Is my GPU dying?

So yesterday was the final beta stress test for the upcoming Guild Wars 2. I just bought the game so I could join the beta event. All was fine until after around 15-20 minutes my screen froze with weird colors and went black after about a second. The music kept playing but nomatter what I did the screen stayed black.

Then I rebooted and started the game again and the same thing happened after about 15-20 minutes. After this I tried to play Skyrim for a while to see if it would happen here as well. But after about 30 minutes nothing happened so I started Guild Wars 2 again. And again after 15 minutes my screen froze and went black..

After this I reinstalled the latest drivers and somewhere in this proces my screen also went black for a extended period, but did turn back to normal with some alt-tabbing etc.

So my question is, is this my gpu (or something else in the m17x) or is there something wrong with the game? This seems to be a bit similar, but sofar it only happened in Guild Wars. I don't play games that often anymore and when I do not for an extended period.

What do you guys think/suggest?

 

if it's only happening with guild wars 2 i'm assuming issue is game related.. maybe compatibility issues with drivers.. it's still in beta after all

 

I really hope so.. I'm gonna check a few other games this weekend to see if it is just GW2. The main reason I'm afraid it's an hardware issue, is because of the long black screen when installing nvidia drivers. Could it be anything else then the gpu?

 

Are you OCing your card to play?

 

That is a beta problem, by the sounds of it. Memory leak I think. Happens sometimes to me in other games what you described. If it doesnt happen in other games, change game settings, turn off shadows, etc. But I think your card is fine

 

I really hope so The only thing I can do now is wait until the final release to find out.. And play some other games in the meanwhile

 

Why don't you check on the temps while you run it?
Does it happens on any other game?

 

Question about the temperature, whats the safe temperature zone of the Alienware M17X R4 7970M?

 

Anything below 90C is ok.

 

Thank you Luis

 

Np that's why we are here.

 

I ran a hwinfo64 log until it crashed. Everything looked completely normal.

 

What about the temps? What was the maximum temperature that you got?

 

I can say that the 'black screen' is probably not an indicator. I've been using Nvidia GPU's for some years and although it has got a lot better, I have seen this during driver installs. Only once on my R3, but it happens at the point during the driver install when it switches out the old driver. Sometimes you get a low resolution display for a while, and sometimes the display never comes back. You can see that it is doing something by the HD access. I have had to wait for it to stop and then reboot by tapping the power. All comes back just fine and dandy.

Let's see if you get it with any other games or it could just be some weirdness with this beta release?