Frustrating GTX 460 problems, need new GPU?

[oparadoxical_]

Alright, so I have posted about this problem three separate times over the past month on here, and I have only gotten a solution that worked temporarily and I have done everything I possible could think of to fix the problem. I am starting to get very frustrated and rather mad that one of my only remaining solutions is to buy a new gpu, which isn't something I can entirely afford right now as I am in high school and don't have any extra money to spend on this.

You can see the first thread about the problem that I made:

For roughly the past month, I have been having what I think is problems with my Nvidia GTX460 video and audio drivers (The latest one, 285.62 ). It is rather sporadic, which is the reason I haven't felt like doing anything as serious of taking the time to reformat my HDD and reinstall win7 and all of my programs and such. But to make sure that I need to do this and that there is nothing else on top of what I have already done that I can do, let me say what has been happening and what I have done to attempt to fix it as of now.


The most basic thing that has been happening is a random black screen with one of two things happening after that:
It would go black for a several seconds and then the screen would come back and it would give me a notification saying "you graphics driver has crashed and now recovered" (or something along those lines) and sometimes instead of saying graphics driver it would be the audio driver.

The other thing that would happen would be that the screen would go black for several seconds and my monitor would show that their is no connection any more and it would keep searching its different inputs. After a short amount of time, the computer would either restart on its own, or I would have to do a force shut off. However, once it restarted, it would often freeze after I type in my password or right when windows desktop would show up the same thing would happen all over again. It would take numerous restarts to finally get into windows, and then it would give me a notification saying: "Your audio driver has crashed but now recovered" and sometimes it would even say that my pc didn't have an audio driver so it would install it. Sometimes, after numerous restarts and it still not wanting to work, I would go into safe mode which always worked 100% and after that I would either uninstall my drivers and reinstall ( which didn't always help) or just restart the computer from there.



What I have tried to do so far:
Reinstall the drivers (making sure that the old ones were completely removed)

Make sure nothing was plugged into the computer that could be causing the problem

Taking off the small oc I had on my gpu and uninstalling MSI afterburner completely

None of that worked permanently, and it didn't always work for the short term either



When it happens:
Completely randomly and with different severities as mentioned earlier. It has only happened in a game twice, and both of those times was on LoL which isn't very demanding at all and it hasn't happened on BF3 yet (haven't played it too much yet, only a few hours compared to playing a lot of LoL recently so games don't really seem to be an issue or a direct cause) which is also why I am relatively sure it is not a hardware problem. It has happened randomly just on the windows desktop, while browsing online, and on just about any other random task on the computer.

Basically, reinstalling win7 worked for maybe a week before problems started happening again.

Some other things that are happening:
Random and small freezes in game.
Rare but obvious artifacts one time before it said that the graphics card drivers had recovered
The random and small freezes that I mentioned happened in LoL and after about 15 minutes it completely froze and restarted.
I also have had 2 or 3 random crashes or black screens in Skyrim.

What I have tried outside of what I mentioned in that thread:
I have tried several different beta/non beta drivers all the way up to the most recent beta back to 277.33. And every time I would install a new driver I would run through the proper process of using driver sweeper and such.
I have made sure that it wasn't overclocked, and I even lowered the clock speeds slightly using MSI afterburner.
I have also tried not installing the 3d drivers for it when I go through the install process for whatever that is worth.

After doing some more research, I have heard that what is happening to me right now seems to happen to a lot of other people with GTX460s and then are eventually forced to RMA or get something else. Mine is just over a year old, so I just that I am slightly lucky it lasted that long because most seemed to happen around the 6 month mark or sooner. Not saying I have given up on it, I im starting to think that it is about to completely die.

So on to the biggest points of the thread:
I would like to not have to buy a new GPU, but I will if I must. Is there any other possibilities that it could be or any other trouble shooting that I should do before buying one?
Also, what should I get for a new GPU <$250?

Thank you for any help!

 

[amuffin]

welp radeon 6950?

 

[chippies]

I suspect that 460 is on its last legs. Only other possibility that comes to mind is that there might be a problem with your power supply. One way to be sure is to borrow a graphics card from a friend.

 

[swifty_morgan]

you said something about MSI after burner. if you used it to over clock, even a little you could have damaged the memory or processor on the card. Having said that, use AfterBurner to under clock the processor and ram a little ( 50/100 ).

remove drivers again. reboot. let windows find hardware. then do a custom install of the latest driver and only install the graphics driver and the physx driver.

you can look in the device manager under sound and see if the nvidia sound driver is installed. if it is disable it.

 

[oparadoxical_]

I suspect that 460 is on its last legs. Only other possibility that comes to mind is that there might be a problem with your power supply. One way to be sure is to borrow a graphics card from a friend.

I could be mistaken, but my understanding of a faulty/dying PSU would be that it would always experience slow downs or poor performance all the time or at least very constantly, not just some random and sporadic freezes. I could be wrong though and I will research that some more. I have a corsair 550w that is roughly a year old, is there any diagnostic software that I could use that might measure how the PSU is performing to tell me if it is at fault here?

you said something about MSI after burner. if you used it to over clock, even a little you could have damaged the memory or processor on the card. Having said that, use AfterBurner to under clock the processor and ram a little ( 50/100 ).

remove drivers again. reboot. let windows find hardware. then do a custom install of the latest driver and only install the graphics driver and the physx driver.

you can look in the device manager under sound and see if the nvidia sound driver is installed. if it is disable it.

Yes, it is perfectly possible that I did damage it in overclocking, even though I only used a very slight oc and the temps were well in check I guess I could of shortened the life by doing that. And I have already tried the down clock, I will also try doing the reinstall again however this time without the audio drivers as I have not done that yet. Thanks for the suggestion.

Also, I am right now leaning towards either a GTX560 ti or a Radeon 6950. I play Skyrim with many different graphics mods that greatly increase the texture resolutions, and from what I heard from some people using these mods it would cause there GPU to use over 1 gig of memory if they had a 2 gig model and if they had a 1 gig they would max out the memory and have some performance issues. I honestly have no idea if this is true or not, if anyone here could confirm that Skyrim modded could use more than 1gig of memory that would be great so I would know to get a 2 gig model. I play on a monitor that is 1600x900, and some of the other games I play are: SC2, LoL, BF3, L4D2, Witcher 2, and the Supcom series.

 

[makafri]

believe me a damage psu is a plausible scenario... the psu could cause any weird random problem in your pc... like the ones you are having right now

 

[oparadoxical_]

Update:
So, I reinstalled the 290.36 Beta drivers, but this time without the audio drivers which is something I haven't tried before and so far (knock on wood) it seems to work fine coupled with a down clock first two games of LoL I have been able to play completely without issues in the last 4 days. However, I am far from convinced yet that this is a more permanent solution, I am more considering it to be a stop gap measure. Especial because I am worried that the down clock I did will hurt performance in other games that I play such as BF3 and Skyrim. I have also had the issue go away for a short time only to come back again slightly later, so I have decided that I am just going to decide on a replacement GPU and get if there is more trouble and not do more trouble shooting if the problem re-arises.

So, pros and cons of the GTX560 Ti vs the Radeon 6950? Those really seem to be the only viable options in my price range, so what are your opinions which should I get? Or should I try to down clock even further to get all the life out of it I can (assuming it actually is dying and I am going to have more problems with it lol) and try to wait for the next gen Nvidia/AMD cards that I have been hearing rumors about being released q1 2012?

 

[rollon42]

I have pretty much the exact same problems with my EVGA GTX 460. Started happening about a year after I got it too. So I did an RMA and just got the new card today but the problems are still there...

I'm still completely confused about this issue. I have an old 9500 GT that I have been using as a back up in my system and it works like a charm. Seems like my system just stopped accepting GTX 460s or something... Please somebody tell me if you find a solution. I'd really like to find out what is causing the problem so I can chuck it at the wall. Unless its user error of course .

 

[FtsArTek]

nope, I had this problem, and it was due to the GPU burning out, and it would overheat and freeze randomly... Just had to get it RMAed. But I would suggest a 6950 as an upgrade,