Hi. So about 2 days ago my EVGA GTX 980ti SC completely died on me while playing Skyrim.
Windows kept giving me these weird graphics card error something along the lines of "your GPU just recovered from a serious error blah blah blah". While Playing Skyrim the screen would go black and grey and it would "soft crash" but it would recover in like 8 seconds and the game would work again. I kept on using it and then all of a sudden the PC shut off completely and it wouldn't turn on at all. At first I thought "maybe the PSU is failing and it's not supplying enough power to it?" so I plugged in a fully working PSU to test my PSU and nope the PC didn't turn on even with the other PSU. No fans would spin no nothing. Just completely dead.
I then removed the graphics card and just plugged in the power cable to the PC (without a graphics card) and sure enough the PC fired right up. So it wasn't my PSU nor the mobo. I'm now currently using my old GTX 670 and the PC is working perfectly aside from the downgraded performance of course.
If I plug in my GTX 980ti the PC wont start at all.
Now onto my question. About a year ago or so I made a topic asking about some weird oily stuff "melted" onto my asus maximus vii hero motherboard that was coming from the area around the CPU. When I asked if this was bad most people here told me that it happens something to some boards and that it's nothing to be afraid of cuz that oily stuff is non conductive. However as I was inspecting my 980ti I noticed that the back plate had a big oil stain and it's that exact same oily stuff from the motherboard. Basically some of that oily stuff from the motherboard landed on the back plate of my 980ti and made it's way inside the 980ti's pcb.
Could this have been the cause of it's failure? Is this the reason why my 980ti wont work anymore?
It's weird that the gpu just died like that. I even ran Valley (benchmark stress tool) and it never went above 74c. That's perfectly normal especially in a hot room like mine. The gpu is still in perfect condition with only a tiny amount of dust and everything is in perfect shape. Weird that it would start failing like that then just die for good.