176
people found this helpful, as of 2023
ranked #196,264 most helpful
out of 571,544,897 reviews
★★★★☆
Change the card's default settings.
I've been using Geforce for a while, my last card was a GTX 750. But lately their software has been irritating me, causing issues and whatnot especially when it comes to recording games. I did hear that Radeon has caught up with their graphics cards these days so I decided to try out one of their decent cards.
I kinda wished I knew this ahead of time so I could easily find out what was wrong, but chances are YOU WILL HAVE ISSUES when it comes to the card itself. This is the only reason I'm not giving this 5 stars, as this was infuriating to figure out, as answers were all over the place. The default settings for the card itself can cause various problems, so you'll have to change them via AMD's Wattman or whatever software you want to use.
In my case, everything installed fine, and from what I could tell at first, the card was running okay. But then I launched Monster Hunter World, set all the settings to max and started up my save file. Everything was perfectly smooth, everything looked awesome. But then I started walking around the main area, Astera, and a few seconds later my PC randomly shut down and restarted. No errors, no blue screen, nothing. This would constantly happen with this game (I didn't bother trying with other games, lol), and I spent the entire day looking for answers. A lot of people would jump to conclusions that the PSU is too weak or faulty. I never had any issues with my PSU, and even though it's weak it's still the min requirements for this card. (450w)
So, after all of that, it's these "Power States". Maybe it won't affect all PSUs, but when the card constantly switch between these during gaming, it would drive my PSU/PC crazy and force it to shut down/restart. I'm so glad I finally figured that out, I was ready to give up and return the card for a full refund. I fixed this by clicking Power State 1 and "set at maximum", then switching to "Dynamic" for frequency, put in a number you want to have. This solved it for me, I just want to point this out since a lot of answers out there would jump to conclusions about the PSU itself.
So, after all that was finally fixed, the card was fine, my game looks perfect and run pretty okay. I'm still toying with the graphic settings to get things running 100% smooth. So this is still an awesome card, just be sure to check the card's settings if you're having issues with power.
June 2019 · Electronics · verified purchase