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BFG 9800 GTX+ 512mb major problem

Bigmonty

Bigmonty

Bigmonty

Associate
Joined
6 Mar 2007
Posts
113
Hi

I have just purchased the graphics card in question in the title and am having the same problem on two serpate operating systems, both of which had been installed for a while and then I did fresh installs of both. The operating systems are Win 7 64bit and Vista 64bit - both on the same but on dual boots.

I turn on the PC, the operating systems boot fine but then when the desktop loads it either crashes straight away (in Win 7's case) or it will crash either straigh away or after 2-3 mins in Vista's case. The crash effect is that lots of horizontal, squiggly lines appear in various colours (mainly purple), it will sit like this for a while, then after a few mins the sctreen will go back and the monitor goes onto standby. I usually have to do a hard reboot at this point.

I have tried updating graphics drivers but to no avail and I really do not want to roll back drivers to an old version as the reason I bought this card was for CUDA support that my 8800 GTS 320mb did not have with Coreavc.

I doubt power is an issue as I have a 600w PSU that worked fine with the 8800. I also ran Nvidia system monitor utility that shows my CPU temp is 36c and my graphics temp is about 44c at the time of crash, so I also doubt this is the issue. My Asus bios is also up to date with at 1301.

Also my graphics card only 6 pin power connector when on various websites describing this card it says it should have two, could this be a problem?

I have read on other forums that there may be a problem with the bios on this graphics card but the people in the other forums generally encounter this problem only after playing games for a few hours where mine is on boot up.

Any help would be grealy appreciated.

My sys specs are as follows:

Graphics: BFG GF 9800GTX+ OC 512MB
PSU - OCZ GameXStream 600w Silent SLI Ready ATX2
Motherboard - Asus P5N-E SLi nForce 650 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2
RAM- 4GB
Processor - Intel Core 2 Duo E6300

Many thanks in advance.
B.
 
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Bigmonty said:
Hi

I have just purchased the graphics card in question in the title and am having the same problem on two serpate operating systems, both of which had been installed for a while and then I did fresh installs of both. The operating systems are Win 7 64bit and Vista 64bit - both on the same but on dual boots.

I turn on the PC, the operating systems boot fine but then when the desktop loads it either crashes straight away (in Win 7's case) or it will crash either straigh away or after 2-3 mins in Vista's case. The crash effect is that lots of horizontal, squiggly lines appear in various colours (mainly purple), it will sit like this for a while, then after a few mins the sctreen will go back and the monitor goes onto standby. I usually have to do a hard reboot at this point.
Click to expand...

I have had the exact same problem. It began crashing in games, and has recently started dying at startup & during playback of video media files. OcUK agreed to an RMA yesterday, so I'm sending my card back today. Frustratingly, the fault is intermittent, so if it doesn't happen when they test the card, I guess I'll be back to square one! :( I am hoping that it goes completely mental on them. :p

I have read on other forums (most notably the nVidia forums) that the issue occurs with other 9800GTX models, but particularly those made by BFG. My card has two 6 pin connectors and it still crashes, so I don't think this is related to the problem.

See below for an example of the fault (not my actual screen; this was taken from the nVidia forums).

1zdsobm.jpg
 
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Those pictures are virtually exactly the same thing that is happening to me. I bought mine from Amazon so think I'll request a refund and perhaps go for a GTX 260 instead.
 
Bigmonty said:
Those pictures are virtually exactly the same thing that is happening to me. I bought mine from Amazon so think I'll request a refund and perhaps go for a GTX 260 instead.
Click to expand...

This is what I'm trying to do. Fingers crossed!
 
Had an e-mail back from BFG after I queried the problem with them. They did not answer any part of my query they just sent me details to RMA it. Think I'll stick with sending it to Amazon.
 
i had a similar problem, but it was all coulored rectangles accross the screen. But i just reinstalled the driver (making double sure i was downloading the righ driver from nvidia's site) & it hasnt happend since
 
well i spoke too soon, happend twice again today.

EDIT

After further research, mine will only do it when switching between two display modes. So flicking between vista aero & vista standard themes (the split second black screen you get during the transition is exactly where it happens)

This is too common for it to be faulty cards, unless faulty batch? Perhaps ive got something set wrong in bios?
 
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sturmtruppe said:
well i spoke too soon, happend twice again today.

EDIT

After further research, mine will only do it when switching between two display modes. So flicking between vista aero & vista standard themes (the split second black screen you get during the transition is exactly where it happens)

This is too common for it to be faulty cards, unless faulty batch? Perhaps ive got something set wrong in bios?
Click to expand...

Flicking between display modes is definitely a trigger. I thought Aero might be to blame, so I disabled Aero - but it didn't help. When Alt-Tabbing between desktop and WoW (for example) the gfx card frequently dies. It can't seem to handle transitions between display modes.

I have tried doing the same thing with my old 2600XT Pro. The 2600 doesn't crash; it performs the transition perfectly well. But the 9800GTX+ freezes and crashes. Conclusion: it is not a software issue; it is a hardware issue, and the 9800 is to blame.

All my bios settings are perfectly fine, and I am willing to bet that yours are too. I reckon this is a faulty batch. If you visit the nVidia forums you will find a lot of people reporting it around the same time.
 
Very ver cautious about this, but ive set "assign irq to pci vga" to enabled in bios & it *seems* to have fixed the problem for me as i have ran multiple stress tests etc & it hasnt done it. whereas yesterday, it did it twice in a matter of 15 minutes.

I have sent an rma request just to be safe, but i hope i dont have to send it back. This is a pretty decent card.

btw, creepy that it suddenly starts going wrong around friday 13th isnt it?
 
my card did it again despite the tweaks i mentioned above. This happend while i was browsing ocuk. It always seems to happen on the desktop, never in games.

Just sent an rma so hopefully theyll send me a replacement. ill just have to bang my old card in there for now.

ps, these latest nvidia cards have a lot of reports of artifacting. wtf is going on with nvidia! reminds me of old geforce fx days!

EDIT

Someone mentioned turning off the pci express power management features in vista. ill give that a try for the rest of the weekend.
 
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turning off pci express power management seems to have fixed the problem. I contacted ocuk on friday about rma'ing the card, so im thinking of asking them to let me see if it happens again over the coming week. Would there be a problem with doing this? (ive had the card since 02/03/09 btw)
 
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