Renzatic on 14/5/2008 at 17:42

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I thought last week was the greatest day of the geeky side of my life. Like all good stories, it had a tragic beginning, fraught with peril and potential for violence. It began when my old 7900GT decided to crap out on me. So I call up Asus, get a fancy RMA number, and send it happily to the shop to get repaired.

A week passes. A week where I'm running on some janky old Geforce FX I picked up for $15 so I could check my email while my other card is getting new bionic arms. Good thing I was able to check that email, because Asus sends me a nice letter stating that my card is beyond repair, and to compensate, they'll offer me two alternatives. The first being that, because the 7900GT is no longer in production and is hard to come by, they'll put my trouble call on hold til they happen across another. And if for some reason that doesn't tickle my fancy, I can go ahead and accept an offer to upgrade to an 8800GTS 512 free of charge.

I giggled a little bit. Sighed. Bit my lower lip. Rolled my eyes coyly. I accepted the upgrade offer. Life was good.

But alas, it turned out to be not all that good after all. OH HELL NO.

I'll summarize my system right fast. I'm running:

Athlon FX60 (really an Opteron 185, which, for all intents and purposes, is exactly the same thing)

2 gigs (1024x2) of G-Skill DDR400 dual channel ram,

500 gig Seagate SATA2 drive

Asrock 939Dual SATA2 mobo (a potential problem, but my experiences have found it to be a sturdy and well performing board. On par with the equivalent Nforce boards)

Basic onboard sound

Antec Truepower 500w power suppily.

It's not top of the line anymore, but the thing still has teeth. Yet despite this, my new 8800GTS 512 performs almost exactly the same as the 7900GT. Every benchmark I've ran, every game I've played, shows no signs that it's benefiting much from the upgrade. I might've gained an extra 3-4 FPS here and there, but that's nowhere near what I was expecting.

I've checked the link width of the PCI-E slot through CPU-Z. It's at 16x as expected. I've screwed with the bios. I've checked the card's clock speeds. Everything is as it should be.

The Witcher, a game I decided to shelf until I had the hardware to play it properly, runs at almost the exact same framerate on the FX60/8800GTS combo as it did on my old 64 3200+/7900GT. Something is obviously very not right here.

Throwing out guesses here. Could it be the CPU bottlenecking the card? I doubt it, since the 8800 line came out around the same time as the Core2s. I doubt Nvidia would offer up a card that offered no performance gains to the vast majority of people using the current CPU tech.

Also, the motherboard could be an issue. It's a nice board. Like I said, it performs on par against the best boards that were out at the time. But it's still the Cheap Alternative, and might be causing me problems.

The power supply? This is my weak spot when it comes to computer hardware. It stems from my never having experienced any power related problems in the past. You can ask me all you want about rail voltage and whatnot, and I'll reply "I dunno. It's 500 watts and it makes the computer turn on". Antec is a well respected brand, and I haven't heard many complaints about their main PSU line, but it could still be the source of all my woes since it might have rails that pump Juice A instead of Juice B (I need to look into this).

Could it be a bad card? I've had a couple of DOAs before, but never had one that, for lack of a better phrase, more or less kindasorta worked. I have had a couple of stranges issues, like blue screens when I set "max prerendered frames" to zero in the Nvidia control panel. Or the odd sluggishness Windows experienced after installing the card for the first time (which went away after reformatting and reinstalling). But nothing that really stands out and screams "this card is totally fucked send it back" to me.

This is a strange issue. I've tried covering all my bases, but I'm still faced with the same problem. I'm hoping there's some small but vital issue I'm missing here, hence why I'm posting this (overly long) message. Any ideas?

Renzatic on 15/5/2008 at 23:19

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Thanks, but I've already passed those milestones. Basic stuff for a semi retired computer geek like me.

Since no one knows any answers, I'll just use this thread as a sort of journal. It might help someone out if they run across the same problems I'm experiencing.

I called Asus. Guy sounded a little stumped, but said that, after conversing with the other techs, the most likely issue is probably my power supply. I might've finally run across the dreaded rails bullshit that plagues most people wanting to upgrade to newer, spiffier graphics cards.

Anyway, they gave me another RMA number, and said to send it to them once I've exhausted all my options and they'll either repair it or send me yet another one. I've still got one option left to me though. A friend of mine, a dude guy more tech savvy than even I am, has a quad core extreme duo sloppy blowjob exhaust pipe edition C2D with a 950w PSU and a couple of RAIDed Raptors in tow (I dunno where he gets money for this crap. I think he sells uncut coke to school kids). He's gonna let me slap my card in his machine. If it runs well, I know I have some severe bottleneck in my comp, and isn't the cards fault. If it's flaky, I've got my new RMA right here.

Renzatic on 16/5/2008 at 15:14

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Everything looks fine there. My timings are nice and tight at 2.5-3-3-6, and read/write speeds are about standard for oldschool DDR400.

The more and more I look into it, the more it seems my PSU is the culprit. I don't have much in this computer. Beyond the motherboard, it's just got the single harddrive, the optical drive, the fans, and the card hooked up inside it. Disregarding the card, I wouldn't think the bare bones of the machine would be sucking up that much. But after reading that a single 8800GTS 512 can suck upwards to 300w of power on full load, well over half of my advertised max output. I have to assume I don't have as much room for play as I need.

The only thing keeping me from declaring it's that is the fact that my machine is running nice and stable. I've heard power supply issues can make even the best machine flake out completely, and I have yet to experience anything out of the ordinary. With that, plus the fact I can make the computer blue screen just by changing a few standard settings in the Nvidia control panel and firing up any D3D game, things are still vague and mysterious enough to keep me from truly knowing here.

Hell, it might end up being something simple. Like my whirlydurgger isn't getting enough megahertz. Whatever it is, it's making a PS3 look better and better each and every day I deal with it.

Renzatic on 17/5/2008 at 01:14

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I have 2 +12V lines, labeled +12V1 & +12V2. One is 17A, the other 19A. The two values are confusing me a bit, but it looks like I'm not supplying enough power to the card after all. Right?

Also, it's an Antec Smartpower, not Truepower.

Renzatic on 17/5/2008 at 01:37

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Awww, damn...for a second, I thought I had the answer to all my problems. Oh well, Thanks for the info anyway. It helped. :)

I guess now the only culprit is the card itself, or some random motherboard setting completely screwing me over. I'll find out tomorrow when I slap the thing in my friend's comp.