EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti SC Problem

[Frazeebd]

Here is my system summary:

CPU: i5-3570K
MOBO: Sabertooth Z77
PSU: Antec 750W
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LP 8gb (2x4gb)
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti SC
HDD: Samsung 830 series 256gb SSD
OS: Windows 7 Pro x64

I assembled the system and everything went great. I got the drivers installed for the MOBO and the GPU. One odd thing was that when I went to EVGA's website and got their updated driver utility, it did not recognize any 600 series hardware on the PC. The drivers that came with the card on the DVD worked fine.

Well, about a day later I'm playing skyrim (which looked beautiful BTW) and a rat jumps in my face and BOOM.. multicolored spectrum on the screen and crash to reboot.

Upon reboot, windows will not load.. I get a BSOD saying something about drivers.

I loaded windows in safe mode and uninstalled the graphics card in device manager and deleted the driver.

I rebooted, and the system boots to windows just fine... it recognizes a standard VGA adapter. I tried to run EVGA's tool again, but it still recognizes no 600 series hardware on the PC. So I tried re-installing the drivers from the CD. I selected "Fresh Install" which should delete any old profile info from the last install.

The install completed just fine, and I tried to reboot... same problem. Windows starts to load and them boom... BSOD and crash to reboot.

At this point I uninstalled the drivers again, and I'm trying to figure out where to go... it's obviously a driver problem, but EVGA's tool won't even recognize the card. It IS the 660 Ti Superclocked edition... maybe its just a one off that isn't recognized by their utility? I dunno...

Either way I can't even get back to where I was, because loading the drivers just causes a BSOD on windows start up at this point.


Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[chippies]

Try the latest beta drivers directly from Nvidia.

 

[Frazeebd]

For some reason the video card blew out I guess. I contacted EVGA tech support (I had him on the phone in under 10 mins, very cool) and he had me try the card in another PC and it happened there too, so it was something in the card that went bad.

I returned the card and got a replacement and I'm back up and running. My real concer now is... Was it just a bad card, ready to go? Or is there a problem somewhere else perhaps, like a faulty power rail or something?
I'm concerned, but am just gonna run the heck out of Skyrim and BF3 this weekend to see if this card stands up to the stress test.

 

[chippies]

Also try FurMark - that generates a lot of heat.