Gaming stability problems after upgrade

[nealk2k3]

I upgraded my graphics card a few months ago to a KFA2 Geforce 560 Ti and used it for a while with no problems. I upgraded the rest of my system a few days ago and since then I've been experiencing problems whilst playing Skyrim (it's the only game I've installed so far)

I upgraded to the latest graphics drivers (as windows update had apparently not chosen the latest ones) and turned down a few of the settings from 'Ultra', which is what Skyrim set it to automatically. I then got GPU-z and ran it in the background logging out to a file whilst playing the game. The last thing it logged before it crashed was this:


GPU Core Clock [MHz] 835.3
GPU Memory Clock [MHz] 1000
GPU Shader Clock [MHz] 1670
GPU Temperature [°C] 76
Fan Speed (%) [%] 99
Fan Speed (RPM) [RPM] 2550
Memory Used [MB] 833
GPU Load [%] 87
Memory Controller Load [%] 43
Video Engine Load [%] 0
VDDC [V] 1.012

The problem I've been having is that the screen goes blank then I have to reset the machine, and then see a dialog from Windows telling me that the system has recovered from a 'BC116' error. Googling this has produced a range of problems that other people have been having and it seems that overheating is the most likely, but from the above logs I see my GPU is hitting 76 degrees, which doesn't see all that hot.

I wondered if the upgrade had caused problems - the previous/current CPU and RAM specs are below

CPU: AMD Athlon x2 6000+ (3GHz) -> Core i5 3570K (3.4GHz)
RAM: 4GB DDR II 800 -> 8GB DDRIII 1600

I thought the old stuff might have been bottle necking the graphics card a bit and so the card was never really hitting top whack and getting over stressed, but I still had all the graphics options turned up pretty high before (I don't remember exactly what they were set to)

I'm not sure what to do about this to try and resolve the issue - I don't think the temperatures look worryingly high and I've got the latest drivers and haven't experienced any other problems so far.

Can anyone suggest what would be a good move next?

Thanks

 

[nealk2k3]

P.S I did see people saying a BC116 might well be due to power supply problems, but I have a 780W Hiper Type M PSU that I would have though would have enough grunt fo rthis system. Besides the stuff listed, I have a couple of HDDs and an SSD and a couple of PCI cards, but nothing power hungry.

 

[nealk2k3]

On reviews I read it said the Hiper PSU was very stable when tested. Did you have problems with yours?

I found a BIOS update for my system but it didn't seem to help.

One thing I remembered whilst in the BIOS was that I set the RAM frequency to 1600MHz manually as it had set it to 1300 automatically. Could this cause stability issues? I did order 1600MHz RAM, although I'm not sure how to check what the sticks actually support as it doesn't say on the box. One annoying problem is that now the BIOS is updated it no longer seem to go into the settings screen when I press delete, even though that's what it says on the splash screen...