june gloom on 24/8/2011 at 10:18
Okay so. I was going to do this awesome thing where I made fun of everyone for not having an awesome computer like mine, but it's suddenly not so awesome.
First up: the specs.
Gigabyte Z68X-UD4-B3 motherboard
Intel Core i5 2300 @ 2800MHz
2 x 4096 DDR3-SDRAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti
SAMSUNG HD103SJ ATA Device
Monitor Type : Gateway LE500 - 14 inches
Windows 7 Home Premium Home Edition Media Center 6.01.7601 Service Pack 1 (64-bit)
The PSU is a Cooler Master 600w.
Here's the situation.
So I got the whole thing set up, spent a few hours moving files, et cetera. Decided to play my new game- Deus Ex HR of course.
Worked fine until the screen did a black flash, came back an instant later, and suddenly there was this weird banding for half an in along the top of the screen that seemed to have trouble syncing with the rest of the screen, and a strange black line across the middle of the screen but only if I look in a certain direction.
Checked the GPU temps with PC Wizard 2010, running at 34c- well within reason, really. This thing's supposed to crap out around 90 or so. It's running the latest driver- 280.26, a clean install.
Closed the game, talked to Renzatic over Steam for a bit. Then my screen went black for a few seconds, came back, and I saw a message saying the driver had crashed and recovered.
CPU cores were holding around 36c.
Screen went blooey again, got the same error message. Renz and I flopped around the internet looking for answers but nothing definitive.
At this point I started seeing weird fluctuations in the temperatures. The CPU went up to around 40 or so- idle- and have stayed there ever since. The graphics card, however, liked to jump around between 30 and going as high as 41 for a bit before coming back down- all while idle. Fan speed is around 30%.
It's not that hot in the room, and I have a big fan going really loud that I never turn off.
And, a good half hour after the 2nd blackout, it happened again- that was about 15 minutes ago. Temperature check: 32c. What?
A quick look at my temps using EVGA Precision says 37 as of this writing.
What the fuck is going on?
Ostriig on 24/8/2011 at 11:12
40°C is nothing of concern, I have the i7-2600K and a GTX570 and they idle at low-to-mid 40s on stock cooling. It's not a heating problem you're getting if that's what you're running at.
Try cleaning out the driver and installing an older one and give it a go. I'm guessing otherwise everything's wired properly, and you're feeding the card directly with the two 6pin lines from the PSU, not adapters off molex rails? I ran a 9800GT off a 2-molex-to-1-6pin adapter, but apparently it's not recommended. Nor do you have any overclocking features enabled, right?
Matthew on 24/8/2011 at 11:47
That sounds a little like what my computer was doing when I got a graphics card with faulty RAM (dunno about the temperatures though). If you have a second GPU lying around you might want to try switching them and seeing what happens, if only to eliminate it as a possibility.
SubJeff on 24/8/2011 at 11:52
3 things
1. Sure your gfx card is properly seated?
2. Potential gfx card mem error.
3. Potential RAM error.
I always have teething probs with new machines, some of them just go away by themselves.
Also 14 inch monitor? Ha ha ha ha
Muzman on 24/8/2011 at 20:56
Something similar happened to me for a long time with Red Faction Guerrilla. I put it down to my slightly old machine with really old drivers (which I kept because newer ones did weird things with Stalker and my old After Effects). It would crash all the time and badly, crashing the display driver like that. Nothing else ever did this. Temperature had nothing to do with it.
Then I got a new machine with up-to-date everything (virtually the same as yours actually) and it still happened.
In this case I got it to stop by gouging GFWL out of it with a rusty spoon and leaving its still beating heart on the floor (sometimes known as using xliveless).
Obviously that's not what's going on here, but it sounds exactly the same. No help at all, but that's damn weird.
Renzatic on 24/8/2011 at 21:18
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
3. Potential RAM error.
RAM errors are usually random in what they do. Like you could be listening to MP3s for 3 hours, and the computers screws up on you. Or you could be doing spreadsheets for 4 hours, and it screws up on you. Or playing a game for 6, and it screws up on you. This is too specific, as it's always his graphics card drivers that are flaking out on him.
I wouldn't dismiss it entirely. RAM problems are random enough that, on very rare occasions, it could cause one thing to screw up over and over again. But I'd put it at the bottom of the list and try everything else out first.
Now the graphics card ram being bad? Yeah, that's very much a possibility. Though I'd still leave that as the last thing I assume. Like I told Deth last night, nothing sucks more than assuming your hardware is bad right off the bat, spending the time to get an RMA on the parts, ship the old stuff out, wait for the new stuff to come in, pop it in, and figure out you've still got the exact same damn problem. All that effort and waiting ends up gaining you absolutely nothing. So it's best to work your way through the could-be's before you take that last, desperate step.
So like you said, I'd suggest reseating the graphics card, wiping your graphics drivers out entirely using Driver Sweeper, installing new drivers, and seeing what happens.
If that doesn't work, install your old graphics card and see how that goes.
If neither of those work, then you could safely say that it's not your graphics card at all. Maybe it's the PCI-E bus on the motherboard. Maybe it's your CPU. By this point, it's all about bashing your head against a wall, and trying out every little thing until you get it narrowed down to what it most likely is.
Also computers suck.
june gloom on 25/8/2011 at 11:29
I seem to have gotten this sorted- rolled back to Nvidia driver 275.33 and the problems went away. Some performance issues in DXHR (mostly on immediately loading a map) but I blame it being brand new/not quite optimized yet.
