Author Topic: 7800 GS OC lock-ups (Read 979 times)

Eagler · « **on:** April 17, 2006, 01:11:34 PM »

I installed my eVGA 7800 GS OC Saturday. I followed the advice given here:
http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=174983
It went in without any problem.
I run my desktop at 1280x1024, everything looks and worked great
then I went in to AH and deleted the video.cfg file. When prompted I set the res for AH to 1280x1024 and textures at 512 and told it to load it in video memory.
I set the sliders in AH to way left, hi detail.
I tested it offline and was amazed at the picture quality. AH looked fanatastic. to the graphics deptartment.
But I am locking up bad in AH. It goes along then bam, locked up solid. HAve to power cycle to get out.
I have AA set at 4x and Af set at 2x, vsync on. Using the latest driver. sound set to 3/4's in dxdiag.
sys specs:
amd64 3400 - 939 pin
asus 8va, 2 GB sys ram
audigy 2 sound card
cable modem
500watt peak ps
only have the issue when in AH
any suggestions?

StarOfAfrica2 · « **Reply #1 on:** April 17, 2006, 02:40:58 PM »

First suggestion is to turn AA and AF to app. preference. Most people dont have lockup issues, and it's probably not yours, but doesnt hurt to try. For me, no matter what hardware I use I always seem to have lockups when I use AF.

Other suggestion is to check the power to your video card. Thats a loooooong card, could be the power plug isnt seated good? Maybe the PSU isnt up to snuff? Card takes alot of juice.

I did some checking in other forums, some people report problems running AF in WoW and FEAR, another issue is several people are complaining of black screen lockups and other issues while gaming. The only thing they agree on is the drivers to use. I clipped these quotes out from some of the forums for you.

Quote

For anyone that has that "blank/black screen" issue, listen up. Google "7800gs ngo driver" and click on the 3dguru link. THere is a link to a thread explaining the driver problems with this card, as well as a link to download a driver that WILL WORK and make this card stop getting the black screen. I tried every evga/nvidia driver from the 81.x drivers to the 84.25 beta drivers, and with all of them, the black screen issue still persisted after any significant load. The NGO driver is an "aftermarket" nvidia driver. And as far as I can tell now, is also the best performing driver. Come on eVGA/nVidia! It's bad when an outside group has to modify your drivers to get a card to work like it should! This card has been out several months now, no excuses please!

Pricy for a dying technology. Had to upgrade to beta drivers. The ones on the CD were not behaving with my Audigy2 card. Crashed my computer once becuase of that. Upgraded drivers and haven't seen a problem so far. And though it runs cooler than the 6800, it runs MUCH warmer than what I upgraded from to my 6800 (5600). Had to drop in a new fan and rewire my case and reposition it near the AC vent to keep PC from getting too warm. It peaked at 82c during tests (and surprisingly didn't crash). I got it down to 72c max and it seems to be topping off there. I have a case with some bad designs for ventilation anyway, so that's probably a personal problem more than something wrong with the card.

If you buy one and your computer locks up and the monitor turns off while playing a game, your card is most likely defective! Don't waste money upgrading your power supply. 18 amps on the 12 volt rail is what EVGA recommends for the 7800 GS line. My power supply has dual 20 amp rails and it still crashed in San Andreas and Doom 3 at default clock speeds.

ridiculus crashing issues no feedback from eVGA on how to fix?

Other Thoughts: this card has a serious OC problem if its not ran around the 430/1250 range,if ran anything remotly past this will cause constant unstability which = crashes! my thoughts... DO NOT BUT THE SUPERCLOCK version of this card!! its not worth the time or the $.

Note that these folks with problems were the minority, but nearly all of them had OC versions of the card, and except for the ones with truly defective hardware (i.e. card does not work AT ALL), they could get it to run fine with no load or heavily underclocked. Also note the one that said his card had issues with his Audigy 2 soundcard. Another possible solution for you.

Good luck!

Skuzzy · « **Reply #2 on:** April 17, 2006, 02:53:05 PM »

Do not preload textures into video RAM if you are running with skins enabled, or running 512 (or higher) texture sizes, or if you are running with AA enabled in the video card.

Right now, if you preload skins, your system needs 1.75GB of free RAM.

Eagler · « **Reply #3 on:** April 17, 2006, 03:33:49 PM »

what gives better eye candy?
AA, higher res textures, higher screen resolution?

anyone have the optimum "working" combo?

Skuzzy · « **Reply #4 on:** April 17, 2006, 04:05:52 PM »

All depends on the hardware. It is best to experiment with your own to find the sweet spot.

All I can offer is general guidelines. I know you do not have enough video RAM to preload, with AA running, without swapping to/from system RAM.

Just know, the higher the AA, the more video RAM will be consumed, which could induce stutters in the game.

Eagler · « **Reply #5 on:** April 17, 2006, 07:59:37 PM »

I set it up with aa and af off, vsync on, 256 textures loaded into video memory. pre-load in system mem and preload skins is unchecked. running ah in 1280x1024 res. hardware vertex and the two optimized settings are checked. fps locked at 60. graphic detail setup screen has the top two slider all the way left and the ground slider about half way. the four check boxes are un-selected..

and it still locked up. this card should be able to handle those settings shouldn't it?

does winXp have irq conflicts like 98 did? I never had to even look at them before but looking now shows the video card is sharing irq 16 with my firewire 1394 conn and the audigy is sharing irq18 with my sata controller. can these be changed?

any ideas?
tia..

Bronk · « **Reply #6 on:** April 17, 2006, 08:55:10 PM »

Eagler , not sure if I am remembering correctly or not. There was a bug with geforce card if you locked frames to anything but unlimited. Try setting to unlimited frame rate with vsync on.

Bronk

Eagler · « **Reply #7 on:** April 18, 2006, 05:58:27 AM »

Bronk, I changed it to unlimited and it still froze up. I lowered the textures to 128 and did not experience any issues but when I bumped them back to 256, it locked up again.
Could it be a BIOS setting? what should the apeture be for a 256mb vcard? 128? 256? anything in the bios that could be causing this? is the card flaky?

right now i am not getting anything out of this card that my old ati 9800 pro could not give me..

Skuzzy · « **Reply #8 on:** April 18, 2006, 06:58:27 AM »

Ok, one more time. DO NOT PRELOAD TEXTURES INTO VIDEO RAM. Preload textures into system RAM (not skins) and try it.

It is probably a memory manager error in the NVidia drivers.

eagl · « **Reply #9 on:** April 18, 2006, 07:28:14 AM »

I read somewhere that some of the "OC" cards aren't stable at speeds above nvidia reference speeds. Underclock the card to nvidia specs and see if it runs ok. If it does, then you have the option to either RMA the card for not meeting manufacturer specs or just live with the fact that you got a card that doesn't OC worth a crap even though you probably paid a premium for an "OC" branded card.

Eagler · « **Reply #10 on:** April 18, 2006, 08:03:05 AM »

thanks Skuzzy, I'll try that ..

eagl, I have not done anything to the card. Just took it out of the box and plugged it in. How so you under/overclock a video card? never done that before. are you saying since it is an "OC" card from evga, that they overclocked it?

eagl · « **Reply #11 on:** April 18, 2006, 08:19:38 AM »

Eagler,

Yea, the "OC" cards from any manufacturer are typically running up to 10% above nvidia specs. Do some online review searching and you'll see, or go to newegg and take a look at the various speeds each listed 7xxx card is running. The lowest speed card using the same name is probably the one using nvidia specs. The rest are supposedly guaranteed to run at the faster speeds they ship at, but some just don't quite cut it.

As far as I know, BFG was the first company to offer these factory overclocked cards and they charged a pretty hefty price premium, but now I think they all do it because the majority of chips, both GPU and memory, will run ok when pushed beyond manufacturer specs. But the failure rate in actual use will probably be higher among those OC cards unless the manufacturer is very careful to sort out only the best cards for their OC line. I would trust BFG to do this, but not evga. They're pushing into a high-end market with low-end quality control, and the results don't seem too good.

Kev367th · « **Reply #12 on:** April 18, 2006, 09:27:01 AM »

Eagler had the same prob with my 7800 GS -

Solution -
Go into the BIOS set the PCI latency timer to 128. (default is 64 on some mobos)

http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=805&p_created=1141634762&p_sid=lTRrUk5i&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MzcmcF9wcm9kcz0wJnBfY2F0cz0wJnBfcHY9JnBfY3Y9JnBfc2VhcmNoX3R5cGU9YW5zd2Vycy5zZWFyY2hfZm5sJnBfcGFnZT0xJnBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9cGNpIGRlbGF5&p_li=&p_topview=1

Eagler · « **Reply #13 on:** April 18, 2006, 11:11:10 AM »

Kev
thanks, I'll try that next..
what settings are you using in AH? what do you have loaded where? video mem, skins, textures? what res are you running and what size textures?
tia

Kev367th · « **Reply #14 on:** April 18, 2006, 01:00:16 PM »

Use 1024 x 768
Texture size 1024
Everything pre-loaded to system memory (I have 2gb's)
Sliders maxed.