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BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

craig588 posted:

If you don't have a warranty left it's probably time to disassemble it, reseat the videocard, apply new TIM and blow out any dust. If you have warranty left you should let their service center deal with it and borrow another one while it's there if you really can't get along without it. It's incredibly unlikely it's a software problem.

I was thinking the same - could be heat-related damage but hard to tell. Ranger, if you're up to it, you can try doing a partial disassemble and cleaning it out with compressed air, might be worth it just to see if anything is clogging up the fan or heatsink. I used to be sorta iffy on doing any sort of laptop repair, but sometimes you just gotta take a risk and figure things out. I found a quick resource that might come in handy, a video that walks through a full disassemble of your model (doubt you'd want to do that but you can maybe get the back panel off at least to check for fan debris/problems). I have an older T61 and remember it had some heat issues, and I said "gently caress it" and got some online guides/walkthroughs, went step-by-step and carefully took everything apart, cleaned it well, put new thermal paste on the CPU/GPU, and reassembled all within a couple hours. Definitely worth a shot and doesn't hurt to learn how to fix that stuff on your own if you're ever in dire need and can't afford (or wait for) a service place to do it.

Ideapad Y570 video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tE_i91q5vw

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BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Fanelien posted:

So I have a 2 card SLI 570 1280mb set at the moment, I just upgraded to a surround setup and I am noticing some absolutely insane temps in some games like Euro Truck Simulator 2(80c+) and World of Tanks(95c) when run in surround resolutions, even with AA off. It's frightened me off turning on surround in Borderlands 2 etc because I didn't expect cards that basically never got above 75c to shoot for the moon on temps when exposed to a surround set up. I have a massive amount of air flowing through the case from two 180mm fans in the bottom but I just can't keep the temps under control, the only good thing I guess is that the cards haven't started to throttle yet. Other than going to water is there anything I can do to decrease the heat?

Is anything else in your case getting hot as well? Might be good to get a utility like CPUID HWMonitor to get an idea of how warm all your components are, so you can see if it's just the cards or if everything is warm. That'll tell you whether your case airflow is good or not, definitely want to try to balance out the airflow so it's a relatively even ratio of air in to air out. If it's not that, try using an OC utility like Precision to manually set your fan speed to a fixed speed that isn't too loud for your tastes. I've got 2 GTX 465 cards in SLI at the moment, have them mildly overclocked to 705/1410/1650 (core/shaders/memory) and for everyday use, keep the fans @ 40% fixed, and maybe pop them up to 60-65% when gaming and my card temps haven't gone above low to mid 70s under load (mainly happens in games like Fallout 3 or RAGE). I also used Arctic Silver 5 paste on them as soon as I got them and ran through a couple stress tests to help burn in the paste, so even when they're idling with 40% fan the temps are steady between 35-40 Celsius. Also have a different case, using an Antec One case with four 120mm fans, one of which is in the side panel blowing right over the cards themselves, but otherwise the fans are well-balanced regarding airflow.

I don't use a surround setup so that's a big difference, but the points above should give a good starting reference for where to look to try to improve temps.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Guni posted:

So I'm not really sure where to ask this but I figure I'll ask here in the GPU thread since it's related to my GPU. Since yesterday when playing BF3 on my Sapphire 7870 GHZ OC edition card I've gotten a 'device hung' error about three times. Does anyone know what this is/what I can do to fix it? It's pretty annoying and I hope my card's ok..

Edit: Max temp is only 65degrees or so, I am running dual screens (one HDMI, one DVI) if that matters or anything?

Is it only happening with BF3? Any other times it's happened, whether gaming or watching videos? I did a quick search and found a couple possible culprits, not sure if you'd tried them or not:

- Make sure DirectX is up to date (should be able to run dxwebsetup from the MS website)
- Blow away your graphics drivers, reboot in Safe Mode, run a utility like Driver Sweeper/Driver Fusion (and maybe CCleaner too), reboot and do a fresh, clean reinstall of drivers
- May be an issue related to overclocked cards, oddly enough - some sleuthing found others having issues with BF3 on overclocked cards, regardless of brand/vendor. If you're using any overclock utility, see if it has an option to bump the card's stock voltage. Or, barring that, try clocking the core/memory down slightly and test BF3 again to confirm if it's an overclock issue - if you go the voltage increase route, check to see what the max "safe" voltage for your card is, last thing you want to do is mess it up by giving too much juice.

Outside that, not sure if any other patches or updates are available, if you've exhausted that route then definitely do some testing and keep us posted.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

havenwaters posted:

I'm gonna just chalk it up to The Witcher 2 being a bit buggy, it is where I notice it the most. I'm on 13.4 right now, though it has persisted through 13.1, 13.2 beta 7, and 13.3 beta 3 as well.

I can't get a picture or video of the issues though because every time I try the game refuses to show off the artifacts.

Have you gone through some of the clean reinstall steps that others posted when it comes to driver upgrading? Might be worth a shot if the issues have persisted through multiple revisions...remove drivers, boot into safe mode, run Driver Sweeper/CCleaner, reboot and install drivers fresh (not sure if you're overclocking, but if so, might be worth it to set clocks to default before reinstalling).

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

havenwaters posted:

I should try that again at some point. Is there anyway to disable windows update from automatically grabbing the cached drivers that seem to persist even when I use driver sweeper and CCleaner in safe mode (I had this same issue on my HP laptop at one point and bad amd drivers and I eventually just gave up and reformatted the drat thing)

Not that I know of, but easiest for me has been downloading the driver, removing the old one, disable or disconnect the wired/wireless adapter, then doing a full removal/reinstall to avoid Windows Update doing its auto-update. Once that's all done and the old drivers are clean, the fresh install is a lot easier, then you can just re-enable your wired or wireless when it's done.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Rigged Death Trap posted:

So my 660ti isn't putting out HDMI. It's turning on and the fans kick up, power LEDs on everything fine, but just no HDMI.
What can I do?

Is it a standard HDMI out on the card? I ask since some of Nvidia's cards with HDMI have regular, and others (like my old GTX 465) had a mini HDMI to standard HDMI cable. If it's regular HDMI, go with the simplest route first and try another cable to rule that out. Other than that, did it work initially and stop, or did it never work at all? If it hasn't worked I'd test one of the other video-out options like DVI to see if any of the outputs have signal. If it happened right after a driver update, you might be able to roll back and use a different driver version after a standard remove/clean with Driver Sweeper + Ccleaner/reboot and reload fresh. Also make sure your power cables for the card are plugged in securely, I had a similar issue to yours when I was cleaning out my PC and didn't have a 6 pin connector fully seated, the card fan spun up but I got nothing on the display. Thankfully it didn't hurt the card, once both 6 pin connectors were secure everything came up normally.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

lovely Treat posted:

I just got myself an ASUS GeForce GTX 660 DirectCU II OC which is my first Nvidia card since the days of the Geforce 6800 ultra so I am a little out of touch with Nvidia stuff.

I am currently using the 314.22 drivers but am experiencing some odd behavior whilst running some benchmarks with Bioshock infinite (crashes), is there a specific driver version that's recommended at the moment or is it safe to just use the latest ones all the time?

I had some similar issues with freezing or the game randomly slowing/jittering at times using the same drivers you've got. Ended up blowing them away, cleaning everything out in safe mode with Driver Fusion, and installing the previous 314.07 WHQL Nvidia drivers. So far, so good, no issues even with a decent overclock.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Miffler posted:

That's a hell of a cooler. :staredog:

EVGA makes some pretty great stuff, love that dual fan cooler. I know some folks prefer the reference coolers that exhaust air out of the case but drat, as long as you got enough airflow, that heatsink/fan combo does a better job and looks to be a bit quieter than the ol' "dustbuster" cooler.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Klyith posted:

Man, I want your life. Got a pretty great video card that's clogged with dust? gently caress it, throw that poo poo away and drop 650 bones on a new one.

Checking your video card for dust is not some kind of rocket surgery. If you have one with a blower style cooler, there will be a couple obvious screws on the top side of the card that you can remove to pop off the plastic shroud. With the shroud off, you will probably see a gently caress-ton of dust blocking the airflow. Blowers are really susceptible to dust, any case without filters they will eventually clog up. If it's a top-mounted fan (or dual fan) seeing the dust will be even easier, though you still may need to remove the shroud to really clean it well.

It less unlikely to be a thermal paste issue, the card isn't very old and they slather that stuff on pretty good in the factory.

With the blower style heatsinks, taking off the shroud and getting into the fins with a medium bristle toothbrush does wonders (maybe get it slightly damp with a little rubbing/denatured alcohol to help clean some out). Definitely helps to get into the heatsink fins more easily too, and doesn't hurt to put on some new thermal paste if it's been a while. I'll usually clean the old off and put new stuff on maybe twice a year just to be safe.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Sepist posted:

My 660ti is going to a black screen then returning a second later when it gets over 55 degrees celcius with less than 70% fan speed, is that normal without overclocking? I can circumvent this by having the video card fan go to 70% and set all of the stock fans on my phantom case at full speed. A nvidia driver infected with a bitcoin miner was running on it for 2 days before I found it which I'm afraid damaged the card :T

Blow away the drivers and see if you can find a way to get rid of the miner - not sure if it'd be considered as malware or virus-related but couldn't hurt to run a scan with a tool like Malwarebytes. If nothing else, see if you can find out what the miner is called and do some searches to find out how to get rid of it. And honestly, I wouldn't download any drivers outside the ones direct from Nvidia, especially if you got yours from a sketchy third party site.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Factory Factory posted:

314 has given me no clocking problems, and HL2 doesn't crash. :ms:

I think Nvidia has recommended people using the latest drivers (and having problems) roll back to the last stable 314 WHQL drivers. I've been using the 314.22's for a while now and haven't had so much as a hiccup with them, but the 320 revisions all gave me issues of some sort in my games (freezing, unstable overclocks, artifacts).

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Daysvala posted:

GPU-Z seems to corroborate what MSI Afterburner is saying about the fan speed, and it sounds like a leaf blower is running in the room so I guess it's probably running the fan at what it claims the speed is.

Yeah I have one of those reference blowers that exhaust out the back. My case seems to have sufficient airflow, but I can't check to see if the blower is clogged because one of the screws that secures the blower to the card came improperly manufactured and I can't get a screwdriver head to catch.

Are you able to pop off the heatsink/fan shroud independent of the heatsink itself? I know some older GTX cards could do that so you could clean out the heatsink and fan without removing the entire heatsink itself, so it's worth a shot. Usually just have to squeeze the card at the edges to pop away some tabs so the shroud comes loose. Other than that, are you using a regular screwdriver to try to get the heatsink screws loose? Might be worth a shot to get a mini set of them if you haven't already, I have a set and it's just a cheap little Stanley 6 piece but they work perfectly for video card screws. If you can get the heatsink loose, definitely worth a shot to clean off any old paste and reapply some new stuff to see if that helps out.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT
quote /= edit

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Gonkish posted:

I had a 9800 Pro and that thing was amazing at the time. I remember thinking that the heatsink was HUGE. :v:

Before PCI-E was really mainstream, I still remember some of the GeForce 6000 series having those smaller dustbuster type coolers that were dual slot and people being like ":argh: I'M LOSING A PCI SLOT". Although those 6000 series cards (and the Radeon series from the same era) were pretty badass for the time. Back when you could look at benchmarks and see a HUGE difference between card generations/series, where nowadays it doesn't seem as significant between each one IMHO. I remember going form a GF3 Ti500 card to a GF4 Ti4600 and it loving blew me away how much better it performed.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Agreed posted:

MSI did that on some of the 6950s iirc, really a factory feature since validation was apparently spotty on them and it was handy to be able to switch it down to a 6950 for sale if necessary. This looks a lot neater and if EVGA decides that supporting BIOS mods is cool then that could be really interesting in terms of pushing conventional OC limits. Lift some of those draconian voltage limitations. Seriously, 38 microvolts worth of adjustment on the GTX 780? That's it? With 265W to work with? Get the gently caress outta here...

Sapphire did it with some of their cards, I have a dual fan 6970 that has the switchable BIOS that has some "unlocked" features, mainly allows for higher voltages. I use the standard BIOS and even with that, I can still unlock voltages and get some good clocks out of it. Currently running it at 1.01Ghz core and 1.5Ghz memory (6Ghz effective) and it's a really solid card for everything I've played thus far. I'm sure other manufacturers have done similar things with a switchable BIOS option, it's really not a new idea from what I've noticed.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Rosoboronexport posted:

Did you unlock voltage control from the Afterburner settings?

This, and with Afterburner you can check the config file as well to enable the "unofficial" overclock settings. Close Afterburner, go into its install folder, find the MSIAfterburner.cfg file, open in Notepad and change the value for EnableUnofficialOverclocking to 1. Re-open and test, should let you modify and save voltages.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT
Man, Nvidia seems like they're having a string of terrible luck with their drivers lately. It's like an on-and-off thing with them, I remember back when I had a GTX 465, the only drivers that played games smoothly in my rig at the time were the Forceware 175.19 drivers - any more recent ones after that caused massive slowdowns in certain parts of games where I'd never seen it before. A good example was playing BioShock 1 & 2, any areas that had any fog/dust effects would get laggy and jittery, and even some of the other smoke and fire effects looked "off" in comparison.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Sir Unimaginative posted:

It's basically a complete software/utility suite now; a lot of stuff is offloaded to the CPU so the GPU can do only GPU things and most CPUs have more than enough headroom (unless you're still running a Core 2 something).

Also it has HDMI audio drivers and 3D and PhysX abstraction layers included.

For the record: 326.41 .exe and 327.23 WU are both over 230 megabytes.

It could be worse: unlike printer drivers there's allegedly some minor utility from GPU drivers and packages of that size.

Exactly this - before, when Nvidia did their old "basic" drivers, they weren't including different video formats (HDMI/DisplayPort), didn't include audio for cards that support it over HDMI, didn't have a lot of features (if any) in their Control Panel, didn't have PhysX, didn't have SLI, among many, many other features that are now supported. A driver that just supports DVI and SVGA and has a basic Control Panel for adjusting graphic settings isn't comparable to any driver package currently, it's apples to oranges.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Gonkish posted:

Sounds like industrial yield to me. RMA that sucker, try another one. Bad parts happen, unfortunately. Don't condemn a manufacturer for one bad fault (unless they're selling power supplies, because one single fault in those can ruin everything).

Eh, I got lucky with an old Enermax one like 15 years ago, it lasted about 2 years and a capacitor failed, sent sparks out the back and stunk up my bedroom. Fortunately it didn't kill anything else, I had a spare and all my other parts tested normally...I think it depends on what part of the supply fails as to whether it causes a chain reaction and fries everything.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT
Dammit, I think I jinxed myself with this power supply talk...pretty sure mine just failed on me last night. No crazy light shows or anything, I'd been gaming for a couple hours and all of a sudden everything just shut off without warning. I thought my video card went out initially because I got the "no signal" message on the monitor but the whole PC just shut down completely. Surge protector it's plugged into is only a few months old, everything else connected to it is working without a hitch. Surprised too, power supply is a decent Antec TPQ 850 watt, partially modular, had it for a few years with no hiccups whatsoever. I didn't smell anything that indicated anything fizzled out inside the unit, unfortunately I don't have a spare PSU so I gotta get a new one and hope for the best. Pretty sure everything is OK, even after I unplugged it and let it sit overnight, I tried powering on again and the power blips on for a split second then cuts off, the fans spin a little and the motherboard still has the green LED on indicating it's getting juice. Freakin' sucks :sigh:

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

sether01 posted:

If you have an extra cable that connects to the video card from your psu you could try that. I had the exact same thing happen a few days ago with my 3 month old Seasonic x650. I was playing ARMA3 and testing different gfx settings when everything just shut down.

I left the power cable unplugged for around 40 minutes then plugged it back in, and the exact same thing happened as you, it would blip for a moment, then nothing. If I unplugged the pci express cable going to my gtx770, it would boot with an error saying "Plug in your video card stupid!"

So I replaced the cable, and it booted up fine. I'm not sure if the cable has been defective this entire time, and has been what has causing my stability issues or not, but so far so good.

Edit: Writing that down made me realize something. Should I be using 2 cables coming out from the powersupply to the two plugins on my videocard? Right now, and before, I'm using a single cable which has 2 plugs on the videocard end. Would that make any difference or am I over thinking it?

I ended up borrowing a 750W PSU from a friend who had a spare PC he wasn't using at the moment - turns out the video card was the culprit, not the PSU. I had an old GTX 465 laying around, when I plugged it into the board with the original PSU I thought died (and tested with the 750W), it powered on fine and everything booted like normal. Put the newer card back in, no boot from either power supply, so I think the card is toast. No idea what happened, it's been humming along great for months, never went over 70°C, and just went kaput after playing Bioshock Infinite for about 2 hours. Time to get in touch with Sapphire and hope the RMA process is easy, the card is registered and has a 2 year warranty, wondering if I just got a dud somehow. The main trouble is there's no indication of what went wrong - no damaged parts on the card that I could see, no power cables came unplugged or shorted out, so I'll leave it up to the manufacturer to find out and hopefully send a replacement out quick.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

fuckpot posted:

Should I always be looking to have the latest Catalyst drivers? I just upgraded from 13.4 to 13.9 and have been experiencing more CTDs than I am used to (almost none except in Fallout:NV). I tried the 13.11 beta drivers and they seem to be flakey as well. For some reason I hate using old drivers but they seemed to work better. What's the consensus on the best Catalyst drivers at the moment?

I have an ASUS 7970 and 64 bit Windows7 if that matters.

edit: bought some more bits

For me, I usually check reviews and performance before jumping on a driver update, especially if the ones I'm using at the time are stable and don't have any issues. Before I had to RMA my 6970, I didn't notice anything different between the 13.4 and 13.9 Catalyst drivers when I updated, and I think outside the frame pacing stuff, there wasn't anything majorly different between the two.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

deimos posted:

So I upgraded Windows to 8.1 and got the 3d Stereoscopic crap Factory Factory mentioned but now my SLI flat out refuses to turn on. Any ideas?

I did a quick Google search and it looks like this isn't an uncommon issue - people with desktops and laptops have had graphics issues with SLI since upgrading to 8.1. Nvidia released a 326.01 driver for Win8.1, maybe remove the existing drivers and do a clean install with the new ones?

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

veedubfreak posted:

Just a gentle reminder, the r9 280x is a 7970. It even crossfires with the 7970. Remember this when making decisions.

Which makes me wonder how many of their other mid-to-low range cards will be rebranded 7000 series GPUs, maybe just cherry-picked ones that are guaranteed to run at higher clocks with better stability. Like, will the 270x be a rebranded 7950 or perhaps a 7870 GHz edition?

On a better note, got an e-mail today that my replacement 6970 shipped out, hopefully it'll be here by the weekend!

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT
Has anyone tried toggling the power modes in the Nvidia Control Panel to see if their power saving features might be causing instability? Didn't see it mentioned, and I know with my Radeon card the ULPS setting would lower the clocks but caused weird screen flickering in 2D mode, so I disabled it both with MSI Afterburner and a quick reg hack. I wonder if turning the power mode from Adaptive to Max Performance would make a difference, or if a reg hack might kill some of those issues. I did a quick search and found a couple articles, one is for notebooks specifically so not entirely sure how relevant it could be to someone using a desktop:

http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/19134-gpu-downclocking-for-no-apparent-reason-disable-powermizer/
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6413172337?page=24
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/495286/how-to-disable-power-saving-mode-on-2nd-card-in-sli-/

Might even be worth checking some of the Windows hidden user profile folders - I remember some older Radeon 6000 series cards had a couple video profile hacks that talked about editing an XML file in C:\Users\<name>\AppData\Local\ATI\ACE, so maybe Nvidia has a similar area you can locate some sort of file and modify the card's clocks so they stay the same regardless of changes from 2D to 3D.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

8astard0 posted:

Holy poo poo. Possibly a good time to look at those EK waterblocks.

As another poster mentioned, might be good to see if some of those cards have similar reference board designs that can use existing aftermarket coolers. I'd hope that since the 280x is just a rebranded 7970, any cooler that fits the 7970 would work with a 280x, but not sure about the 290/290x cards. Guess it's worth a shot, probably just need to take some measurements for the screw holes on the cooler and the size of the PCB to see what could potentially work.

Additionally, has anyone with Nvidia problems recently tried any full-on OCD type driver removal? When I went from my Nvidia cards to using an HD6970, I not only did the typical steps to remove the Nvidia stuff (uninstall drivers, boot to safe mode, clean with CCleaner/Driver Sweeper, install fresh AMD drivers) but went through CCleaner and a couple other registry cleaning tools to make sure ALL the Nvidia entries were cleaned out thoroughly. I figure it might be worth a shot for anyone that had newer Nvidia driver problems and want to roll back, to wipe everything as clean as possible before doing a reinstall and see if that makes a difference. So far I've never had a problem with a driver upgrade/downgrade, it takes a few minutes longer but it's worth it to me if there's no issues with BSODs or other performance quirks.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

K8.0 posted:

I have a Sapphire 7950, one of the 950mhz ones. It's about a year old and from the day I got it I figured the fans were going to be trouble because it sounded just a bit off to me. Now at least one of the fans is really hosed and making a ton of noise under load. I don't think replacing fans is an option since they're some oddly mounted low-profile fans. I could RMA it (and I have another video card I could live with for the RMA period) or I could get an aftermarket cooler. I'm curious as to people's experiences with Sapphire customer service, aftermarket coolers that would go on this card, and in general what you might do in this situation.

Had to RMA my 6970 recently when it completely shut down my PC and stopped working altogether. Sent the RMA info over to Sapphire's support, got a response back within 48 hours, sent the card info and they approved the RMA. Only downside was having to send back at my own cost, but even then, they sent me a replacement out less than a week after I sent the bad one in. So overall, I had a good experience, less than 2 weeks turnaround between the time I put the RMA in and got another card sent. I guess it's up to you, you could RMA, or get a different aftermarket cooler, but probably cheaper to RMA (I spent all of $19 sending via USPS Priority with insurance).

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Rahu X posted:

Quick question for you guys.

If I end up getting a GTX 780, should I go for the EVGA with the ACX cooler, or the MSI with the Twin Frozr cooler?

Most reviews I'm seeing on either are rather back and forth in terms of temps. The MSI does seem to be generally quieter though, but the EVGA isn't unbearable by any stretch.

Personally I'd go for EVGA - nothing against MSI, but EVGA has had pretty consistently good build quality, great warranty, and some other nice perks (I think they still do their upgrade program as well). I've had a bunch of EVGA cards and never had issues with them, and most people have preferred them as a "go to" for Nvidia cards.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT
With regard to your video problems - does your PSU have additional 6/8 pin PCI-E connectors that you could try? Have you noticed anything on the motherboard itself around the PCI-E slots? Other than that, I agree with the others on trying a different cable, or hell, if you're using DVI, check the cable for bent pins and the monitor connection for any damage. I've seen weird color flashes and graphics corruption when pins get damaged on the cable, or the port on the monitor itself is messed up somehow. I dunno if anything else could cause it (perhaps motherboard drivers?) but I'd start with the most obvious things first.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Rahu X posted:

Yep. I uninstalled them, cleaned them up with CCleaner, then even cleaned them in Safe Mode with Driver Sweeper. I even made sure to remove the AMD drivers I have for my current replacement before installing the GPU and NVIDIA drivers. No dice.

Before anyone mentions reformatting and re-installing Windows, I've tried that before and got the same issues on my GTX 580 upon installing the drivers, so I doubt that will fix anything.


Just finished doing so. Came up clean, no issues.



Also, small update, I gave my GTX 580 to one of my friends to test and see if he gets the same issues on his system. In the meantime, I'll probably go ahead and send the GTX 780 in for replacement. I'll keep you guys updated when I get more information, and if the GTX 580 turns out to be fine, I'll continue testing with that.

I'm really hoping I won't have to get a new motherboard, as I just got this one back in March.

Just an idea - do you have another monitor you can test with? LCD or otherwise? Before assuming it's the board or card, I wonder if your monitor is on the fritz. You'll probably be able to tell for sure once your friend tests the 580 card, if it works on his system, I'd see if a different display has the same problems.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Kaddish posted:

Whelp. I broke and bought a 780 today. I've been thinking about getting something with more than 2GB anyway and the price difference between a 770 4GB didn't seem worth it. Anyone want a just fine for everyone who isn't crazy 660 ti?

Does your board have more than 1 or 2 PCI-E slots, and do you have a PSU that can handle a second card? Toss that 660Ti in and dedicate tp PhysX processing, see if it helps with some games. Lots of folks here have been doing that, but if not, you can probably get some decent scratch for it selling on SA Mart or something.

Tgent posted:

I've had a look around and it seems that's likely. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to stop it apart from stopping windows from getting any new hardware drivers at all.

Set Windows Update to download the drivers, but to NOT install them right away. I've done that for a while now because of some driver issues, and other updates I didn't want or need auto-installing without my choosing. I keep it that way so I get a notice of the updates, but can still choose what to install versus having everything install automatically and bork something up.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

dog nougat posted:

drat, the 290 for $400 it's really enticing. Kind of a shame about the stock cooler being a bit obnoxious. I'm very seriously considering dropping the $$ on one one the custom cooled version become available, but I wish EVGA made AMD hardware. I was looking at the Sapphire version of the 290, are they a recommended AMD card manufacturer? I'm also really tempted on waiting to see what Maxwell offers, just so I could snag an EVGA card. I recently upgraded to 2560 x 1440 and my 570 is barely cutting it.

AMD has quite a few different companies that use their cards - Sapphire seems to be a big one, but Gigabyte, MSI, Powercolor, Asus and a few others all have variants of AMD cards. I have a Sapphire HD 6970 with the dual fan/heatpipe cooler and it's actually a LOT quieter than the reference design, and cooler to boot. I haven't seen it get above low 70s when I game and usually keep the fan speed around 60-65% tops, usually around 40% for everyday use.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Setzer Gabbiani posted:

Me neither, it's everything you could want from a $300 7970



It's died once already, one of the fans grinded itself to death, and both Newegg and Sapphire told me gently caress off when trying to redeem the elusive warranty I see people swear by for either problem. Dumping it for a 290X this Christmas will be the most satisfying thing ever

Weird, I recently had my 6970 completely go dead on me after a few months, and Sapphire never had any issue with replacing it. Just *poof* my whole PC shut down after gaming for like an hour and a half, thankfully I had a spare card and it worked. But the RMA process for Sapphire was quick, had the RMA in with the card info, they sent back the RMA number and shipping instructions within a couple days, and I had my old card out and new card back in less than 2 weeks (so maybe 3 weeks total turnaround).

I got pretty detailed with what happened and what I tried to fix my problem, so no idea if that helped at all. When did you buy your card? I was under the impression they all had at least a 2 year warranty on them, mine still had almost a year and a half left on warranty.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

yanthrax posted:

I'm an amblyope and left eye dominant, and on a whim I decided to swap my primary monitor to the center, and put the secondary off to the left corner of my desk, so the screen lies more in my dominant periphery. One thing I've always noticed is when I watch a video, or play a game or something, if I throw it on the secondary screen, the performance is usually a bit choppier. It almost seemed like it had to do with the refresh rate on the secondary monitor, but Windows is reporting it as 60Hz. I thought maybe it was just a busted monitor, but I swapped the two inputs and now the issue is on my formerly primary monitor (left). By switching the inputs I've figured it has to do with the output on my GPU, but is this typical behavior? I noticed it when I was rocking a 560Ti, and it's still prevalent now with a 770GTX.

At this point it's more of an annoyance than a dealbreaker, since I just use my second screen for browsing the internet anyway but it'd be nice to use for XBMC if I could make this go away.

Are both your monitors the same size/model/brand? I'm wondering if one may have a slower refresh rate than the other and could be causing the choppiness. Either that, or tweak around with some settings to see if there's anything obvious causing it. With the choppiness, is it like a screen tearing type issue, or something similar to when a video camera is recording a screen and you can see scrolling?

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

cat doter posted:

Speaking of computer anxiety, does anyone else have that moment of mild panic when plugging in a new GPU and waiting for your monitor to get a signal? It's always the worst part of upgrading. I've only ever had one DOA GPU too.

Not just with video cards, but with ANY upgrade, or even a fresh build when I first get things together and power up to test. The inevitable thrill afterward of feeling like Dr. Frankenstein and bellowing "IT'S ALIVE! ALLLLIIIIVVVVVVVVVEEEEEEE!!" is fantastic though...that is, until you realize "well, here go another few hours of installing drivers/software...."

Zero VGS posted:

Just temporarily I'm going to try to SLA two 770's on my 620w PSU. Nothing is being overclocked, I just want to see if I can get SLA running and experience it before deciding if I want to keep both cards and invest in a 1000w PSU.

- What happens if things get hairy... does the computer just do a hard reset if the GPUs draw too much, or will worse things happen?

- Is it possible to cap what the cards can draw, like with a combination of underclocking/undervolting?

- For crap like browsing the forums / Windows Explorer, are both cards working half as hard, or is one in a kind of standby while the other does the work?

First, I wouldn't advise throwing two 770s on a 620W supply...even if it works, there's no telling for how long. Might be a good idea to look at the amperages for each card and compare to the total amps your supply can provide to get a good idea of whether or not it'll work. But:

- If things get hairy, the power supply could fail, which usually ends up being anything from the machine shutting off and refusing to come back on, to smoke/spark/etc. coming out and possibly shorting out other components

- You *might* be able to underclock the cards and draw a little less power, not sure how much it'll help depending on their combined power draw

- Usually for 2D applications, cards will run in a lower power/lower clock speed mode and then ramp up for 3D gaming. Not entirely sure about SLI but I'd assume the main card would do the work and the secondary might go into an idle state

BOOTY-ADE fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Nov 26, 2013

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

PC LOAD LETTER posted:

Uninstall old drivers> turn off pc and install new card> reboot and reinstall latest drivers

Should work fine after that.

This, but might be good to boot the PC into Safe Mode after installing the new card, run Driver Sweeper/Fusion to clear all the old stuff out, then boot into normal mode and reload drivers.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Sepist posted:

This ended up being fixed by using the DisplayPort with a HDMI adapter, so I guess the HDMI port is shot on my card.

Have you tried another HDMI cable to see if the one you had was the problem?

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Rakthar posted:

The prevailing theory I read was the issue may caused by the power management introduced in the 680. Most people that complain in threads seem to have the 680, but the 670 can be affected too. I didn't find many complaints about the 7 series cards.

If you google search "geforce 680 stutter" you'll find most of the threads I read, you're welcome to draw your own conclusions.

Makes me wonder if it's a similar issue to what some AMD/ATI users had with HD 6xxx cards - the ULPS feature would lower the clocks in 2D mode but would sometimes cause weird screen flickering, regardless of what was being done. I had the issue with an old 6850 card, and even after that with a 6970, and the "fix" was disabling ULPS with the MSI Afterburner and via registry key. Just a really odd issue, I thought initially my cards were bad because I'd never seen issues like that unless the card was either dying or had an unstable overclock.

I picked up a 670 FTW recently from a friend who upgraded to a 780 (somehow got a deal on Amazon for $300, wish I'd seen that and snagged one) and haven't had any issues thus far. Overclocks pretty well on stock and I was surprised how cool it stays, usually idles around 27ºC and even during gaming with the fan at 55% fixed, I've never seen it go above low 60s playing stuff like Bioshock:Infinite @ 1920x1080 with pretty much everything maxed out.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

cat doter posted:

Are there commercially available similar coolers? I can't just buy sapphire's custom cooler right?

I wish, honestly - I think more card manufacturers could probably make a quick buck by selling their custom cooling solutions on their own. Asus, Gigabyte, Zotac, Sapphire and a few other brands have been making some pretty sweet coolers, it'd be nice to go online and purchase just the cooler itself. It's kinda the reason I usually wait for other vendors to come out with their versions of cards, versus getting the reference card and then spending extra later...the cost difference with say, an Asus DCU custom card and a stock reference card with an aftermarket cooler separately are probably close to the same.

Also, loving the poo poo out of the 670FTW I scored from my buddy, I cleaned it out real good, put some new paste on, and so far it's overclocked with no problem to 1110 core/1650 memory. Runs through all my games and stress tests without any issue at full 1080p resolution. Noticed during stress testing with Valley/Heaven and with Furmark that the core clock was going WAY higher than what the boost said it would - right now GPU-Z shows the boost as being 1189, but Furmark and Valley show the core hitting around 1230-ish during peak load. Only downside is the blower style cooler, but it's nice since it's exhausting any hot air outside the case, versus the old 6970 I had that was dual fan and kept most the heat inside.

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BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Factory Factory posted:

The block/pump assembly isn't the problem; it's the clearance of the decorative part of the mounting bracket and the extra fan you install to cool VRMs and whatnot that the CPU block doesn't cover.

I honestly don't get why a company would make something like that with such an odd design. If it was simply to throw their brand name on, they could put it on any where on the bracket without needing that goofy part that sticks out and takes up room. Factory Factory had the right idea in cutting that little part off, probably would make it easer to use a 2nd card if he didn't have a smaller case that was already kinda cramped.

I'm thinking with the VRM cooling part and the choice of fans, the best route for anyone with dual cards would be the slim fans, and having a case with at least one side panel fan that could blow in right over the cards. I'm still using my Antec 300 Illusion case and that single side 120mm intake is a blessing, especially a while back when I was running 2 GTX 465 cards in SLI and there wasn't much room between them for airflow.

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