Do I Have A Defective GTX 670?

[yakitoriboy]

So I recently got the courage to finally build my own system. Everything has been going great except I noticed occasional hitching during games like Skyrim, Shogun 2 and the Witcher so I decided to run a 3dMark 11 test and I got what apparently is a very low score for the specs that I have. My score was P7732. My bios and drivers are up to date and it even tells me that "It looks like your PC should score better." and on that link it tells me that my gpu is not performing well. So, I don't think it's a CPU issue.

Is there anything that I could be doing wrong?

Here is the link to my test result

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/4080684

I would hate to have to hassle and return the card.

Here is my specs to my computer

3770k
corsair vengeance 16gb 1600mhz
EVGA gtx 670 FTW
Corsair AX 750 psu
Asus Z77 Sabertooth
Sandisk 240gb SSD
Windows 7 Pro 64bit

 

[johnnychuttz]

Are you using Nvidia driver 301.42 or one of the beta's? I didn't care for either of the beta drivers with my FTW.

Also, make sure the pci-e slot your are using is set to pci 3.0 in the UEFI/BIOS. I had to enable it manually when I swapped in a buddies 3570k to test it. Sounds like it may be set to x1 possibly.

 

[Maxx_Power]

Your scores are a little bit lower than they should be according to other reviews I have read. Do a CPU-Z and GPU-Z check of your setup while running the 3dmark11, allow them to log the data, and make sure the CPU/GPU are running at their max proper core speed, and that the temperatures are not too high to cause them to throttle.

Oh and as johnny said above, check to make sure you are running the GPU in a full bandwidth, PCI-E 3.0 slot.

 

[larkspur]

Describe "hitching".

Unless you are seeing artifacts or having crashes, it sounds like the GPU is fine. Bad GPUs are usually obvious. But how are the temps on the card? Temp throttling will cause performance issues and is obviously bad for the lifespan of the card. Use GPU-z to record your temps during a 3dMark11 run and a heavy gaming run and report the maximum temp.

 

[smorizio]

I have that mb..make sure your using the xmp profile for your ram. they also drop a few more updates for the bios...make sure you have them..also make sure you set under video the gpu as the first video device. by default the ipgu is. also turn off the ipgpu and the mvp chipset. they dont work right with all games and video cards yet. also in the bios check to see if the mb reading the video card right. the default settings is auto (pci 3.0) 16x. if a card is in the other video card slot both will say auto 8x 8x. other settings are 16x (pci 2.0) 8x/4/1x pci 2.0 mode. also in the nvidia driver make sure power savings is off so it wont thottle the card back and make sure if your using one monitor only change the profile in the control panel to one monitor. also with the intel onboard chipset make sure you have the newest chipset drivers loaded. also with the intel network chipset there a bug with the install software from asus. one of the intel network software when loaded will make your internet speed crawl. it a know bug on the rog forum and other asus sabertooth forums. if you did install it..just uninstall it you can see the speed change if you use windows task manger and turn off the intel software...the speed will be back to where it should be.

 

[geekapproved]

Your probably comparing your scores to people who are doing massive overclocks.

 

[verbalizer]

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/364990-33-defective

 

[paddys09]

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/364990-33-defective

Thanks verbalizer now I'm caught in a never ending loop :lol:

 

[verbalizer]

 

[paddys09]

Threadception..... I suppose I should add to this now instead of ruining the thread :lol:

Have you tried disabling intel graphics and ran 3dmark again?

How does it perform in other benchmarks?

 

[yakitoriboy]

Thanks guys. Alright, I did some of the things posted here and it definitely seems like it improved things. This was my first build so I had no idea that I had to specify these things in the bios.

In the bios everything was set to "auto" as default, but I went ahead and selected the GPU as the default drive and selected Gen 3 (I'm guessing thats 3.0?)

Also it does seem to "hitch" when the gpu gets hot. About 70C. For some reason I thought this card can go up to a lot higher without it affecting performance, but I just manually upped the fan speed on the gpu and it seems to have fixed the hitching problem for now.

Any long term problem on always keeping the fan speed really high on the gpu?

Thanks again guys. Things have really improved already and I think I can conclude that it's not defective and I just need to learn more about these things.

 

[yakitoriboy]

Best answer selected by yakitoriboy.

 

[smorizio]

depends on how good of a heat sink and the silicon the gpu and ram is cut from. also some cards are not running stock there overclocked...so there going to run hotter then stock. check to see if your 670 is running stock speeds or is over clocked. if it an over clocked card...you can use msi afterburner to slow the card down to stock speeds and see if it more stable.

 

[yakitoriboy]

Thanks smorizio.

I think the FTW is slightly clocked above the stock 670s, but I haven't done any overclocking of my own. If ther is overclocking, it's just the stock overclock. Should I try under clocking it?

Also, you mentioned making sure my RAM is using xmp profile. Can you elaborate? I am not sure what you mean by this? Actually my mb was reading my RAM frequency incorrectly at first. (Was reading 1333mhz not 1600mhz) so I had to change it to 1600, but other than that I haven't really touched any settings with my RAM.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey