Problems being caused by my Graphics Card ? - Any advice welcome.

Galloglach

I posted a thread quite a while ago (around 4 or 5 months back probably) about a problem I was having with my current computer.
Essentially, after a certain amount of time in any game it would freeze up with looping sound, static visuals etc. At the time I had a Nvidia 8800GTX ( from XFX) but this has since died on me because the Video memory failed.


I bought a 280 GTX as a replacement (also an XFX XT edition) and it seems to be fine - except of course for the fact that the same problem is still haunting me. Since then, I've resumed my attempts at solving the problem once and for all and I've been slowly working my way through every possible cause, but I'm now coming to the conclusion that it is related to either my video card or the nvidia drivers.


my spec is :

Motherboard : Asus Striker Extreme () with onboard 5.1 audio (ADI1988B I think)

Memory : 2gb of Crucial Ballistix - which I've run at all timings, speeds & voltages imaginable & doesn't make a blind bit of difference. Also tested copiously with Memtest.

PSU : Tagan 1100w

CPU : Intel Q6850 (stock) - again this has been tested a lot.

Graphics Card : XFX 280GTX XT Edition

OS : Windows XP Pro 32 bit.


Afaik all of my drivers are completely up to date.



First, instead of actually freezing the computer entirely, even though the sound loops and the picture freezes - I can regain some functionality by patiently tapping keys such as : alt+f4, windows key and alt+tab. After a little while, I can see the mouse cursor again - evidently I am back on the desktop except of course that I cannot see it because the same frozen image is still on the screen with the mouse cursor moving about on top of that.

In some games, after a long time of sitting & waiting the nvidia ' Display driver has stopped working' style of message would pop up and then I'd be back on my desktop & would have to restart. I can't remember exactly what this message said since it's been a while since I've been patient enough to sit around for a very long time and wait for it to appear. When it does though it is along these lines.


Thus, I feel that whatever is going on is most likely being caused by the card & its drivers somehow. I'm reluctant to say the card is faulty since I've had the EXACT same problem with two completely different cards.
The issue of whether the card is overheating or not is perhaps something to think about. my 8800 was prone to going above 80 degrees at stock fanspeeds ( say 81, 82 sort of thing) but after bumping the fanspeed up to around 80% the temperature never tended to stray about 75 -80 celsius. I must admit I haven't been watching the temperature incredibly closely with the 280GTX - I just put the fanspeed up to 80 % on Rivatuner and ruled it out. Perhaps I should run a loop of 3d mark and keep an eye on the speed over several hours....


Also, the clock speed of the card is something which I thought could be an issue too ? I suppose I could always try downclocking the card by a good margin through Rivatuner and see if the driver related freezing of my games stops as a result ?




Any advice or suggestions as to how I could go about trying to fix this - or a consensus over whether I should try the temperature or downclocking approach first - would be most appreciated.

Thanks.

Galloglach

Well - I just ran the Left4Dead Demo in a window for approximately 2 hours with Rivatuner's hardware monitoring running on top of that. A few days ago I had two of the crashes I have described within a 2 hour period of playing that particular demo so I thought it would be an eligible place to run a temperature test.

During the two hours of play the temperature reached a maximum of around 75 degrees Celsius (with the fan at 85%) but this only happened twice. The average, at a guess, would probably have been around 70-72 or thereabouts. This is making me doubt the possibility that the card overheating is what is causing the crashes.

Also, in whatever game I'm playing the problem doesn't tend to appear during periods where the hardware is highly stressed ( when a lot of models are displayed on screen at once, for example.) Rather, the freezing / crashing / driver error / whatever it actually is seems to happen more so during periods when very little is going on at all. I feel like this should be significant somehow - but as to why I don't know ?

GigaWatt

i would suggest trying the same graphic card with another mother board... since the same problem has emerged with both graphic cards, the problem could be the board... or the OS, have you tried reinstalling WinXP from scratch... that could also be the problem, i would suggest to try XP SP2, it has proven to be the most stable edition of all XP editions. sometimes Windows "gets confused" if you try to install (or reinstall) several drivers one after another, so i guess this could also be the issue.

one other thing... graphic cards and their GPUs cuold probably stand even higher tempertures than 75, or 80 degrees celzius, hell i'm running my GeForce 7200GS (i'm not much of a gaming person) over clocked with RivaTuner and with a passive cooling system (no coolers present) at a temp of 95 degrees... the games that i play (mostly Doom 3 or Quake 4) have no probelm with the card or it's teperature... i once even whent up to 98 degrees without the graphic card showing any kind of glitching or framerate losses, exited the game and continued work on my rig... . a frined of mine once whent with his GeForce 8800GT up to 102 degrees... and the OS just restarted itself, but the graphic card was still among the living...

it's good that you have ran all those test, to make shure that it's not something that is temperature related, but i don't think that's the case...

i've seen something like this happen to friends rig once, i guess the PCI Express slot was faulty, or wasn't proparly placed on the mother board, so i just unplugged the graphic card just a little bit from the slot, and the graphic card had no problems with any kind of games... no a bad idea to try that too, don't plug in the graphic card in the slot too tight, just let it slide into it (in a matter of speaking... ), and then try playing some game that had glitching problems. sometimes the pins of the card are not in alignment with the pins of the slot, so this causes bad conductivity between the copper plated parts of the slot with the motherboard, so one of the results could be that in extreme conditions (playing games in the current situation) causes the flow of data to be disrupted by the bad condictivity between the pins of the card and the slot...

but this is just my opinion, i'm more of hardware kind of person... ... anyone with more knowledege with software problems of this kind, feel free to correct me...

Liqourice

Just to ask, have you updated all drivers, not just gfx drivers? Chipset, sound, cpu and such? Tried to reset cmos to default?

All cables connected and cards seated properly?

Sometimes it's just the simplest thing but also the hardest to find so it doesn't hurt to ask.

OldBuzzard

You ain't gonna like this, but, Welcome to the Wonder World of TDRs

"Display driver atikmdag/nvlddmkm stopped responding and has recovered".

That's the message, right?

Note that one of those is an ATI driver as well. TDR's are a problem for both camps. No one really knows what the REAL cause is

There any number of "cures", but no one single cure seems to work for everyone.

You might take a look at theis thread: Vista and 7.3 Display driver atikmdag stopped responding error

It's on the atikmdag error which is ATI, but there is good info for nVisia owners as well.

Ihad them with my 3870 X@ and what cured them for me was:

Turned off AERO

Then the "boot fix". To do that:

1. Run MSCONFIG in a command prompt.
2. Click the BOOT tab
3. Click on ADVANCED options.
4. Put a CHECK in 'Number of Processors", and then select the number of procrssors your sustem has. 2 for a dual core, 4 for a quad, 1 for a single.
5. Put a CHECK in 'Maximum memory", and key in amount of RAM you have.
6. CLick OK, Click APPLY, and re-boot when prompted.

This seems to work for a lot of people, so give it a try. If not, look in the thread I linked to. Someone there can give you some other options to try.

Good luck.

Judas

is there a remote possibility that your underloading your psu?

i mean 1100 watt psu is almost twice as much as you really need no?

course the 280 card would draw far more then the 8800 (at least i beleive it does)

but i wouldn't say it's outside the realm of being a possible cause.

Galloglach

Hey, thanks for replying. I've actually tried Vista and XP and BOTH of them yielded this error. I've been back on XP for months now but seemingly it has had absolutely no impact on this issue.

Galloglach

Thanks for the reply. I've reinstalled Xp several times (Sp3 now ofc but I was originally installing SP2) & seemingly no matter how simplified I make the install this thing persists. As to the idea that the pins might not be contacting properly, again considering I have had 2 cards in there it can't be the cards themselves but the idea that the motherboard might be the cause due to a bad connection is entirely possible I suppose. I guess I'll have to try to connect the card a little more loosely as you say - though I can't visualize how I'd pull that off atm lol.





Thanks for replying. Iirc my drivers are all current. Latest Nvidia WHQL for the Graphics card, latest drivers for the onboard Audio, A new set of chipset drivers was released very recently by Nvidia and I have downloaded them but as of yet haven't installed them. I doubt these will fix the problem though - but eventually I'll put them on when I can be bothered with all the booting into safe mode etc... On top of this I've fiddled about with the Bios as much as is humanly possible. I think if the problem was voltages related I couldn't actually see my mouse cursor floating around the frozen picture after a certain length of time ?

I even flashed the motherboard BIOS when I got the newer gpu, but this didn't achieve anything either - except supposedly a slightly improved ability to oc my cpu which I'm not going to touch with a 50 ft bargepole right now considering I can't even get this thing stable with the cpu running @ 3.00 ghz.....

To my knowledge all cables & connections are properly in place. I may go through the whole system soon though to check absolutely everything but considering the PC can go days & days without a crash sometimes I'm not sure whether this will be the cause. It's only when in a DirectX application that this happens - and seemingly without any detectable pattern.





On a related note, I have just come across several posts on the nvidia forums and a few others ( well 2 or 3 individual posts) suggesting that having an internal card-reader in the computer was the cause of similar problems for the posters and that removing the connection to the card reader has fixed their problem and they no longer receive such freezes. I'm really not sure how much chance there is of this actually working but I'm clutching at straws here so I will probably try it at some point today.


Another user suggested that his usb mouse was causing problems and that using an ordinary ps2 mouse solved the issue for him. Again, I doubt anything will come of it but I'll probably scour around for a spare non-usb mouse over the next day or two to see if it makes any difference.

GigaWatt

well, just insert the card in the slot, tighten it, and then pull it up (sort of speaking...) for about 0.5mm or 1mm... the distance should be enough... ... try different conbinations of distances, one of them might work...

well, sometimes hardware parts can conflict each other (especially if you have many connected to the rig... ). for example i have a MP3 player (it's a Grundig model, don't really know which model it is ) seems to freeze the my system (XP SP2) every time i connect the mp3 player on the front panel USB connector (also does the same thing in the back panel USB connectors) only when i have my Motorola SB5101 USB Cable Modem connected to the rig (through USB), when i unplug the cable modem, the MP3 player is read by the OS just fine... don't know why this happens, i guess the hardware is in conflict (somehow) with the cable modem and the OS just frezes after i plug in the MP3 player... when i unplug the cable modem and plug in the MP3 player, there is no frezing of any kind whatsoever...

on a more "inside hardware" related note, i once had a ethernet card (on my older rig) connected through a PCI slot. the card was reading fine, the OS (XP SP2) was fine too, but the card somehow made all the other PCI slots unreadable... if i put anything else in the other PCI slots, the OS wouldn't detect them, unplug the ethernet card and the slots became readable again, plug it back in (on any PCI slot the mother board had, believe me, i've tried every combination... ) and the slots became unreadable to the OS... i guess this particular ethernet card and my mother board weren't compatible (in some way...) cuz when i gave the card to a friedn of mine, it worked just fine with his mother board, he didn't have any kind of problems with it...

Liqourice

Good old IRQ conflict, something that would never happen with the Plug and Pray in Windows XP!

GigaWatt

hahahahahah, good one