GPU Issue

g4m3rof1337

g4m3rof1337

Active Member
Recently, I've been experiencing problems with my older 8800GT, I bought it not even a year ago, and a few weeks ago, I decided to SLI.

Anyways, I started running into Display Driver issues when gaming, and also when I would boot up, after the BIOS screen would show up, my monitor would just show a black back lit screen.

I took out my older gpu and just kept my newer one in, and I booted up just fine, and I found out recently that there are problems with NVIDIA and their cards not working after a year or so..


I may start considering going over to ATI.
 
I haven't touched any of the cards overclocking wise.


I just went into COD4, and I didn't get any Display Driver issues, like I got when I was using the older card.



I don't want to get another 8800GT, since I may run into this problem later on down the road, and I don't want to go to the 9 Series, since it's practically the 8 Series.
 
No I meant are the stock clocks the same. I think standard is 600mhz GPU and 900/1800mhz memory on a 8800GT. If one stock clock is higher then the other put it in the bottom slot, the slower card in the top. Have you tried the old card by itself?
 
Alright, both cards work and boot up individually, I didn't check if I get the Display issue with the older card by itself.

I then tried to boot with both of them installed, and couldn't get past the BIOS, so I unplugged my flexible SLI bridge, and got past it, but then I had to restart, and ran into the same problem, so I took out the older card, and booted up on one card just fine.
 
Hmm, so it isn't an SLI problem? Are you sure it's the 'older' card?

You could run ATI tool on each of the cards individually to test them for stability.
 
Well, when I play COD4, my screen will blink black once I join a server, and then it'll tell me that my Display drivers or something stopped working, when I took the old out, I didn't experience that.


I'll try the ATI program tomorrow.


Thanks.
 
I would try a different driver version. hed a similair problem with CF, where during a game the screen would go black for a few seconds and it turned back to windows, saying there was a problem with the driver and it had been restored. (havnt had the problem anymore since Ive updated drivers)
and if you already have the latest drivers, try older ones ;)
 
g4m3rof1337 said:
Alright, both cards work and boot up individually, I didn't check if I get the Display issue with the older card by itself.

I then tried to boot with both of them installed, and couldn't get past the BIOS, so I unplugged my flexible SLI bridge, and got past it, but then I had to restart, and ran into the same problem, so I took out the older card, and booted up on one card just fine.
Click to expand...

Yea thats odd. Like Arch said. It sounds like a Nvidia GPU or your boards chipset driver issue. Have you got the latest of both installed? In SLI its not got your monitor running a weird refresh rate is it?
 
I have the latest NVIDIA drivers, and I'm pretty sure it's not a refresh rate issue, since I didn't encounter the blinking screen problem when I ran the second newer card by itself.



I don't mind switching to ATI, but I want to know if one 4870 will be good for awhile, then crossfire.




Thanks.
 
It will be good for a while. I just played through all of CoD4 two nights ago, all on the highest settings, and not one bit of lag throughout the whole game. Also let my friend play, so there was about 15hrs of straight gameplay with no problems.

Last night I played GRID at its highest settings for 6 hours with no lag.

Then did the same for Crysis with all settings at high. Didnt know there was a very high setting, so ill be playing through it again on that.

I think youll be happy with a 4870. Just dont forget to to make a few profiles.
 
I'll try switching my GPUs in SLI, and see what happens.


So, I'll put the older one on the bottom, instead of having it on the top.
 
So I switched the cards, and it booted up and everything seems fine, but the blinking monitor thing happened once, when I went into a game..




It's an on and off problem, right now, I'm running both cards with the bridge connected..

I thought it was a mobo issue, since both cards worked individually, but now I'm running both.. Could this be a hard drive issue?



Thanks.
 
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Could this be a hard drive issue?
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Very unlikely. I'd suspect a faulty mobo/GPU over that... I know, it's running fine now, but sometimes it just happens that a bit of tinkering around fixes it temporarily, then it starts playing up again, and so on until noting gets it working... see how it works for now, if no problems appear, it's probably something you'd expect from Windows every now and again, but if it happens again, you can start suspecting a hardware problem.
 
Can you try another PSU, because 2 x 20A rails for that system is a little weak imo. It is also possible (if you are using a 32bit OS, especially Vista) that you are running out of memory allocation space. I would try and remove 2GB of system memory (RAM) and see if that helps. This would be confirmed if you can run COD4 in safe mode.
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Either way, these two areas are where i would investigate further.
 
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Well, I'll see if I get the same problem with the new drive. I'm also running 64 bit Ultimate. Would adding a PSU be the same as trying another one? I can try and use a more powerful PSU, but yeah.

If it's a mobo issue, I'll have EVGA send out another mobo to see it that helps.





Thanks.
 
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