Broken video card, or perhaps something else?

npour · 2019-03-24 15:02:07

Hello Arch Linux forums,

A few days ago I was playing a video game when suddenly my system froze, or at least, that which was shown on my screen, I tried all sorts of key combinations (CTRL + ALT + F2) but the system seemed to remain unresponsive. I tuned off my computer (by cutting the power) and tried to reboot. The booting process was properly shown on my screen, and grub properly loaded without issues after that I could see the systemd initialization screen, but after that my screen would be covered in artifacts and ultimately the display would freeze up. I figured the issue was probably a corrupt file, so I loaded up an Arch Linux live cd (which all perfectly worked) and redownloaded and reinstalled every native package via arch-chroot. I rebooted into my normal OS but the problem still persisted, so I figured it had to be either a driver problem (I use the proprietary NVIDIA driver) or faulty hardware. Firstly I tried to disable NVIDIAs proprietary drivers KMS features, by removing the modules from mkinitcpio and removing the kernel parameter, and indeed, because of this I could now get past the systemd initialization and login. But after starting xorg/i3 (with compton) everything crashed again) Then I tried to use nouveau instead of the proprietary drives, and yes, those drivers do work without artifacts and eventually freezing up and xorg (+comtpon) runs fine.

So my question is: Is my videocard busted, or could the problem lie somewhere else, since nouveau works fine?
I'd really prefer to use the proprietary drivers since the performance of nouveau isn't enough for what I use my computer for on a daily basis.

TLDR: After a crash nvidia proprietary drivers give artifacts and eventually freeze up, but nouveau works fine, how is this possible? And could this somehow be fixed or is the card busted?

Last edited by npour (2019-03-24 15:05:57)

Lone_Wolf · 2019-03-24 15:19:08

Next time something like this happens try switching numlock state . If that works kernel is still responding to input.
( enabling REISUB gives more options )

Try to find the journal from the crash (journalctl -b -some_number ) , it may have clues.
If you can't find that one , the journal of any boot with artifacts / freeze failed could have them.

Last edited by Lone_Wolf (2019-03-24 15:19:30)

Arch Linux

#1 2019-03-24 15:02:07

Broken video card, or perhaps something else?

#2 2019-03-24 15:19:08

Re: Broken video card, or perhaps something else?

Board footer