Driver crashed, core clok drops to 400

[zachary k]

sometimes, when i am playing a game, the driver crashes and the core clock drops to 400 and kills my framerate. anyone know what can be causing this?
evga 260 (216) core clok=690 mem clok= 1053
asus p5n-d
core 2 duo @ 3.4GHz
ocz 700W PSU

 

[EXT64]

Core clock dropping could either be it going into low power (power saving) mode since it is no longer doing anything, or it could be downclocking due to overheating. Run a program like HWMonitor in the background that records max temps to make sure the card is not overheating. Does it happen a lot?

 

[zachary k]

not often, jut enough to be annoying. and its running at a cool 57 ish temp.

 

[EXT64]

Is that idle or max?

 

[zachary k]

max

 

[EXT64]

Yeah, that's fine. And unless the PSU is bad it should be plenty. If you haven't already I'd stress test the rest of the components (Ram/CPU) to make sure they're all stable with something like Prime95. Otherwise, it may be software related (try other/newer drivers).

 

[zachary k]

how would i test the power supply? i know CPU and ram are more than stable and i have the newest drivers from nvidia.

 

[EXT64]

I confirmed that GTX260's do downclock when at idle, so that probably is what you are seeing. It should jump back up when you start using it again. As for the power supply, I don't have a really good way of testing, but one quick check you can do is again with HWMonitor; run it in the background and see how much your +12V varies from what it was at idle. Big variations could indicate issues.