460 Usage drops to 0%, horrible stutter

HutnerMan14 · **460 Usage drops to 0%, horrible stutter -** 10-03-2011, 03:47 | posts: 37

Hi Everyone,

I just made the switch from AMD to Nvidia, which I was very excited about, but I'm having some major problems

TLDR GPU usage drops after a minute or 2 of gameplay to near 0%, and stutters gameplay terribly.

I bought 2 MSI N460GTX Hawk cards to run in SLI, and have experienced the following:
After Playing any game for a minute or so (time varies, as does where it happens) the GPU usage will drop to 0% and the game stutters as if it was running at 1 or 2 fps. It will then pick back up again and run at rock solid 60. If I continue playing each time this happens it will happen for a longer period of time.

I have tried the following. 275, 280, and 285 beta drivers. Running each card as a single card with, as well as in SLI (with 3 different SLI bridges). Turning NVIDIA control panel power settings to prefer maximum performance, and back to adaptive. I have tried downlocking the cards with no luck. I have tried with only 1 stick of ram, different ram, all at stock speeds. I tried with power saving settings on in the motherboard bios, as well as off. I have flashed the bios to the latest version. I have a soundcard as well, and I have tried to run games without it in and with it in, no change. I have updated all my motherboard drivers as well. There may be other things I have tried that I am forgetting, I spent the larger part of my day working on this

Couple notes on findings: According to GPU-z the voltage on the top card is only .987, while the bottom is 1.000. I have attempted to use MSI afterburner to overvolt the top card to see if this fixes the issue but so far have been unable to do so.

The MSI Hawks come with an active phase switching function, and LEDs to determine which phase it is currently in. When the stuttering occurs, these lights drop from 7 (max power phase) to 3 or 4.

The temps during these moments are low, never above 51 or 52, and are not always the maximum temps reached.

This would seem to point to a problem with the power supply, which is a Corsair 750W (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817139006) but this power supply is only a year old, and within the past month has performed perfectly fine on an HD 5850 crossfire setup, and then an HD 6950 2gb single card, and has never given me a single issue.

For Reference, here are my other components.

Phenom II BE955
Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4gb)
GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3
Corsair 750W
H100 CPU Cooler
X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Sound Card
2x N460GTX Hawks
Crucial 64MB SSD
Hitachi 1.5TB

If anyone can offer me any advice it would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks again,
Hunter

slick3 · 10-03-2011, 04:28 | posts: 951 | Location: Canada

Hunter WHAT IS UP ???

LoL, felt like saying that. Anyway, I had a single GTX460 a while back, when the drivers for the card were still crappy. The problem being low gpu usage in almost every game with no bottleneck what so ever, that and stuttering. The problem for me remains unfixed, and i switched to HD6850 which worked perfectly. However, i found out that, while using the GTX460 ... my FPS improved dramatically and GPU usage being 80%+ IF i run the game under WindowsXP. I suggest you try that for your DX9 games.

Also, did u try running the gameS under a clean installation of Windows7 ??? Something else that i may suggest is to use the pre-historic drivers, well not really but I am talking about the 197.XX series drivers ...

Visit this, it may provide some help !

Hayden202 · 10-03-2011, 14:07 | posts: 390 | Location: Exton, PA

Hmm, you have tried a lot of different things. I would first assume drivers, but it seems like it might be something else since you have tried a bunch.

Maybe, if you still have one of them, try a 5850 or that 6950.
If you don't get the issue than we can maybe say its a problem with the two MSI 460's or nvidia drivers. I have the same mobo and am running 460's in SLI. I love the board, but I will try and recreate this issue your are experiencing to see if I can help trace the problem.

Our setups are actually nearly identical lol.

HutnerMan14 · 10-03-2011, 15:02 | posts: 37

Quote:

Originally Posted by slick3

Also, did u try running the gameS under a clean installation of Windows7 ??? Something else that i may suggest is to use the pre-historic drivers, well not really but I am talking about the 197.XX series drivers ...

Hi slick, thanks for the suggestions! This is a clean install of windows 7 luckily, because I just got a new motherboard. I may try another fresh install later if I can't resolve this.

I will definitely try the 197 drivers (although I almost hope that doesn't fix it haha) when I get home later. I also got pointed to the MSI Live update by a friend to check the gpu bios.

Hayden that's also a good suggestion, when I get home later I plan to try the 460 in the bottom pci slot only to see if that helps. And then failing that I will try just the 5850 in the top slot.

TheHunter · 10-03-2011, 15:19 | posts: 13,439 | Location: √╥²

try 270.90 tesla modded inf driver before going back to older driver, but you will have to manually change INF in extracted driver folder..
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread....t=tesla&page=3

btw 197.xx won't work anyway, official 460gtx support started with 258.96 driver..

HutnerMan14 · 10-03-2011, 19:43 | posts: 37

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheHunter

try 270.90 tesla modded inf driver before going back to older driver, but you will have to manually change INF in extracted driver folder..
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread....t=tesla&page=3

btw 197.xx won't work anyway, official 460gtx support started with 258.96 driver..

Thanks for the suggestion, I thought we had a fix here for a bit! I installed the modded inf drivers, and it seemed to be running smoothly. However it seems that the problem still occurs, just later on (few more minutes of gameplay, or sometimes a second run of a benchmark).

Based on the results I am experiencing it may in fact be driver related, but specifically a phase state bug that can occur with MSI cards. Since I have yet to find a driver that seems to fix the error I'm worried I'll have to return the cards and get a different brand

Spets · 10-04-2011, 01:09 | posts: 1,429

Is it just the gpu usage going down or do the cards downclock?

HutnerMan14 · 10-04-2011, 05:12 | posts: 37

Hey everyone I got it Fixed!

Spets to answer your question, and anyone else who may experience this, it was just the gpu usage going down, and what appeared to be the power phase of the cards (but not the voltage it was given).

I tried TheHunters suggestion of 270 modded drivers, which seemed to improve things but did not fix it. It was a fresh install of windows pretty much, so I decided to format all my drives, make sure everything was exactly ready for a fresh install, and reinstall Windows again.

Now with the 280 drivers (haven't tried 285 yet) I'm running great in seemingly everything

Thanks for all the help everyone! It seems that the issue was in fact related to some wacky failure of my installation.

Redawgc187 · 10-04-2011, 05:23 | posts: 661 | Location: United States

Probably due to leftover files and registry entries from your amd cards well congrats on getting it fixed and happy gaming.

HutnerMan14 · 10-04-2011, 14:50 | posts: 37

Quote:

Originally Posted by Redawgc187

Probably due to leftover files and registry entries from your amd cards well congrats on getting it fixed and happy gaming.

Hey Redawg, that was the weird thing! It was a totally fresh install for the Nvidia cards initially as well. The only thing I can think of is that I didn't format my external drives which had some leftover programs on them. Oh well