Galaxy 8800GT, time to RMA?

armil

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Jul 6, 2007
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I've been having troubles with this build.

Core 2 Duo E8400
4GB Kingston Ram
MSI Neo 2 FR
Sound Blaster XFi XtremeGamer
Galaxy 8800GT
550W Ultra XConnect 2 PSU

I've been having troubles, the graphics driver resets at random intervals, causing some games the can't recover to crash. I was worried that it wasn't the card and I was having a heat problem, or a PSU/Voltage problem, I have tried about 4 different drivers. (Current stable 169's, 2 174's (including the most recent)) And right now to test voltages and temps I have 2 instances of prime95 running (one for each core.) and the ATI tool stability test. Voltages by the mobo sensors have remained stable. Temperatures have leveled out at 58CPU and 84GPU, and it's been running stable. No glitches or anything. I've been going around checking for new drivers/bios for other components. But the GFX driver is the only thing with issues. And usually only in full screen games. DX or OpenGL doesn't matter. I'm worried that the RAM on this card is bad. And extended gameplay/filling the buffers for fullscreen reveals this issue since the Entire System stress test is pointing away from a power or heat issue. I'm going to underclock the RAM on the VidCard by 100mhz to see if that does it.

Any thoughts. I've tried everything, other than this, the build is stable.
 

crazywheels

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what do you mean it resets? From what I am reading you have an INTEL motherboard and an INTEL cpu. There should not be any indication of an ATI tool stability test.
 

FrozenGpu

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That PSU is an extremely unreliable PSU, I would first look at that. Use a PSU that first of all has an efficiency of higher than 70% and has better amperage, although it snot bad on the x-connect, but seriously that is a horrible PSU, you may want to look into how unreliable it is, before you go any further with the gpu....
 

I'm agree with you FrozenGpu, those Ultra XConnect's look nice and shiny but they don't have what it takes 'under the hood' as it were.

@ Crazywheels, the Ati tools software always used to work on Nvidia cards and there is no reason why the OP shouldn't use it as it has one of the best artifact stress tests you are likely to find for free.
 

armil

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Alright. I wrote that late last night after a lot of troubleshooting.

For the people asking about driver resets. In Windows Vista, Microsoft has seperated the graphics driver from the rest of the operating system as best it can, meaning when something goes wrong, the system can reload the driver and flush the video card without causing artifacts, bluescreens, or system crashes. However when this happens in many games, the unexpected lack of response from the graphics driver causes either for them to crash, or not refresh the graphics anymore.

As for not using different drivers, NVIDIA's driver releases are retarded. Right now I'm running 174.85, but more recently I was running 174.74(i think), the ones on the main website are 169.xx, and theres also releases of a 173.xx series. Each of these is compatible with all their graphics cards, but there's concurrent development on all of them. (I believe 173.xx is 174.xx optimized for mobile GPU's)

Although I was inclined to place blame on the PUS, I am not so sure. If this was the issue, it should have become apparent after running both processor cores at 100% and the GFX card processor at 100%, the voltages did not dip. (slightly for the first ~1 minute, but not by 2.5% and then they recovered to perfect.)

I know that my graphics card fan is glitchy, though temps remain fine, no amount of NTune, RivaTuner, or anything else can make that fan spin faster than 29% (even low level adaptor tweaks, make it think it's faster but the cooling efficiency is the same.

However I have an additional crappy 500w(with a large single 12v rail.) PSU sitting around where I can jump the 2 pins and get it going to provide power only to the 8800gt and use the other PSU to power the rest of the system. I'm worried about issues with this. Providing power to the 2PCIE before the system is booted, will that damage the card?

Before I do this. I'm going to Underclock the memory 100mhz, see if that's not the issue.
 

monst0r

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well, i have a very similar setup running on that same PSU. one already failed on me, the fan stopped spinning. i got to RMA it though..

p.s. i believe the combined 12v output is about 32A, which is fine for that card.
 

armil

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Well. After a little more testing, under stress test the Voltages across the system is fine, but whenver the card crashes the 12v and 5v readings drop. I dont know which is causing the other. I ghetto rigged a single rail 500w to the card and jumped the Power and Ground on the CPU connector to power the card before I booted. Time to test it out.

As for sound. I have a weird setup. I have both running concurrently. So I can have 5.1surround out of the X-Fi and voice chat through the onboard. That might be the issue. Creative blows. >.< I'll try that if this doesn't work out.

UPDATE:

I've tested it with a separate power supply and it's still crashing. Next I'm gonna pull out that sound card I guess.
 

armil

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Well. After pulling the Sound card out I'm running into the same issues, and in the game I'm disabling sound to test and that didn't do anything. I think the card is dead.

I think I'll go ahead and try a reformat, to see if theres some corruption somewhere.
 

armil

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Just an update. Pulled out one of my memory sticks. Thought it worked because I had trouble free gaming, but the problem picked up again. Ran memtest on the remaining stick and it passed 6hrs of Memtest, I'm talking to the MFG about a RMA but I also use this computer for work and it would suck to be without for 2+ weeks. (Though It'd give me an excuse to hook up my laptop to the widescreen TV for a while. I think the card's dead though. Moved back up to the 174.85 drivers since they weren't the issues. Processor passes Prime 95 indefinately. Could be the mobo/new bios however. Might try a reformat.