PC freezes with red dots/artifacts on screen followed by GPU driver reset

[Aditya781]

I bought a used XFX RX 560D dual fan from china more than a month ago (no possiblity of return/refund), and things haven't been great since. At first I was having similar crashes (as given in title) but with blue dots within few minutes of launching a game, that turned out to be a driver issue, reinstalling the drivers (using DDU first) fixed that issue. But now the crash happens with red dots after 30 minutes to a few hours of gameplay. It happens when I play Ark Survival Evolved only (or maybe because I mostly play that game) and 2 other times it happened on low load ( one time while watching a video, and another time while quitting BF4). I have run OCCT GPU stress test for 1 hour without any errors, 2 instances of MSI Kombustor memory burner 2Gb (to get a total vram usage of 3.6Gb) for 1 hour, ran Unigen Superposition benchmark at 8K low (to utilize as much vram under 4Gb, the average fps was 4 though) without any issues. I have read that artifacts mean defective vram, and only Ark uses more than 3 Gb vram (i.e. 3.6Gb, its strange that I can't get to 4Gb usage in anything), so I decreased the settings to use only 2 Gb vram, but the crash still happens. Shortly after getting the card, I played and completed FarCry 5 without any issues (except the blue dots crash because the drivers weren't installed properly, had no crashes after that was fixed).
Also, how much power is this card supposed to utilize under load? It uses 30-40 watts, is that what's wrong? I have tried increasing the power limit slider to max but it still doesn't use more power.
I don't know if this is relevant, but when I received the card, the first thing I wanted to do was to unlock all the shaders so I flashed it with a modded bios I found on TechPoweredUp database, the model number and everything checked out but still after flashing the card got bricked, I managed to reflash the backed up bios and never messed with that again.
I am not looking for a confirmation that the card is defective (if it is), I just want to stop the crashes, I am ready to compromise performance if I have to. Thanks for reading all this.
Edit: Couple days ago I reinstalled windows, played BF4 today with stock wattman settings, it crashed after a few minutes into the match, the game froze for a few seconds (no artifacts) then crashed to desktop with DirectX error "d3d device hung". "d3d device hung" is the same Unreal Engine error I get when Ark crashes. I loaded my wattman settings (aggressive fan curve and max power limit) then played BF4 for 2 hours without any crash. So the wattman settings are doing something right, its just not enough for Ark.

 

[Shmee]

Sounds like a bad card. What are the rest of your system specs though? If possible, I would go with a decent RX 570 or RX 580, they would be much faster. Make sure to get from a decent brand and seller.

 

[Aditya781]

Sounds like a bad card. What are the rest of your system specs though? If possible, I would go with a decent RX 570 or RX 580, they would be much faster. Make sure to get from a decent brand and seller.

Its an old pc and I just want to get by these few months before I go away for college and buy a gaming laptop.
Specs are:
Athlon X4 740 cpu
Gigabyte GA-F2A55M-DS2 rev 3.0 motherboard
Corsair VS450 psu
8 Gb DDR3 ram

The cpu doesn't even support pcie gen3 so there's no point in getting a better gpu.

 

[Guru]

Either your GPU or PSU, my bet is on your old PSU. The fact that its also using only 40W suggests to me that the card is not fed properly with wattage. I mean. If your psu is from when you bought your PC, that would put it at 10 years old or so. Capacitors and components degrade and just the specs back then were different, so might not be able to sustain high bursts of energy, etc...

So yeah. Try underclocking the card and see if that helps.

 

[Aditya781]

Either your GPU or PSU, my bet is on your old PSU. The fact that its also using only 40W suggests to me that the card is not fed properly with wattage. I mean. If your psu is from when you bought your PC, that would put it at 10 years old or so. Capacitors and components degrade and just the specs back then were different, so might not be able to sustain high bursts of energy, etc...

So yeah. Try underclocking the card and see if that helps.

The PC is 5 years old ( the cpu came out in 2013 I guess) and the PSU is from 2016 (not the older split rail one). I tried your advice and underclocked it as much as I could i.e. 700ish MHz core clock and 1000 MHz memory clock, the power consumption on full load dropped to 25 watts, I thought that would do it because I noticed that when the crash happens, the power drops to below 30 watts ( according to AMD's performance monitoring overlay). But sadly it was the opposite, the game crashed within minutes multiple times. So far the most stable wattman settings are: stock core clocks, memory clock to 1400 MHz (-100 MHz), max power limit and memory voltage to 880 mV (+30 mV). I can play for 1-2 hours before crashing. So I guess I'll just try overvolting untill I get 60 - 65 watts on full load (that's the normal amount, right?). Should I use MSI Afterburner or AMD wattman? Afterburner only has one slider for voltage, but wattman has two separate voltages for core and memory with multiple states, kinda confusing.