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GTX 970 4K Gaming Edition Hell!

Magoo

Magoo

Magoo

Associate
Joined
15 Aug 2003
Posts
305
Location
Christchurch.
Debate plus advice on new GPU please.

I cannot believe how painful this has been. I've never know a card out of the box to be so badly supported. I have tried numerous drivers. Kernel mode driver error keeps coming up. Also getting a lot of red snow now on boot? Have checked the connections to the board and swapped the memory to the other slots.

Worked beautifully for 3 days. The next 3 days i've spent mainly in safe mode, if indeed it booted at all, without freezing in minutes.

I've read that the nvidia drivers at present are awful especially with Windows 8.1.

I thought I'll give nvidia shot, definitely the wrong time time to move. Also there seems to be a lot controversy around the 970 at the mo with reported performance drops / vram.

So hopefully OC will change the card.

As i have an asus board was looking:

Asus Radeon R9 290X DirectCU II OC 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics (or)

Asus Radeon R9 290X ROG Matrix Platinum 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (MATRIX-R9290X-P-4GD5)

Are these both safe?!

Can anyone explain the difference between these 2 cards (ROG matrix?)

Many thanks Magoo
 
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I haven't heard of any notable issues with nvidia drivers on 8.1, I haven't had any driver issues with 970 sli or my 980 sli now (that's not to say others haven't but not heard of any widespread problems)

Also did you need a second thread for the same topic?
 
Yep! there is no reason why the drivers wouldn't work with 8.1. Any issues you do have will be cqrd or gpu overclock related.
 
Maybe I'll try a replacement card first? As the R9 290x are not as good checking the benchmarks. There seems to be a lot of people with the kernel mode driver not responding though?
 
Send it back.

If you Google any GPU error you will find lots of cases of said issue. But thousands and thousands of cards are sold and people without problems don't write about them.
 
As the card is exhibiting red snow on boot I would imagine it isn't stable at stock speeds thus is tiggering the error normally seen from an OC.

Assuming the red snow is easy to spot I would look to RMA the card and go from there.

In single GPU config at 1080p all of the top end cards will perforrm similarly in the 970 price range. Outside of drivers and fraps you won't notice much difference between a 970 and a R9 290X.
 
FYI the error message is....

Display driver stopped responding and has recovered
Display driver NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 347.52 stopped responding and has successfully recovered.
 
Magoo said:
FYI the error message is....

Display driver stopped responding and has recovered
Display driver NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 347.52 stopped responding and has successfully recovered.
Click to expand...

I would imagine this is a by product of the card being borked.

Usually if you have problems on the boot screen prior to the driver even loading then you can safely say its a a hardware problem with the card. This could easily then lead to driver errors especially if the hardware has a fault.

There is only one course of action and that is to return the card.
 
To eliminate any other hardware issues have you tried the following:

1) Reseated the GPU and cleaned contacts to ensure it's not due to any install issues.

2) Checked power cables to ensure they are fully secured, if so have you swapped them out to eliminate any power cable issues. Also what psu are you running, how old is it?

3) Due to the red snow on boot it's unlikely to be a driver issue but to eliminate that, a driver sweep in safe mode (using Display driver uninstaller) and clean install.

If all of the above yield no results then it's pretty certain to be a borked card.
 
as many others have said - the card seems hardware faulty , so I would return it via an RMA (returns merchandise authorisation) for replacement with a properly working card
 
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