New Graphics card, getting problems

[Pale Shaza]

I just put in a new graphics card (msi ati radeon hd 6850 cyclone power edition) and it keeps crashing. I seemed to have done everything right, but I did encounter a few problems and I am guessing one of these caused it.

I uninstalled the old g card (radeon hd 4650) driver by going into device manager and uninstalling it there, then instead of rebooting I just shut it down and put in the new g card. I thought that was the correct thing to do, but could remnants of the old driver still be there?

After putting in the new g card which seemed to go into place fine. The power cable confused me slightly, but I had some of the right cables inside the case which connected directly to the power supply (600w) so I used one of them which fitted in fine.

When I turned on the computer it started in the low resolution which it is supposed to from what I've read, I went to click on the cd drive (which had the driver cd in) and it said that it was not accessible. It then told me that I had o restart to implement the changes I'd made (i'd not made any changes since uninstalling the old g cards drivers), I restarted because it semed the only thing to do.

After the restart it came up in 1920 res (the res I usually use) and seemed be working which was strange since i'd installed no new drivers. In device manager it said I was using a hd 6850 card and that the driver for it was working fine. I thought this was odd, so I booted cpu-z to look at it. In cpu-z it said the card was running on 100mhz and 150mhz memory. This, obviously is not what it is meant to be.

I tried running a game and it crashed. I then tried to install the correct driver and it didn't seem to do anything. (that was the one on the disk). And I tried to uninstall the driver windows had put on seemingly automatically but it came up with a blank screen. Safe-mode then wouldn't boot, it just hung (maybe coincidentally?). Now I'm back on windows as I was before with 1920 resolution. CPU Z no longer says it's running at 100mhz, it says it's running at 600mhz and 550mhz memory. It flashed up with this one time before, but seems to be staying this time. The weird thing about this is that although this is not the clock speed the new card should be running at, I believe this is the clock speed my old card ran at...

I know computers, but I don't have much experience with hardware and this is the first g card i've installed so I could use some help. I understand that things are obviously wrong, but I don't really know how to fix them, especially if it's because of the power cable (this looks right, but I didn't use the wires in the box, just one of the free cables inside the box with pci-e written on it that fit.)

The card is almost definitely in the correct slot by the way because I put it in the same place my old card was in. And I'm using windows 7.

 

[Pale Shaza]

Okay, I didn't know that, my old graphics card always stayed at a constant clock speed.
My PSU:

corsair
TX650W (I got this wrong in the previous post, it's 650w, not 600w)
Model: CMPSU-650TX

I looked around and it seemed that 650w was enough to support the new graphics card...?

Also CCC isn't opening at the moment for some reason.

 

[Pale Shaza]

I looked at my voltages on speed fan and there could be a problem:

+3.3V = 3.36V
+5V = 5.13V
+12V = 1.92V

The last one is way off, it should be around 12V shouldn't it? Might that mean a hardware problem? or is something just not set right?

 

[Pale Shaza]

I reinstalled all the drivers and am pretty certain that's all set right, with the newest drivers and CCC which is now working.

Speed-fan and SiSoftware both say that voltage, but from what I've been reading the system shouldn't even turn on if that's correct and at the moment it's pretty much working as usual apart from if I try and do anything graphically intense.

I tried using heaven and when I tried it seemed to die. It came up with a blank screen and the only thing I could do was kill it and reboot.

I also changed the 6 pin cable as I had two free, but it's exactly the same with both.

 

[Pale Shaza]

I looked in the BIOS and the voltages are actually fine:

+3.3V = 3.36V
+5V = 5.134V
+12V = 12.239V

I also noted down the other voltages. There are two columns, one in white and one in yellow that you can select so I'll put both:

CPU: 1.3 or 1.25625
QPI: 1.150V or 'auto'
IOH Core: 1.1 or 1.24
DRAM 1.5 or 1.64

I reinstalled heaven and it didn't give me a blank screen. Instead it started loading the dragon, filling it with colour and part way through that it crashed (came up with a coloured (light blue) screen) and I had to restart.

At the moment it's pretty stable when I'm just using the desktop, but anything graphically intense it dies on.

 

[Pale Shaza]

I managed to play skyrim for about an hour on it. It played brilliantly, like it's meant to. After about an hour it died. And the last two times I've tried it since it's got to the menu screen and then has died as it's trying to get into the game proper.

 

[Pale Shaza]

Yea, I was thinking a full reinstall, it's just so much hastle, but I'm starting to think I've got no other options. I've done some reading up on similar problems and I think windows might be shutting the display off when it thinks there's a problem. By full re-installation are you saying a full re-installation of the drivers or of the whole os? Because I'm starting to think the whole os since I had to reinstall the drivers a few times in the beginning and it never seemed to solve the problem. Or possibly I should re-install the drivers to an earlier version (I'm using catalyst 11.10 at the moment).

The temperatures are fine I think. I can run the MSI kombustor no problem at normal (1260 res) and extreme (1920) and it generally doesn't go much past 55C (which is okay I think...?). When I'm just browsing the desktop speedfan says the GPU runs at around 32C.

Very weirdly, which I would have thought just suggests it's something software related even more is that it's died all three times I've run the heaven benchmark test.

I also played counter strike source for about an hour last night and it was stable for that time and then crashed again.

 

[Pale Shaza]

I've reinstalled the os and no problems so far, although I haven't played any games. The only strange thing is that my clock speed seems to be all over the place, it's ranging from about 2Ghz to 3Ghz on cpu-z where it's usually a stable 3.4Ghz. The system seems to be running fine now, it was quite slow when I first booted it though and cup-z said it was running at 1.5Ghz, I went into the bios and it said it had restored itself to the default clock due to a booting problem but it overclocked itself back to the usual 3.4Ghz.

CPU-z is now saying it's runing at 2Ghz.

 

[Pale Shaza]

It did seem to be working okayish. CSS was playing, but skyrim was freezing when I loaded it. But suddenly when I start my games the display goes blank and I have to force restart. What the hell am I doing wrong!?

 

[Pale Shaza]

Right, here are the specs, just ask if there's anything more you need:

Computer: Titan Goliath (bought from Overclockers almost 2 years ago)

Motherboard: Gigabyte EX58-UD3R
Processor: Intel core i7 920 @ 2.67Ghz (overclocked to 3.4Ghz, it was overclocked when I bought it)
Memory: DDR3 6GB
(new)Graphics card: msi ati radeon hd 6850 cyclone power edition
(old)Graphics card: Radeon HD 4650
power: corsair, TX650W (I got this wrong in the previous post, it's 650w, not 600w), Model: CMPSU-650TX

This new graphics card is the only piece of hardware i've ever changed in the computer, everything else is what it originally came with. I cleaned a lot of the dust out of the case a few weeks ago so it's not particularly dusty in there anymore, although I wasn't hugely thorough, I just cleaned it up a bit.

I installed the g card using an antistatic wristband and was very careful, so there is no reason it could have been damaged when I was putting it in.

 

[Pale Shaza]

Could removing the card and putting it back in possibly solve the issues?

At the moment my games are running for the most part, but if I minimise them and then maximise it causes the display to crash (go blank, not coloured) and often when loading a save whilst in game it'll do the same.

Also I read that I may need to update my motherboard chipset drivers because it could be causing me some problems. I've never had them updated to the best of my knowledge, could old chipset drivers be the cause of the problem?

 

[Pale Shaza]

To remove the cpu overclock do I go to 'optimized defaults' in the bios?

Currently my cpu stats look like this:

When I restore it to optimised defaults it looks like this:

That's running at the right clock speed for the i7 920, but I don't know what the rest of that means, so is this the right thing to do to remove the OC?

 

[Pale Shaza]

Another thing, about updating the BIOS, on the gigabyte BIOS download page it has rev 1.0, rev 1.6 and rev 1.7. Is rev 1.7 the newest versions of software, or are they different versions of the motherboard hardware, I'm guessing it's hardware looking at it. Basically my question is: how do I tell which rev page to download from. On cpu-z it has two rev values, one by chipset/northbridge which says 13 and one by southbridge which says 00. Those numbers are completely different from the values on the website...

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3265#bios

That's the gigabyte bios download page. For rev 1 the newest version is the Beta F12Q, for the rev 1.7 the newest version is FK1, and rev 1.6 has a different one aswell.

 

[Pale Shaza]

By the way:

My system is crashing randomly at the moment. Sometimes (like now) it can be on for over an hour and not crash. Sometimes it'll crash within minutes of logging on.

If the system crashes whilst I'm updating the BIOS I could get really ****ed, however my system does not crash when in safe mode.

Is it okay to update the BIOS in safemode rather than in windows normal?

 

[Pale Shaza]

I took the overclock off, I updated the bios and the chipset. I log on to windows and about 5 mins in I get a nice big white screen that makes me force restart. I just don't get it....

 

[Pale Shaza]

My old card is completely stable, I made another topic about it as I thought this one had run dry, I'll link you to it.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18343183