Gfx card or PSU trouble, need some help.

So in anticipation of BF3 yesterday I installed the latest driver. Played wow for a bit, then it suddenly crashed. No biggie, just reboot and keep going right.... Wrong. Kept getting the kernel driver was restarted and just a few seconds in game and it froze up, sometimes it just rebooted.

So I did some testing, as long as I didn't start up anything that required 3d graphics(Plants vs Zombies ran fine for 30+ minutes), I was ok. Checked the temp of my cpu and my gfx card, no problem. Uninstalled the latest drivers and went back to the previous ones I had(clean install, used a tool to get rid of all remnants before installin). Still no joy.

So I grab my old 260GTS(or was it 250) that I kept just for situations like this. Remove all drivers put in my old card, boot up, install the latest drivers. Reboot, and it gets to the point just before login and it freezes. Starts fine in safe mode, but not on my life in normal.

So i read a bit on the Zotac forums. Apparently there is a problem with the vCore being a bit low on those cards, so I grab MSI afterburner and up it to 1.0025v(or whatever was recomended). Still no joy.

Now I'm thinking that since my old card which I did replace because I wanted something with more horsepower not because it was bad doesn't work in my computer, it has to be another component. I'm thinking my 700W PSU Coolmaster, it's about 2ish years old same as my motherboard. Unfortunately I do not have a replacement to try, but it's the cheapest component to replace. 700 W should be enough for a Geforce 580 GTX, 2 SSD disks, one regular and a DVD, right? The 700W have served me well with the rig for the last 6 months since I bought the graphics card, so it worked for 6 month so it should be enough?

Any tips anyone have to check if it really is my PSU that is the problem, or any other tricks I might try to get it to work?

They have power supply testers that we use here at work... they are cheap and check Mb connecctors and graphics card connectors.

Easy to use

Google Link

That is a great tip, gonna order myself one of those. Unfortunately nobody sells 'em around where I live, or something like it. So I did it the old fashioned way with a multimeter. All voltages are within the tolerances. So I guess it's not the PSU after all.

So gonna try to do a repair of my win 7 installation, if that doesn't fix it, I'm gonna see if any of my friends are home this evening and try my gfx card in their PC, and if that works I'll do a clean win 7 install.

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Originally Posted by Atrocious

That is a great tip, gonna order myself one of those. Unfortunately nobody sells 'em around where I live, or something like it. So I did it the old fashioned way with a multimeter. All voltages are within the tolerances. So I guess it's not the PSU after all.

So gonna try to do a repair of my win 7 installation, if that doesn't fix it, I'm gonna see if any of my friends are home this evening and try my gfx card in their PC, and if that works I'll do a clean win 7 install.

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This might not be it..it seems rather simple.. but whats happing to you happened to me one time.. almost exactly as you describe. Someone told me to take my PSU apart and clean it.. blow out all the dust and such.. I did that and it fixed it.

I'm gonna give that a try to. Desperate here. :) Thanks for all the tips so far folks!

OMG Lyonheart! I think your tip sorted me out. Opened the PSU cleaned it out with some compressed air, and right now I've flown from Hellfire Peninsula to Blade's edge mountain without a hitch....

Damn it! I spoke too soon. Ran well for 1 hr, then it started again....

on a psu using a multimeter will only give you the no load voltage. i beleive your issue is happening under load, and i'd put money on it being either the 12v rail or the 5v from the pcie. depending on what motherboard you have, there should be some sort of monitoring softare that came with it, open it up so you can see the voltages, and then fire up wow and see which one falls off. if your psu is a multi rail unit, you can more than likely just load a different rail, or balance it out. but this happening the same time as a driver update is kind of odd. have you tried doing a rollback (using the old drivers) and see if it still happens?other than that driver have you done windows update or anything? does it do it with a solo client as well?

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Originally Posted by jstanthr

have you tried doing a rollback (using the old drivers) and see if it still happens?

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nVidia drivers cannot be successfully rolled back and this is mentioned on page 27 of their documentation.
If the OP truly has a driver issue then he needs to make sure every possible prior existing driver is gone. I
can only recommend this guide even though it is horribly written (I plan to re-write that soon for d-b and
give the original author some credit). Once you're sure that all the prior driver garbage is off of your hard
drive then you can reinstall a fresh set. Also, do not install the nVidia surround driver or the HD Audio driver
if you're not using either one (most people aren't).

I realize you've probably already done what's listed in that guide since you said you used "a tool" to
remove the past drivers off of your hard drive. I'll assume the tool you used was a program called Driver
Sweeper. In a situation like this where I can't easily figure something out I'll resort to a full reinstall of
Windows and most of the time that fixes it. I hate to tell people to do that because not everyone has the
luxury of having their stuff on spare hard drives and reinstalling can be a real pain. If you're willing to take
the reinstall route I would do that if you don't have another PSU to swap into your system (most people
don't have a spare one lying around) -- You also get the nice fresh OS feeling where everything runs extra
fast although you do have an SSD.

Just to note, an nVidia GTX 580 requires a PSU that can handle 600W system-wide. A two year old 700W
PSU might be cutting it close these days depending on what components CoolerMaster actually used inside
of that thing and how much amperage is being output on the 12V rail. I realize you did test a
older/lower-end card as well and got the same results but, the damage to the PSU could have already
been done by the higher horsepower GTX 580 by that time -- It's hard to say.

For future reference, you can also download and install the Unigine Heaven GPU benchmarking program to
push your GPU load to its max for testing instead of having to load up a multiboxing team and fly around
the world seeing if you can get a crash.

I guess i should have specifically said uninstall/reinstall as i would never use the rollback feature anyway it's buggy at best. i was using rollback as a general term, didn't mean the exact feature sorry for the poor choice of words.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jstanthr

I guess i should have specifically said uninstall/reinstall as i would never use the rollback feature anyway it's buggy at best. i was using rollback as a general term, didn't mean the exact feature sorry for the poor choice of words.

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It's all good. I just wanted to clarify because some other random person might come across this thread
and try to actually use the Windows Rollback feature for their nVidia drivers.

One things is clear, it dies during high load. I found a nice stress test tool called Prime95. Altho my temp goes high, I am starting to think the problem is what MiRai says that the PSU can't handle the load, since sometimes it can run the stress test for a couple of minutes before it dies, other times it dies after just a few seconds.

Ordering a new 700W PSU today, hopefully I'll have it by tuesday.

IMO make sure whatever psu you get is preferably a modular single rail unit.

High quality units that are modular are fine. Some PSU manufacturers skimp on parts for their modular
units which can give a shitty connection at the plug. Modular used to be frowned upon back in the day
because of this but it's being accepted more and more these days.

Decided to just do a major upgrade anyway. Getting a new MB, CPU and PSU. Buying the same I've had the last two years, Cooler master 700W silent pro it's modular and single rail from what I can read. So in a few days I'll be up and running again.

Would it be a good idea to backup my entire wow directory, and just copy it back over after install to avoid patching up again?

Seems it was not the PSU after all, but the motherboard, so after installing a new MB and CPU, everything seems to run perfectly. At least I have a spare PSU laying around. :)