260 GTX keeps crashing...

[Chong Warrior]

This card is only a few days old but within 5 minutes of gaming it always crashes back to the desktop and there's a mesage in tray saying Drivers have recovered from an error (a bit ironic as I swapped from a 4850 as I was tired of buggy ATI drivers lol)

I've installed the 182.08 drivers when I first got it. Uninstalled them and installed the 181.22 drivers but still same problem.

Tried running 3D Mark 06 and Vantage while monitoring temps and fan speeds but it runs those ok. Card is pre overclocked to 621 core / 1350 shader / 2000 memory but temps aren't going over 65c.

Running Windows Vista 64 and games crashing are Company of Heroes and Far Cry 2. Any ideas?

 

[Chong Warrior]

fully uninstalled the ati drivers from before with driver cleaner?

Uninstalled yes, not used driver cleaner as I'm not paying to uninstall drivers.

What motherboard? not an Asus P5 series is it?

P5K Deluxe

 

[Chong Warrior]

This is a new one on me.... will have a look a into it, cheers.

 

[Chong Warrior]

For such a popular combo there's not much mention of an issue like I'm having. If all the ASUS P5 mobo's (most popular motherboard series ever?) couldn't work with a 260 GTX it would be everywhere surely?

 

[Chong Warrior]

This might sound silly, but try underclocking the GFX cards shader clock and see if the problem still shows up

Well I've just taken off the pre-overclocks and underclcoked it to what a standard 260 GTX should be 575/1250/1000 and I've just played 2 full levels of Company of Heroes first time Nice one.

Good of these companies to sell Extreme Editions that can't even run at their default speed

 

[Chong Warrior]

You just seem to be having awful luck with video cards!

Yeah and it's for that exact reason I decided to get this card from the place just a couple miles down the road from me. Too slow and expensive doing by post with this place.... just need to decide if it's worth the hassle of trying to get this swapped or just live with it at stock speeds....?

EDIT - yeah had a nightmare with an IceQ 4850, couldn't be bothered with all that again lol!

 

[Chong Warrior]

I think I'll see what the memory and core can do. If it's just the shader core that's struggling then I probably won't bother.

Though I'm not sure if the shader and gpu core are directly related to each other for performance? In Rivatuner it links them when overclocking with the shader roughly 2:1 ratio

 

[Chong Warrior]

Yeah you can do that. I'm just thinking they'd do that for a reason is all...

Also most of the factory overclocked models seem to take the core/shader/memory up in a similar ratio to each other. Example if the core is clocked by 10% then so is the shader.

My thinking is maybe only overclocking GPU core could lead to some kind of sync issues and actually lead to reduced performance?

I'm about to put this to the test over the weekend anyway

 

[Chong Warrior]

Well worth downloading ATITool (if you haven't done so already) and using that to determine best clocks for your card.

I've read that ATI Tool hasn't had any code written into it for the 200 series of cards? I can't see any mention of it being compatible in any release notes either.

core/shader out of sync only leads to performance issues if you force it to run outside of the normal range (usually with a BIOS edit) OCing with say rivatuner the clocks will auto correct on the card after applied to fit within the normal min/max range for the ratio.

Well after some messing about it seems it's not possible to overclock them too far out of range as you say. The shader clock has to be at least double the core clock or it won't stick. So if I want a 700mhz core clock then the shader has to be at least 1400mhz, which isn't happening lol!

Have managed to get the memory upto 2400mhz with relative ease though, which is a good boost from 2000mhz