Asus 780TI DCU2 OC, card locks in at underclock.

fullmetalheart

Honorable
Feb 5, 2014
10
0
10,510
Hi everyone, i recently changed out my EVGA gtx 670 4gb for an asus gtx 780ti dcu2oc card. Uninstalled all drivers last week, did a clean install (just in case) of new drivers for the 780ti. Played all weekend no problems

Tonight as im playing rust i notice my FPS drop from 120ish to 80ish, look in GPU tweak and my card has under clocked itself and the enitre graph is flatlined, showing it has been that way for a while. I selected my OC settings, and still nothing.

Reboot- Run Rust, now card ramps up to 1070mhz and everything is great, half an hour later, looking at gpu tweak, the same damn thing. the card just will not unlock from 536mhz..... It will go lower if i alt tab to windows, but it will never ramp higher than 536 usually. Ive read online about a way to lock my clock in at a set speed but i really dont want to do that... because this SHOULD NOT be happening. It should just work, never had these issues from my 670. Also tried this with unigine heaven and same thing, it will lock in at about half of the cards speed, heaven benchmark even shows it at 600mhz or so usally, Reboot- back up to over 1000mhz... Anyone have any imput? Thanks

Specs:
3570k @4.4ghz - h100
sabertooth z77 mobo
16gig corsair dominator 1600mhz
1050w seasonic psu
120gig corsair ssd
1tb WD black


everything in my system was existing, like i said just a new gpu. and my 670 DID NOT have this issue... I would really hate for this to be a bad card, asus has ALWAYS given me issues with their products, when i did initial build, had a asus 670 and my z77 mobo come in and died within 24 hrs, bought the evga card instead since the 670 was brand new and out of stock, so i finally go back and give them another chance and less than a week into this card and its being janky as hell.



imagen
 
Solution
Did you OC this card? The reason I ask is because that sounds like an unstable OC. If you OC the 780ti and it is unstable, what happens is the driver crashes and it locks itself at some weird, very low voltage. A restart will fix this but of course if you still have an unstable OC it will just crash again at some point under load.
your card will downclock when you tab out, your max clock looks fine. Try running games with say msi afterburner on screen display showing that usage and speed the card is running at in real time. Also, rust is not an optimized game and cannot be expected to run at proper speeds at all times for this game

i'm not overly familiar with the heaven benchmark (i use valley, so not much difference) but also run it again with the onscreen display running so you can see real time card speed and usage. If your scores do not line up with what a 780ti should be outputting, then i would suggest sending your card back.
 
If it is not giving you temperature problems (it isnt) but is still locking you down, then yes, sounds like a bad card to me as if there is nothing wrong with the rest of your system, it should "just work" but you really need to try full release games rather than games that are still in alpha or beta
 

fullmetalheart

Honorable
Feb 5, 2014
10
0
10,510



Even battlefield 4, skyrim, and benchmarking tools do it as well. The issue happens with those too. I had already submitted a ticket to asus but figured I would ask on here to get a quicker answer :(
 

fullmetalheart

Honorable
Feb 5, 2014
10
0
10,510
Brantyn- I have dual monitors, running haven or any other AAA title I monitor the gpu. And it will just randomly under clock and lock itself there. Like I said even the heaven benchmark detects the card at 600mhz and displays it in the top right of the benchmark during a test.
 

Deuce65

Honorable
Oct 16, 2013
1,465
0
11,960
Did you OC this card? The reason I ask is because that sounds like an unstable OC. If you OC the 780ti and it is unstable, what happens is the driver crashes and it locks itself at some weird, very low voltage. A restart will fix this but of course if you still have an unstable OC it will just crash again at some point under load.
 
Solution
Deuce65 has a very good point which has caused me to think of something else

Try underclocking the card before you do any kind of stress tests (underclock it by 100mhz on both core and memory) then rerun the stress test (heaven) if it doesnt do the weird locking thing, then you have recieved a defective card, OR the cooler is not contacting properly and needs to be tightened (core temp may be fine but other parts may not be, also needing to tighten the direct cuii cooler is a common thing)
 

fullmetalheart

Honorable
Feb 5, 2014
10
0
10,510
To answer the over clock question yes I had played with it a tiny bit. But even after a reboot and asus tweaker starting up with factory default settings it will still ramp down in the middle of a game after a short while.

Also the second monitor thing. I was running one. But after I noticed the card doing janky things I hooked up my little 14 inch monitor to just display asus tweakers gpu monitor :) so even with one monitor it still does it

Thank you so far everyone for the suggestions.
 

Deuce65

Honorable
Oct 16, 2013
1,465
0
11,960
Well in your graph there it shows a max clock speed of 1085 which is around 200Mhz over stock. Now, the card should be able to handle 1085 but you never know, and as I mentioned that behavior is consistent with a failed OC. I would suggest, before you try to RMA the card, you at least test it locked down at stock speed first.
 

fullmetalheart

Honorable
Feb 5, 2014
10
0
10,510
It was where I had the oc set, the picture was from current clock settings after the card locked itself.

I'll run It completely stock setting through some benchmarks when I get home from work. Either way it's getting sent back to amazon. I ordered a evga 780ti sc today to replace it. Better factory oc specs from the manufacturer. I should have stayed with evga from the get go, always had rock solid hardware from them. Thanks for the help everyone
 
A common occurance with the asus coolers is the need to tighten them before installing them in your case (tighten the 4 screws on the back) I did have to do this with my 780 direct cu ii, and i can get the core clock up to 1256 and mem to +500 for a game stable overclock and much higher for synthetics