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BFG 8800GTX locking up

I seen a site with a PSU modded with a extra PCB full of caps and I mean crambed and it ran solid as a rock, seems the extra quality CAP's help, I cant remember fully but I dont think the extra PCB even fitted in the PSU case it was on trailing wires on a bench test lol.
 
Right, managed to swap the card into another machine. The machine involved is running of an Antec TruePower 500W PSU, and is an AM2 4600+ at about 2.6GHz. The 8800GTX worked just fine in that. I put the card from the AM2 rig - a BFG 7900GT - into the main rig, and that worked just fine too. So it looks like the combination of the 8800GTX in the usual rig is the problem, not the card on it's own (assuming it wasn't a connection issue, which moving the card has fixed). Tomorrow I'll try testing again with the 8800GTX back in the original machine. If it still misbehaving then I plan to try two molex connectors plus converters to power the GTX, rather than the two dedicated PCI-E power outlets, to see if that makes any difference. If that fails, I will try swapping PSUs and see if that works.


M
 
Misan said:
I had the exact same problem with an 8800GTX BFG and the P5N32-E SLI, turned out it was the motherboard causing the problems. Lock ups would occur in most games putting a large amount of load on the card, and in some cases i'd receive an nv4_disp BSOD. I tried various forceware driver versions, clean install of WinXP etc to no avail.

As you may have seen on these forums, the P5N32-E SLI is extremely picky with RAM settings/timings. Is the BIOS flashed to the latest release for the board? (albeit most are classed as beta revisions)

Also, post your memory timings, perhaps they need a little tweaking.

Regards
Click to expand...



Interesting that you mention the BSODs. There were two occasions where I had BSODs, but they were over too quickly to read. I'm still using 0109 BIOS IIRC. RAM is OCZ PC8500 and is currently at 5-5-5-15-2T-5-22. It was at 5-5-5-15-2T-4-20 until I started having these issues. As I said though, I can run SuperPI to 32 million DP, which is impossible unless the RAM is working near perfectly.


M
 
OK, first of all: apologies to those who said it was the PSU, and how I doubted you.


Now, the long version...


As promised, after putting the two cards back in their respective machines, I tested the main rig. It was a bit slower than before, but it locked up as usual. I didn't quite follow plan A, but only replaced one of the dedicated PCI-E power leads with a molex plus converter. The problem remained. Then I added an extra fan (the case is an Antec Nine Hundred, so I fitted a 120mm fan to the outside of the case in the side door. This meant removing the perspex fan holder, turning it over and fitting the fan to the outside. Still, you've got to suffer for your art...) and tried it. Yep - it locked up again.

Next up, a bit of software cleaning. After the usual (and already done) AV, Ad-Aware and Spybot sweeps, I uninstalled all the nVidia drivers. I then installed the chipset drivers, DX9C and the last working drivers, 158.19.

Yep, it locked up again. This time it was back to locking up while I was fiddling with the graphics options - hardly a stain on the card. So finally, a probably belatedly, I swapped the PSU with an identical 650W TruePower Trio in another machine. Yep - now it works perfectly. At least as perfectly as Oblivion ever works. I managed a solid two hours play with only one overclocking-related crash (they're different).

So, it looks like it was the PSU. I'm still a little puzzled, because in my experience PSUs either work or they don't. Mostly don't, if they are Hiper ones. This one seems to be slowly deteriorating rather than just keeling over. The "duff" one works just fine in machine #3, but then that's an old socket 939 rig. It only had the Antec 650W in it because the older Hiper (of course) blew up. Soooo, time to try and get a warranty replacement....


M
 
a lot of Antecs have cheap CAP's, there is big write up about it online, I have lost a few Antecs by customers and 5v rail has habit of dying on Truepowers, I know the newest ones are made by Seasonic but not sure about the Triopowers.

Waste of time to RMA outside 1yr as you need send to NL under the 3 yr warrenty.
 
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It's only four months old. The problem will be proving that the problem exists. I'm not worried if it gets no worse, but my worry is that it will.


M
 
I got a bag of **** new parts here that I paid £1000 for weeks ago (not inc case/hdd/rom drives) and cant work out whats wrong, looks like mobo or gpu, just blew up a perfectly expensive OCZ Powerstream 600 SLI (new model only avail in USA and I ran it since Jan 07 till 4 weeks ago flawlessly) that was after 1 press of power button never even got fans going.

I was trying that PSU instead of the Enermax to prove it wasnt PSU even though Enermax passes all tests on load and measures with digi meter, I still need try another PSU to be 100%, that only leaves GPU not proven as I have tested all other parts but do not have working spare PCI-E GPU, looks like mobo though, 4weeks of headaches and late nights due to this POS.

So I know where your at with hard to pinpoint random faults.

I feel like that guy in other thread, he also wants to throw the whole lot in the bin lol.

No swearing, no matter how poor you disguise it.
 
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helmutcheese said:
I got a bag of No Swearing! new parts here that I paid £1000 for weeks ago (not inc case/hdd/rom drives) and cant work out whats wrong, looks like mobo or gpu, just blew up a perfectly expensive OCZ Powerstream 600 SLI (new model only avail in USA and I ran it since Jan 07 till 4 weeks ago flawlessly) that was after 1 press of power button never even got fans going.

I was trying that PSU instead of the Enermax to prove it wasnt PSU even though Enermax passes all tests on load and measures with digi meter, I still need try another PSU to be 100%, that only leaves GPU not proven as I have tested all other parts but do not have working spare PCI_E GPU, looks like mobo though, 4weeks of headaches and late nights due to this POS.

So I know where your at with hard to pinpoint random faults.

I feel like that guy in other thread, he also wants to throw the whole lot in the bin lol.
Click to expand...

lol, are you talking about me? because i was seriously so close to lobbing out of my window this afternoon, lol
 
Me again...


Guess what - the problem is back. Now this may be my fault, but I'm not sure. At some point after my last post I installed the latest beta graphics drivers and they appeared to be OK. But this morning Media Player locked, and sure enough, when I tried Oblivion I couldn't even get as far as loading a game.

But...

In the past I've tended to just reboot the machine when the gfx locks up. I did say early on that sometimes I see a BSOD, but it's over too fast to read. Well, tonight I turned off AutoReboot and waited for the inevitable (it actually happened while using the 3D graphics settings of nTune!). Lots of C-A-Ds later, there was the BSOD. It's an NV4-DISP error.

After a lot of googling it's clear that this error is a common one, with lots of suggestions of what might cause it, but no proven causes. General opinion is that it's a driver error of some kind, but this seemed to be based mostly on the fact that NV4_DISP.DLL is a driver file. Everyone just suggests removing the drivers and re-installing. Been there, done that, but I'm willing to try again. A number of people have pointed out that the problem seems to occur elsewhere, and that the NV4-DISP crash may actually be a symptom. I've done a Safe Mode driver removal (but not nTune removal - for some reason the latest version can't be removed in SM) and then deployed DriverCleanerPro to clean out the ****. I've reloaded 158.19 which worked for months without a problem. It was also the one I was running a couple of days ago n that window when Oblivion worked again. I've not had a chance to test yet, so I'll report back later.


M
 
Dutch Guy said:
Have you considered it might be the CPU or mobo not being able to run at 400Mhz?
Click to expand...


As I said earlier, I can run SuperPI for 32 million DP, which shows the RAM works. I've turned the overclock down - no effect. The CPU was hotter than this two months ago and was fine. The system seemed to be working again until i changed drivers - then it stopped again.

Edit: of course more importantly, as i said in the first post, the system keeps running normally - it's just the graphics that go haywire. For a while anyway. If you can actually get rid of whatever program is running 3D graphics before the blue screen then everything carries on as normal.


No, I haven't eliminated it completely, but it's not very likely.


M
 
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Tested it with 158.19 after using DriverCleaner. It doesn't work still. Tried dropping the official overclock down to 575 core from 600, still doesn't work. More playing tonight then I guess.


M
 
- Have you tried underclocking the video RAM to see if that helps?
- Maybe change the PCIe speed in the BIOS? (perhaps it isn't locked?)
 
Tried both of those mate. PCI-E makes no difference, and lowering the RAM speed seems to slightly delay the inevitable.

More and more I'm thinking this is a software issue. What I'd like to know though is: why did swapping the PSU over work? At least for a day.


M
 
Right, I did a bit of thinking - and yes, I know that's dangerous. If swapping the PSUs didn't make any long-term difference, what was it about swapping them that caused a short-term cure? So I replicated the swap in every respect except one: I didn't actually swap the power supply. All I did was turn the machine off for forty-five minutes (it usually runs all the time doing SETI). Turned it back on and Oblivion ran normally.

Now I've got to see if this is replicable. Except that means waiting for the NV4_DISP bug to return...


M
 
Meridian said:
65 MBytes per process as far as I can see.
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I asked because when I was s till running Seti and when they first started with Boinc there were situations where the app would start to use more and more memory until all the system memory was in use.

I also had to shut down SETI if I wanted to run a game as it impacted performace even though the priority was on low.
 
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