back drivers after drivers but no luck.

Then I forgot something that is obviously a foreign component between the motherboard and the GPU on the ITX system, which is the riser card as I use Silverstone RVZ03. My assumption is that the riser card is a physical connection, so there should be no issue... However a friend of mine who bought Thermaltake P3 said that possibility of bad riser card/cable is very likely as he had to use Lian Li riser cable because the Thermaltake version is just bad that it doesn't even work with his 1080Ti back then.

So big question. Is riser card/cable really have big impact on GPU stability? And if it does how to test for PCIE connection ? I've tried burning my new system with 3Dmark timespy stress test, and furmark back to back, but never crash. The crash happens randomly, while resizing youtube window, sometimes after some sessions of World of Tanks (sometimes after 30 minutes, sometimes never crash).

I'm going to buy cooler master riser cable on Monday, but it's surprisingly expensive, I hope it addresses my issue.

 

[Necere]

I would build the system outside the case (or in a different case) without the riser to see if that's what's causing the instability before going out and buying a new one.

 

[Bubba]

In your motherboard bios, there might be a setting to force the pci-e bus to run at 1.0 or 2.0 speed.
It might improve stability.

 

[Midiamp]

I would build the system outside the case (or in a different case) without the riser to see if that's what's causing the instability before going out and buying a new one.

Thanks for the advice, given that I really like the RVZ03 slim vertical form factor, buying the riser cable seems to be worth the endeavor. Either way sticking with the case.

In your motherboard bios, there might be a setting to force the pci-e bus to run at 1.0 or 2.0 speed.
It might improve stability.

I haven't tried that, set it at 3.0 when setting the BIOS the first time.

 

[Necere]

I wasn't suggesting that you get rid of the case. I'm suggesting you test without the riser to see if that's actually what's causing the problem.

 

[Midiamp]

I wasn't suggesting that you get rid of the case. I'm suggesting you test without the riser to see if that's actually what's causing the problem.

I appreciate the suggestion, just so happened I'm pressed for time, so no luxury to test the system out of the case. Maybe next Sunday.

With that said, it seems that I have found some stability now. Changed the pcie connection to 2.0 on BIOS, switching to silent bios on the card, disabled high definition audio device that shared the display adapters PCI bus.

I think changing the pcie connection to 2.0 have the biggest impact so far.