How to repair your graphics cards

WE’VE ALL BEEN THERE. Just picture it for a moment: you’re rampaging through your favorite game, decimating monsters left right and center, silver sword drawn, coated in oil, and then suddenly, pop! System crash. What the heck?! The PC reboots, you get back in-game, then five minutes later, the same again. Try one more time. Three minutes later, wham! The game closes to desktop. Frustrated, annoyed, and disgruntled, you shut the machine down. Time to sit down and actually do some work.

- ZAK STOREY

YOU'LL NEED

THIS HWMONITOR www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

3D MARK https://store.steampowered.com/app/223850/3DMark

We’re, of course, talking about the pitfalls and pain of graphics card failure. It’s one of the few components that can tell you it’s hurting before it keels, and we’ve become experts at repairing our trusty graphical boats. In this tutorial, we’re going to run you through our top tips, covering everything from GPU diagnostics to physical repair work, and software side tweaks that should help alleviate some—if not all—of your Nvidia, AMD, and Intel problems.

1 DIAGNOSIS PROGRAMS

First and foremost, we need to identify what is causing the issue. If you’ve got a relatively new graphics card, it’s unlikely to be a physical problem (although it is possible). The first thing we’re going to do is look at exactly what’s causing the error. Now, you can’t typically find these in Window’s Event Viewer—it may tell you if a program crashes, but it won’t tell you why. Some games do come with error codes on failure, which can be a massive help in diagnosing an issue like this, but that’s not a guarantee either.

» So, the first thing we want to do is stress test the graphics card. To do that, we’re going to need two programs. First, some form of monitoring software, so ideally you want something like HWMonitor or HWInfo. Secondly, you’ll want a benchmark that predominantly stresses the GPU, above all else. FurMark is a great pick for this—however, some errors do only occur with CPU interaction, and as such, we prefer 3D Mark. It’s got a number of benchmarks that stress different elements of your GPU so you can identify exactly what’s causing the issue.

2 LOOPED TESTS