No Idea what just happened...

Roark

Lord of Bacon
Messages
1,357
Location
North Carolina
A few days ago I found a process running I didn't recognize. Looked it up and apparently was some sort of bitcoin miner.

I ran my cleaning programs (MBAM, Spybot S&D, CCleaner), then did a full system scan with MSE, which is always running anyway.

Thought I was clean, thought I was safe.

Last night my computer shutdown randomly while I was playing Stellaris.
When I turned it back on ... pop - fizzle ... bricked GPU.

After roughly a year of running fine my R9 290 is toast.
I didn't think Stellaris was system intensive enough to brick a GPU, and I was confident my system was clean.

What is the most likely, game too intense or I missed a virus?
Don't want to spend money on a replacement just to have it happen again.
 
If there was a Bitcoin miner running on your system...those are very heavy on GPU's - and AMD GPU's were the choice for BTC mining.
 
Yeah, CCleaner is an excellent tool. By default, it won't screw much (if anything) up. You'd have to dig in the settings to really bork something.
 
Yeah, CCleaner is an excellent tool. By default, it won't screw much (if anything) up. You'd have to dig in the settings to really bork something.

It's really not hard for someone that's not in possession of common sense to fu** something up :p Even CCleaner.

That being said, I agree with Carnage, the GPU was likely bricked due to the BTC miner constantly maxing out the GPUs usage, resulting in 100% usage and a significant amount of heat being produced, for as long as the PC was operational. (Which for most gamers, can be hours at a time). Hence, bye bye GPU :(
 
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