{"id":14465,"date":"2026-07-22T01:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T05:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.both.org\/?p=14465"},"modified":"2026-07-19T07:15:47","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T11:15:47","slug":"when-my-gpu-crashed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/?p=14465","title":{"rendered":"When my GPU crashed"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\r\n \r\n <\/i>\r\n <\/a>\r\n <\/span>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n

My primary workstation has an ASUS TUF X299 MARK 2 Motherboard which is almost ten years old. This motherboard does not support a processor that has an on-board GPU. As a result, I’ve installed several GPUs over the years, changing or upgrading as I bought new displays that supported higher resolutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The GPU I’ve been using for the past several years is a Radeon Pro WX3100. First released in 2017, it’s been a powerful yet relatively inexpensive GPU, and has met all my needs for the last several years. However, my workstation runs 24×7, I usually run many applications on multiple desktops, including multiple virtual machines for experiments I use in my books and articles. So it gets a good workout. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The problem revealed itself quite dramatically when my screen went black when trying to wake up from sleep and, after a couple long minutes, reverted to 640×480 resolution, and only displayed a hugely magnified section of my desktop. The desktop was unusable as I couldn’t access any desktop tool to reboot or power off. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I tried Ctrl-Alt-F3 to go to another virtual console where I tried to change to the multiuser.target but that failed. A reboot worked — until the next time this failure occurred. At that point nothing worked, so I logged in from another host on my network and rebooted from there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After that, reboots never finished. I was left with a black screen, and I couldn’t login remotely because the network hadn’t yet started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The solution<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

At first I thought the display might be the problem, but it worked fine through the EUFI BIOS boot and the very early stages of Linux boot through GRUB and a bit of the kernel startup until it tried to reset the display to a higher resolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next obvious culprit was the GPU. Fortunately I keep a supply of spare parts, so I had another identical GPU in a drawer. After installing that everything works fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Summary<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

GPU problems of any kind are quite rare. This wasn’t the first time I’d had a GPU problem, but it’s been years since I have. It started and progressed through increasingly severe symptoms over a time span of a couple days, to the point where the system was unusable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fix was simple: replace the GPU. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My primary workstation has an ASUS TUF X299 MARK 2 Motherboard which is almost ten years old. This<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14467,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[984,84,5,83,89],"tags":[985,132,196],"class_list":["post-14465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gpu","category-hardware","category-linux","category-problem-solving","category-system-administration","tag-gpu","tag-hardware","tag-problem-solving"],"modified_by":"David Both","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14465"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14470,"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14465\/revisions\/14470"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}