R7 260x help/ best drivers?

karma charger

karma charger

Member
hey guys, i recently upgraded from my dying 4870 (may she rest in peace:() and decided to go with the R7 260x. in hindsight i should've just went with the R9 270 but it's too late now and now i'm stuck with this devil of a card. don't get me wrong, this thing has great power, it's just that AMD can't make drivers to save their lives. i started out on the 13.12WHQL drivers and everything was running fine until one day i noticed that if i left my computer idle for too long that when i tried to play a fullscreen game the computer would lock up with just a black screen. it didn't bother me too much until recently when it started to do this without it even being idle. i would boot up and it would freeze right away. so i decided to go to the 13.20WHQL drivers, and thy seemed to be fine. didn't freeze right away and barely ever does, but the performance is terrible. i had to set all my games to low-medium settings just to get 40 frames. so my question here is is there any drivers that actually run the R7 260X decently? or is there a quick fix for this? anything that can solve this problem. my specs are:

ASUS R7 260X OC EDITION
Phenom II x4 955 BE
8GB 1333Mhz G.Skill RAM
600W Raidmax PSU
MSI 760G MOBO

thanks in advance guys.
 
Okedokey

Okedokey

Well-Known Member
Dude, you're really not going to like this, if you can monitor the 12V rail. That PSU is garbage with a total of 432W on the 12V rail, however the kicker is the ATX2.2 standard essentially traps 22A for the CPU, leaving only really 432W - 22A = 14A for the rest of your system.

The 260X has a TDP of 115W (9.6A) leaving only ~4.4A IF the PSU could run at max, which it cannot.

So, by the time you derate (around 4W per oC above 25oC), your PSU is maxed out (even without overclocking). This IMO is almost certainly the cause of your issue.

If I were you id test the 12V rail amperage and 12V stability with a multimeter while running 3Dmark. If you have a spare $50, upgrade to this Corsair 600W which can deliver a full 46A on the 12V rail (thats 552W).

Sorry mate, you probably killed your last GPU with a crappy PSU, and your current instability is very very likely to be poor power. You're essentially browning out. This can cause the very issues that you describe from GPU downclocking (insufficinet amperage), freezes, instability and data loss, and if you continue to run it like that you're likely to kill the CPU, motherboard, GPU or RAM.

Even this $30 Corsair 430W is better than what you have as it can deliver the full 32A on the 12V rail, plenty for your system, but id rather spend the extra 20 bucks and get another 14A.
 
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karma charger

karma charger

Member
I hate to say you're wrong, but you're wrong. This PSU is really nice. I've recommended it to all the people who have asked me for a decent PSU and they never have a problem. In fact, my friend has the 500w version of this PSU and has an R9 270X and runs everything fine with benchmarks hitting even higher than what we've seen from other people. My old 4870 ran perfectly fine on this PSU for 2 years straight and ran on a 430W PSU before that for 3 years. (the card was 5 years for god's sake, it had it's time and died because of age, nothing more. The fan even fell off the card) plus the 4870 ran perfectly fine with no freezing or anything like i am having now. and the 4870 ran at 150w compared to 115w from the R7 260X. I also took out my R7 260X and put my friend's R9 270X and it ran perfectly fine. It's not the PSU, this thing is great. It's a driver issue as usual on AMD's end. asked around and a few other people with the R7 260X are having the same problem. Looked around on the internet and lots of people are having this problem. I just wanted to see if anyone found a good driver from a manufacturer that works or what not. btw here's a link to the PSU just to make sure we're thinking of the same one.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817152041

thanks for your help though, I know you're all just trying to help, but I can guarantee that it isn't the PSU, it's a driver issue.
 
Okedokey

Okedokey

Well-Known Member
The PSU is garbage, however you may be right about the drivers. *edit*

I was looking at the older RM 600, however that one is still questionable. I would still be testing the 12V rail stability.

If you think it is drivers, then uninstall all the drivers the normal method, restart, use DriverSweeper to clean up remnant driver entries and then restart again before installing the latest drivers.

Good luck with that.
 
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karma charger

karma charger

Member
I'll do a quick check of the 12V rail. never got around to doing it in the first place haha. But yeah, that's my problem, I've tried all the drivers and none of them seem to work.
 
Okedokey

Okedokey

Well-Known Member
karma charger said:
I'll do a quick check of the 12V rail. never got around to doing it in the first place haha. But yeah, that's my problem, I've tried all the drivers and none of them seem to work.
Click to expand...

Youll need to monitor + and - 12V rail from a molex connector underload for at least 30 minutes using something like 3DMark11 on loop.
 
karma charger

karma charger

Member
Actually, before i checked the 12V rail, i decided to check out the drivers ooone last time. Turns out the 13.11 Beta 9.5V drivers work great. Fixed all of my problems. I'll still check out the 12V rail though.
 
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