Rats! Faulty GeForce Card and system down.

**expat** · March 16th, 2018, 03:00

I will spare everyone the time helping diagnosing this as googling shows in almost all cases the card is faulty and driver replacement doesn't resolve it (it didn't for me). Some evidence bios flashing and one case of baking the card in the oven (yes, that's right, to melt the card solder that's broken) worked but not sure if this was permanently.

I have the exact same symptoms discussed here and elsewhere and the story is consistent: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/...ver-issue.html

Not up to speed on hardware these days but suspect the GTX 1080 is the one to have? Also may do a memory upgrade too.

Any suggestions on hardware choices? Do I need to be sure a new card will fit my MB - i.e., are these all still "PCI" (SLI??) spec? (I don't want to buy VHS if I have Betamax). Also would like to use the existing power supply (600w).

My system is 4.5 years old and as follows - both the CPU and card were overclocked at the factory.


	Asus Z87-K, Intel Z87 Chipset
	Intel Core i7 4770K, Haswell, 3.5GHz, Quad Core with HT, 8MB Cache
	Corsair H80i Hydro Series - High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
	Extreme - Upto 4.4GHz - Tuned to absolute safe maximum, Performance prioritised over acoustics.
	8GB Total (2x4GB) Corsair Vengeance LP, 1600MHz
	3GB EVGA GTX 780, 863MHz GPU, 2304 Cores, 6008MHz GDDR5
	No ATI VGA Card Required (NVIDIA Required)
	Your choice of graphics card professionally overclocked, Requires Windows to be purchased with the system.
	600W Corsair Gaming Series, 80PLUS Bronze (Single Graphics Card)

Thanks!
expat

**Bjoern** · March 16th, 2018, 06:28

Power requirements for the 1080 are lower than for the 780 and both are PCIe x16.
Check the physical length of a 1080 vs a 780 if the case is rather small. And the available PSU power connectors.

RAM prices are very high at the moment, thanks to our special friends in the mining business, so you might want to reconsider.
The Z87 chipset should be good for DDR2400 RAM, but you should check the mainboard's specs before committing.

**gman5250** · March 16th, 2018, 06:42

If you're considering the GTX1080, give the TI a serious look. I spent a few dollars more and haven't regretted it.
Agree with Bjoern...RAM prices suck for the reasons he pointed out.

Tried baking a card once, but used the microwave to save time.

**warchild** · March 16th, 2018, 06:49

I'm running a gtx 1070 expat, and i couldnt be happier. even before i upgraded my mobo and cpu, i was delighted. The card is simply a major force to be reckoned with, and its quite a bit cheaper than a 1080..

**warchild** · March 16th, 2018, 06:52

Originally Posted by ********

If you're considering the GTX1080, give the TI a serious look. I spent a few dollars more and haven't regretted it.
Agree with Bjoern...RAM prices suck for the reasons he pointed out.

Tried baking a card once, but used the microwave to save time.

:LOL: I love it..

Also, Expat. If i might make a suggestion or two.. Kick the power supplu up too an 850 watt version ( the machine will run more efficiently and cooler ) and increase the ram to 16 gigs..

**Bjoern** · March 16th, 2018, 10:36

I absolutely fail to understand the "more watts = better" attitude. If not running two video cards plus a five year old, extremely overclocked i7, 600W is more than enough for all intents and purposes. With an efficient and stable PSU, you can even get away with less.

Run your hardware through the calculator and you'll be surprised how little it actually needs:
https://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator

I had a peak overclocked Q9450, overclocked RAM, an overclocked video card several drives and eight case fans hooked on a 520W PSU for years and it worked just great, all because the quality and efficiency of the power output was excellent.

P.S:
Baked an 8800GT once, but the card was as dead after as it was before.

**expat** · March 16th, 2018, 11:42

What good recommendations from some truly great SOH contributors. Really grateful for the support from familiar posters when your PC is pooched and ya' can't fly (and the Mrs is away to boot. Sabotage?)! Thanks all.

I may lean toward the 1070 (non TI) as all I need it for is P3Dv4 et seq and that was all going very smoothly until the GTX 780 konked out and I don't feel I really need to pay for features I will probably never use.

Had this rig built here in the UK by Scan who did a good job and still very much on the scene and fairly competitive and have asked them to suggest a card that fits my rig spec. Very strange typing this here with the card disabled and in 800 x 400 in safe mode - looks very FS98!!

One last try - will open the box and check for dust and bad contacts, but others found that did not fix the issue. Looking forward to posting here again in 1440k . .

Thanks again all,

expat

**warchild** · March 16th, 2018, 11:57

Originally Posted by Bjoern

I absolutely fail to understand the "more watts = better" attitude. If not running two video cards plus a five year old, extremely overclocked i7, 600W is more than enough for all intents and purposes. With an efficient and stable PSU, you can even get away with less.

Run your hardware through the calculator and you'll be surprised how little it actually needs:
https://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator

I had a peak overclocked Q9450, overclocked RAM, an overclocked video card several drives and eight case fans hooked on a 520W PSU for years and it worked just great, all because the quality and efficiency of the power output was excellent.

P.S:
Baked an 8800GT once, but the card was as dead after as it was before.

Hh.. I would regularly burn up Radeon's within six months before. I ccan appreciate baking very well..
The thing is, the more power available, the less the machine has to work and the smaller the current draw. If your running say fifty watts of power, and your machine is drawing 51 watts, then your goinmg to overheat constantly and quickly kill the machine, if not start a fire. But if your running a hundred watts of power and drawing fifty, then you have a lot of power to spare and the machine stays cooler for a much longer time with little to no risk of anything burning out from trying to draw too much power out of something that cant supply it.

**warchild** · March 16th, 2018, 12:01

Originally Posted by expat

What good recommendations from some truly great SOH contributors. Really grateful for the support from familiar posters when your PC is pooched and ya' can't fly (and the Mrs is away to boot. Sabotage?)! Thanks all.

I may lean toward the 1070 (non TI) as all I need it for is P3Dv4 et seq and that was all going very smoothly until the GTX 780 konked out and I don't feel I really need to pay for features I will probably never use.

Had this rig built here in the UK by Scan who did a good job and still very much on the scene and fairly competitive and have asked them to suggest a card that fits my rig spec. Very strange typing this here with the card disabled and in 800 x 400 in safe mode - looks very FS98!!

One last try - will open the box and check for dust and bad contacts, but others found that did not fix the issue. Looking forward to posting here again in 1440k . .

Thanks again all,

expat

This is an example of the 1070 seahawk by MSI. Recorder is fraps, so yeah. its a major workhorse..

Enjoy and best of fortunes..

**Bjoern** · March 16th, 2018, 14:27

Originally Posted by expat

Very strange typing this here with the card disabled and in 800 x 400 in safe mode - looks very FS98!!

The i7's graphics chip should be good for much more. You can even run MSFS at low settings on those.
Just remove the video card and replug your monitor (and install suitable drivers).

Originally Posted by warchild

Hh.. I would regularly burn up Radeon's within six months before. I ccan appreciate baking very well..

Did it ever work for you?

The thing is, the more power available, the less the machine has to work and the smaller the current draw. If your running say fifty watts of power, and your machine is drawing 51 watts, then your goinmg to overheat constantly and quickly kill the machine, if not start a fire. But if your running a hundred watts of power and drawing fifty, then you have a lot of power to spare and the machine stays cooler for a much longer time with little to no risk of anything burning out from trying to draw too much power out of something that cant supply it.

Almost all PSUs come with a set of protection features required to be sold in most countries. Overvoltage, overcurrent, overpower, overheat, etc. Therefor, the risk of starting a fire is minimal unless you deliberately damage the unit or remove the protections. So drawing 530W from a 520W PSU is not going to do much harm other than shortening the life of the components if done 24/7, but as I said, this is rarely necessary if the PSU is adequately sized to requirements.

If I run an 800W PSU with bad efficiency and thermal management at 450W peak demand output, I will get a worse result than with a 500W PSU with better efficiency and thermal management.
If the difference between both units is $30 and I'm absolutely sure that I won't ever need a SLI/Crossfire setup, I'll save the money and invest it in something more sensible like alcohol.
Due to better efficiency of the smaller PSU, I'll even have an advantage in running cost since the unit with worse efficiency will draw more input power. So that means more savings on the electricity bill and even more alcohol!

**PhantomTweak** · March 16th, 2018, 22:43

Well, Bjoern, it's SO good to see you have your priorities straight. Alcohol first, all else strictly secondary

I don't know that it applies to PSU's or not, and it probably doesn't, but I was told by the rep for the generators (diesel) we had at my work place, 250 KW, that they are at their most efficient at about 50% load. Since our site used about 10KW, we had to install what's called a Load Bank to make up the difference. Basically, a heater the size of a small car, that just took outside air in one end, and used resistive coils of different values to add up to what you needed. We switched the coils in and out until we added up to 50% load on the generator.
Just what we needed in Yuma, Az, I know, a giant space heater. 120° F outside, and we ran a big-a$$ heater. Riiiiight...

What do expect from the combination of the Air Force and Lockheed?

I know, slightly different than a PC's PSU, but hey, ya never know!
I've not built a ton of PC's but I've always lived by that 50% rule when I did. Wasting money that should have gone to alcohol, maybe, but what the heck, because of diabetes, and some of the meds I take for it, I may not drink anyway, so no great loss to me.

Just my opinions on all this...
And we all know about opinions.

Pat☺

**napamule** · March 16th, 2018, 23:10

I think there is a measure of 'luck' when it comes to hardware. Just like it applies to automobiles (same year, same make, same model, same miles) where one will quit at 99,999 miles when others are still 'running good' and/or 'running strong' at 199,999 miles. Just saying.
Chuck B
Napamule
PS: card manufactuers routinely do a 'REFLOW' (melt solder on card) but that is before they put on the components and they do it in peanut oil at precise temps and then gradually cool them down afterwards.

**kalong** · March 17th, 2018, 06:12

Originally Posted by warchild

This is an example of the 1070 seahawk by MSI. Recorder is fraps, so yeah. its a major workhorse..

Enjoy and best of fortunes..

Very nice video that bring very good info. I can see there still a lag happening at corner display. I surely 1070 has good performance before to deal with flight simulator, but wrong.
plan to build PC for flight simulator, whether single 1070, dual 1070 (SLI) or single 1080 to use 4 monitor or possibly using VR.
how about AMD? any thought?

***Roger*** · March 17th, 2018, 07:01

expat, I think you also have a Scan pc with very similar specs to mine. The only thing I changed was the 770 video card (it hadn't failed) for a msi 1070 with 8 gig of ram.

**Stefano Zibell** · March 17th, 2018, 09:20

Even a 6gb GTX 1060 will perform better than a 780. But we have miners to thank for high gpu prices too.

**warchild** · March 17th, 2018, 10:16

Originally Posted by kalong

Very nice video that bring very good info. I can see there still a lag happening at corner display. I surely 1070 has good performance before to deal with flight simulator, but wrong.
plan to build PC for flight simulator, whether single 1070, dual 1070 (SLI) or single 1080 to use 4 monitor or possibly using VR.
how about AMD? any thought?

Welll, you see, thats why i posted this video and mentioned Fraps. Fraps will take almost any video card and reduce your FPS to between 1 and 7 FPS due to the nature of the format it saves the video in, which takes up several gigabytes in space for just a few minuts of recording. This video began as a fifteen gigabyte file for example and had to be converted before i could upload it. The end result you see here, is a 748 MB file. So, the lag you see, isnt from th video card, its from Fraps.. I typically run P3d at between 60 to 100 FPS depending on the complexity of the scenery. Some Tokyo scenery for example is so dense it it has over the last decade become a traditionaL place to avoid in any simulator but especially FSX and P3D. New Yorks jFK will also grind most machines to a halt.
There are a lot of reasons why you might see stutters and lag, but the video card has only a small part to play as both FSX and P3D are still CPU driven, and not GPU. GPU's are actually used very little by either sim.. So perhaps a better reference for me to use to explain the lag you see is to explain that my CPU is an AMD Ryzen 5 1600 with 6 cores and 12 threads running at 3.2 ghz and using 16 gigs of 3.2 ghz DDR 4 memory. The blockage on my system doesnt come from anything ive mentioned so far, but rather is caused by the standard hard drives I use, and the slower system drive which i bought because its a heavy duty server HD guaranteed for five years.. Because of my commitments to several communities, my machine could not be built to accommodate simulators only and must accommodate several programs running at once, including a massive minecraft server where the world space is over ten square kilometers in size and no one single space contains less than a million blocks.
I get 128 FPS from minecrafts Java backend even when P3D is running. So you see, I cant more highly recommend the GTX 1070 as its proven itself over and over again from its initial release date till now. It's one hell of a graphics card and i feel very fortunate to have been able to get it..

Pam

**warchild** · March 17th, 2018, 10:21

Originally Posted by Bjoern

The i7's graphics chip should be good for much more. You can even run MSFS at low settings on those.
Just remove the video card and replug your monitor (and install suitable drivers).

Did it ever work for you?

Nahhh, I'd always get distracted by people or animals or something would come up and i'd literally fry the board.. Thats also pretty much how I ended up with the 1070. My last card was some older but high end card that overheated and i tried baking but ended up with a partially blackened card..

**kalong** · March 17th, 2018, 19:13

Originally Posted by warchild

Welll, you see, thats why i posted this video and mentioned Fraps. Fraps will take almost any video card and reduce your FPS to between 1 and 7 FPS due to the nature of the format it saves the video in, which takes up several gigabytes in space for just a few minuts of recording. This video began as a fifteen gigabyte file for example and had to be converted before i could upload it. The end result you see here, is a 748 MB file. So, the lag you see, isnt from th video card, its from Fraps.. I typically run P3d at between 60 to 100 FPS depending on the complexity of the scenery. Some Tokyo scenery for example is so dense it it has over the last decade become a traditionaL place to avoid in any simulator but especially FSX and P3D. New Yorks jFK will also grind most machines to a halt.
There are a lot of reasons why you might see stutters and lag, but the video card has only a small part to play as both FSX and P3D are still CPU driven, and not GPU. GPU's are actually used very little by either sim.. So perhaps a better reference for me to use to explain the lag you see is to explain that my CPU is an AMD Ryzen 5 1600 with 6 cores and 12 threads running at 3.2 ghz and using 16 gigs of 3.2 ghz DDR 4 memory. The blockage on my system doesnt come from anything ive mentioned so far, but rather is caused by the standard hard drives I use, and the slower system drive which i bought because its a heavy duty server HD guaranteed for five years.. Because of my commitments to several communities, my machine could not be built to accommodate simulators only and must accommodate several programs running at once, including a massive minecraft server where the world space is over ten square kilometers in size and no one single space contains less than a million blocks.
I get 128 FPS from minecrafts Java backend even when P3D is running. So you see, I cant more highly recommend the GTX 1070 as its proven itself over and over again from its initial release date till now. It's one hell of a graphics card and i feel very fortunate to have been able to get it..

Pam

many thanks for clear explanation, thought P3D v4 not fully depend on CPU like FSX.

**warchild** · March 17th, 2018, 20:20

Originally Posted by kalong

many thanks for clear explanation, thought P3D v4 not fully depend on CPU like FSX.

its 64 bit, and they have worked on upgrading it, but the base engine is still the old microsoft cpu driven engine, although there are more graphical layers added on from what i can tell..I'll let you be the judge.. The first image is fsx, the second is P3Dv4..

**kalong** · March 17th, 2018, 20:47

true, P3D v4 have many upgraded from FSXA or in other term "highly modified", cause base engine still same.
so, CPU still need to be consider though.

***Jafo*** · March 18th, 2018, 05:19

Bjoern's really gonna shake his head in disbelief/horror when I mention my PSU is a Corsair ASX 1200I Platinum Certified 1200w Modular....

Thing is....you only ever even know it's there on boot.....then the cooling turns off in disgust and goes to sleep....just another way to build a 'silent' computer.
It'll never get near to being overworked or overloaded....so it ends up being one less thing to worry about ever going 'wrong'...

**Bjoern** · March 18th, 2018, 09:10

Originally Posted by Jafo

Bjoern's really gonna shake his head in disbelief/horror when I mention my PSU is a Corsair ASX 1200I Platinum Certified 1200w Modular....

Thing is....you only ever even know it's there on boot.....then the cooling turns off in disgust and goes to sleep....just another way to build a 'silent' computer.
It'll never get near to being overworked or overloaded....so it ends up being one less thing to worry about ever going 'wrong'...