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Strange stuff in 3DMark06

sidefxv1

sidefxv1

sidefxv1

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Joined
1 May 2007
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572
Location
New Zealand
I've got some strange things happening with 3DMark06. I wonder if someone would care to speculate on what might be going on here.

Basically when I run it I usually end up with a score somewhere around 12500. And the framerate in the first test (return from procyon?) is usually around 85 at the start. But sometimes when I run it this drops right down to 22 or so and my score drops to around 4500...

Now... when this happens I can usually "fix" it by opening my case and wiggling the Graphics card around a bit. I also noticed a while back that a couple of the gold contact surfaces on the "pins" of the graphics card seem to have little bits missing at the ends... (I can probably take a photo of this if it will help... but they're basically just a little shorter than the rest - both only on one side of the board)

Is it likely that these might be losing contact in some way with the PCIE bus and that's why the performance goes way down? If they did lose contact would the card keep working but slower? Or is there something else going on here?

Any thoughts please? This is getting a bit annoying.
 
sidefxv1 said:
I've got some strange things happening with 3DMark06. I wonder if someone would care to speculate on what might be going on here.

Basically when I run it I usually end up with a score somewhere around 12500. And the framerate in the first test (return from procyon?) is usually around 85 at the start. But sometimes when I run it this drops right down to 22 or so and my score drops to around 4500...

Now... when this happens I can usually "fix" it by opening my case and wiggling the Graphics card around a bit. I also noticed a while back that a couple of the gold contact surfaces on the "pins" of the graphics card seem to have little bits missing at the ends... (I can probably take a photo of this if it will help... but they're basically just a little shorter than the rest - both only on one side of the board)

Is it likely that these might be losing contact in some way with the PCIE bus and that's why the performance goes way down? If they did lose contact would the card keep working but slower? Or is there something else going on here?

Any thoughts please? This is getting a bit annoying.
Click to expand...

Have you tried any games?

Also I would not recommend wiggling the card around when the system is on, could damage the card..

Yes if possible please take a picture.
 
assuming overclocked, sometimes pci-e can set itself to 1x speed, if you get a very poor performance run in a game/3dmark open up , i think cpu-z will tell you the pci-e speed and show if its down to 1x.

locking the pci speed to 101 was pretty much what a lot of boards needed a while ago(long while) so i've been locking to 101 since then and normally don't have the issue.

i assumed he meant if it was being stupid, turning off and wigling the card, if not, lol.

i would take a picture, or just compare it to a pic from a review of the card. some contacts might well not be used anyway, might have a faulty card with a couple contacts that have broken in use or in manufacture.
 
Heh, yup, definately only touch the card when everything's off - I'm not *quite* that much of a eejit. :p

Games run better when everything is running well in 3DMark.

I'll have a look at whether pci-e is reverting to 1x speeds. I've already locked the pcie freq in BIOS (to either 101 or 105 I forget which) so I suspect not?

Hmm... thanks for those pics Andy - yup that looks like one of the "shorter" pins on one side - there seems to be a shorter one on the other side too. So I guess they're probably not the issue. It's really odd though - my first thought was perhaps driver, windows, etc. However the whole turning it off and giving it a bit of wiggle always seems to work. Which I sort of thought probably pointed towards *something* on the hardware side not sitting quite right...

I'll see about patching/dling the latest version of 3DMark.
 
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