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 Posted: Mon, 22nd Dec 2008 17:57 Post subject: 8600GT problem, opinions needed! |
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Sigh. After 1.5 years of flawless operation, my GPU (?) started acting pretty strange today. Well, at least I think it's my GPU.
I'll try to make it short: I was playing King's Bounty, and all of a sudden, the game froze. I rebooted the comp, and continued playing, thinking the freezing was caused by a bug or something. Then maybe after 3 minutes of playing it happened again, the game froze and the music kept on looping. After a reboot I tried other games to see if it was some serious bug in the game, or some problem in my system that's causing it. Unfortunately, it turned out to be my system, as the result was the same with 2 of my other games I tried to run (Fallout 3, Guild Wars). Next step was to check whether my GPU is overheating, but it wasn''t (~60C when the games froze). After that I tried many different things, like updating drivers, directx, etc, but nothing worked.
The funny thing is that I can use the comp for web browsing, or pretty much any general activity, but as soon as I start something that uses D3D, the system shits itself even though every attribute I can monitor seems to be alright (various temps, voltage, etc).
And the most annoying thing is that it all happened overnight, last weekend everything was fine, and when I got back to my apartment and loaded up my game, the problem was already there. No warnings, freezes, crashes, blue screens, ect before that. Nothing. Go figure...
So what do you guys think? My GPU is dying on me, or can it be some other problem?
PS: I have 2gbs of system ram, that seem to work well, according to memcheck. Also, I didn't add anything new to the computer after I built it (1.5 years ago). It's still the same system, that had no problems whatsoever until now.
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| Posted: Tue, 23rd Dec 2008 01:55 Post subject: |
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Have you got another GPU you can quickly throw in and test? It doesn't have to be powerful, it won't matter about framerates, just something you can test and see if the system freeze occurs again.
Failing that, try completely uninstalling your current driver set and reinstalling.
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| Posted: Tue, 23rd Dec 2008 14:51 Post subject: |
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Hey, thanks for the reply! Unfortunately I don't have a spare GPU, I built this computer when my old GPU died.  Anyway, I did some more testing, mainly to rule out that my RAM is faulty (taking one of my two ram sticks out, switching them around etc). At least these tests proved that memory is not the issue. I'll try uninstalling/reinstalling my drivers to make sure, but I don't think that's the source of my troubles, as I had the same driver for some time and it was still the same when the problems started. I only installed a new one afterwards. It doesn't hurt to check though, so I will 
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| Posted: Tue, 23rd Dec 2008 14:53 Post subject: |
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Nah, it doesn't hurt to check .. and it'll only take a few minutes. Drivers, as with anything on Windows, can sometimes get corrupted -- at least this way you'll be able to rule out another possibility.
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| Posted: Tue, 23rd Dec 2008 15:08 Post subject: |
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Ah yes. After I put my RAM sticks back and started up the computer to see about that driver thingie, and half the screen was missing, and replaced with colorful crap. So yeah, my card was dying and it seems it's finally given up and accepted it's fate. R.I.P.
So much for my holiday gaming I guess it's not so bad, but I'll need to get a replacement soon. Anyway thanks for the help anf suggestions! Oh, and Merry Christmas!
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| Posted: Tue, 23rd Dec 2008 15:20 Post subject: |
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Merry Christmas to you too, bud! Sorry to hear about the card, that's a real kick in the teeth... At least GPUs (thanks to the war between AMD and ATi) are dirt cheap now. You could pick up an 8800GT or 4830 for a song.
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| Posted: Tue, 23rd Dec 2008 16:34 Post subject: |
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This may be wishful thinking but it could be a failing power-supply. Don't know how you could test your current psu without having a spare one lying around.
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| Posted: Tue, 23rd Dec 2008 16:40 Post subject: |
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OR!! Another test is to put your card into someone else's machine. Got any other PCs around the house? Friends with PCs willing to test your card?
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| Posted: Wed, 24th Dec 2008 01:30 Post subject: |
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Thanks for the additional replies! I checked the PSU, it's working and it has adequate power for all my hardware. Yep, tested the card, and it's dead (more like "half dead" right now). But I went ahead and got a replacement today, and it works perfectly (not surprisingly, hehe). Anyway, thanks again for all the help guys!
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Frant
King's Bounty
Posts: 24655
Location: Your Mom
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nouseforaname
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Posts: 21306
Location: Toronto, Canada
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waste of money, I'll be happy to swap it back with my 7900GT now that I don't need hardware video acceleration in this computer
