GTX 580 Crashing, is it my RAM? Please Help!

[rspkers]

I'm on my 4th RMA of my EVGA GTX 580SC. The issue is when I play any games, the games crash into a black screen within 2-30 mins, and the sound crashes with it, at a humm of whatever sound was playing before it crashed.

My RAM is supposed to be 1600 but is currently at 1333 in BIOS, I don't know how to change timings, or what timings it should be, or voltages.

Does anyone know if this is a RAM issue?
Btw, two of the cards that did this issue that I sent in my RMA passed when they went back. I have no idea what's wrong and it's killing me.

Also: I have ran a memtest for 24 hrs with all passes, but the EVGA guys always, always ask about RAM saying the card depends on it to a T.

Please help me.

My specs:

Motherboard: Gigabyte X58A UD3R Rev 2.0
Chip: 980x Extreme Edition
PSU: 1000W Corsair
RAM: 6GB Kingston Hyper X Blu
Model: KHX1600C9AD3B1/2G
Stock V: 1.65v

 

[Warmacblu]

Sounds to me like there is an issue with the card. Is it overheating?

 

[rspkers]

Sounds to me like there is an issue with the card. Is it overheating?

It does not overheat, but it's close to impossible to tell since it crashes so quickly, usually instantly.
The thign I do not undertsand is, if it was a card problem, why did two of my RMA's that had the exact same issue pass when they got it back?

Also with my previous card it never went above 60c

 

[monsta]

Remove all your RAM and run one stick on its own at a time , play a game and see if it crashes. Narrow it down to see if one of your sticks is faulty , that way you can see if it is the RAM giving you the crashes.

 

[rspkers]

Remove all your RAM and run one stick on its own at a time , play a game and see if it crashes. Narrow it down to see if one of your sticks is faulty , that way you can see if it is the RAM giving you the crashes.

As mentioned, I've ran memtest for 24 hours with no errors. I was referring to whether the timings/clock were related to it, not whether I had bad memory.

Also; if it was bad memory, Win 7 would have issues.

 

[monsta]

I had a faulty stick that went undetected for years!
I only notcied it when I first tried to play BF3, my pc would crash and the game wouldnt load up at times. I had tested my memory before and never had any problems , sometimes the tests aren't 100% accurate.
I removed my sticks one at a time, and found the faulty stick which also affected another stick due to being in dual. I lost 4 gig of 8 gig of ram , but now BF3 plays like a dream , no crashes at all.
Its really worth a try, at least in doing so you can find out for sure if RAM is definately your culprit , and it won't take long to do.
I never had issues in Windows 7 the whole time.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

I went through the same damn black screen thing w/ EVGA for 20 months with a FTW factory overclocked GTX 295 ..... it never would run at any speed above the reference speed making the factory OC my son paid for useless.....spent over a year RMAing the things 5 times and endlessly going over the same rudimentary steps on every call....the same things I tried before calling them in the 1st place. They blamed the MoBo (Rampage Extreme), blamed the RAM (Mushkin CAS7), blamed BIOS settings, blamed RAM voltage ..... and then finally finally, I stole twin 560 Ti's from another son's box....OC'd them 20+ % and they just ran fine ..... they finally sent a next generation stock clocked reference board which matched the speed we were supposed to get from the FTW 295.

My expectation is that you will receive 3 or 4 other Superclocked cards from EVGA that also won't work and then finally a year from now they will send you a stock 680 which won't be OC'd but will be as fast as the 580 SC

Go into the BIOS and manually set the RAM speed at 1600 and voltage to 1.65. Just use the printed manual to find out where the settings are .... or undoubtedly, if ya call EVGA they will guide you thru the steps as they insisted on doing this 1st thing when I called even tho I already told them what the settings were.

 

[inzone]

If in the motherboard bios you have the setting "memory level up" you can open that and see if you have the option to enable the XMP file , that will clock your ram automaticly to 1600mhz and set the XMP timings. That may help.

 

[rspkers]

I went through the same damn black screen thing w/ EVGA for 20 months with a FTW factory overclocked GTX 295 ..... it never would run at any speed above the reference speed making the factory OC my son paid for useless.....spent over a year RMAing the things 5 times and endlessly going over the same rudimentary steps on every call....the same things I tried before calling them in the 1st place. They blamed the MoBo (Rampage Extreme), blamed the RAM (Mushkin CAS7), blamed BIOS settings, blamed RAM voltage ..... and then finally finally, I stole twin 560 Ti's from another son's box....OC'd them 20+ % and they just ran fine ..... they finally sent a next generation stock clocked reference board which matched the speed we were supposed to get from the FTW 295.

My expectation is that you will receive 3 or 4 other Superclocked cards from EVGA that also won't work and then finally a year from now they will send you a stock 680 which won't be OC'd but will be as fast as the 580 SC

Go into the BIOS and manually set the RAM speed at 1600 and voltage to 1.65. Just use the printed manual to find out where the settings are .... or undoubtedly, if ya call EVGA they will guide you thru the steps as they insisted on doing this 1st thing when I called even tho I already told them what the settings were.

I got tired of the whole RMA/failure process and called them yesterday, as I neglected to mention. What they're doing is sending me a personally tested 580 that works, with advanced RMA, so I can compare to my recent RMA failure. Part of me blames the PSU, and part of me blames the memory, simply out of the doubt EVGA instilled in me. The thing is, my first 580 that I had lasted for many months under the same specs (but eventually had the exact same issue) It's the fact that it's the same issue every single time that really bothers me.

See, I also have a "backup" ATI HD 4550 1GB card, and it works in the exact same system without a hickup. It works fine, albeit *** performance as it's GDDR2 and cost $50. Point is, it works. So why do my GTX 580's not work? Is it nVidia? Is it my card?

 

[rspkers]

If in the motherboard bios you have the setting "memory level up" you can open that and see if you have the option to enable the XMP file , that will clock your ram automaticly to 1600mhz and set the XMP timings. That may help.

I did not see anything like that in the BIOS.

I'd greatly appreciate if you could help me out with finding it though.

The BIOS version is FF.
The only tweak options listed in the advanced memory selection is to change it from standard, to turbo, to extreme that I can see.