Hey everyone, First of all I would like to say Hi! My name is JC and obviously this is my first post so I will apologize in advance if I am in the wrong forum section, asking wrong questions, providing inadequate information, etc.. Anyways, I am a programmer at heart and up until 2 weeks ago never built a personal computer. I have only done the simple hard drive replacements, ram upgrades, etc for other broken or sluggish machines and generally I work with laptops. With that said I was offered a lightly used Asus P5n-d motherboard, a GTX560 Ti (Factory overclocked) graphics card, skyrim edition if that is important from PNY, and everything else except for a case so I waited on the parts and put this pc together. My only real goal/hope for this PC was to run skyrim at decent speeds with decent quality and all in all it works fine for its purpose but in the end I am having a few GTX560 Ti problems that it seems everyone has had once or twice. It pretty much goes like this... I launch a game, web video, etc and my GPU goes to work, warms up (not too hot, generally around 60-65c max) and I can play a game for as long as I would like but if I close the game/web browser my gpu's clock speed throttles down, cools down and starts to freak out. (Red artifacts and a 50-50 chance of my whole pc going to a blank black screen with no way to recover without hitting the reset switch OR the desktop coming back to a Nvidia driver has crashed error.) I have tried multiple things to fix this issue including different drivers (currently on 314.XX), switching out ram (as proposed by someone on the Nvidia forums - didn't see the point in that personally), switching from windows 8 back to 7 making sure I had a clean install and more. My theory is that if I can keep the GPU at a constant, higher clock speed it may not glitch out so I am halfway looking for an application that can do this as afterburner cannot. I am also looking to possibly upgrade the GPU's bios... I have read about Nvflash but I have no idea where I would find BIOS for my GPU as it is somewhat rare and not on PNY's site. newegg (dot) com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133381 [Sorry, not officially allowed to post links because of the 0 posts thing but I promise I am not advertising! XD] Any suggestions on fixes, applications to try for managing clock speed for my theory or even a place to find bios to update my GPU to? Thanks, JC
Really seems like something that should be easy to find via google and I really don't know why I couldn't. Thanks for the link. I am slightly concerned, however.. according to Nvidia Inspector I have bios version 70.24.21.00.53 while the BIOS on that site is 70.24.11.00.53 It "seems" that mine are newer if the bigger numbers mean that. Is it worth updating in your opinion, or is it really even an update? Thanks sooo much! JC
Hi, welcome to the forum. Do you ever get the problem when not gaming at the desktop or is it only just after closing a 3D application? If it's only after closing a 3D app, it's likely that the graphics card's power management system is flawed. What is probably happening is that as the graphics card detects that a 3D application is no longer running and throttles down the clockspeed but it's dropping the GPU vcore (voltage) slightly before the GPU clockspeed. That can cause instability and crashes as you describe. I think you're right to try to update the BIOS, that might just fix it. Forcing the gpu to maintain 3D clockspeeds isn't an ideal solution because it will result in higher power use but you can easily do it with MSI Afterburner. If the BIOS update didn't work, I would use MSI afterburner to increase the gpu vcore in 2D Mode (you can set clockspeed and voltages for 2D and 3D applications). Hopefully you can increase the 2D vcore setting enough to prevent these crashes but still be well below the 3D setting.
That sounds like a hardware based flaw, probably unfixable and most likely the seller was aware of it. Your best bet is to force constantly high clocks as you said, which is not exactly ideal for a videocard or the energy bill obviously.
ya could try this to force clocks: http://downloads.hwbot.org/downloads/tools/NVPMManagerUni.exe or try to go one notch up on volts with nvidia inspector
uninstall any asus software u may have, like ASUS Precision Tweaker 2 think 285(or ones before 300) is likely stable drivers
To me it sounds like the higher 2D clocks might be the problem! The card should have idle, higher 2D and lastly 3D clocks. Dump your bios with GPU-Z. Then flash the one in the link I provided. If the problem still remains we can try to modify the bios to give you more voltage on the higher 2d clocks to keep the card stable when throttling back from 3D mode..
Updates Thanks everyone for the comments and suggestions! @AnnouncesTruth: The card was free, a hand-me-down and I trust the owner when he says it was fine before however there was a long time period when it was not in use. @Basco: Thanks for the link I will defiantly look at the software and see if it is any better than my current method @Bokah: I don't have any Asus software installed, just the hardware. As for the driver versions I have tried 273, 28X, 29X, 314, latest, and a few in the middle. Here is a little bit of an update on my end. First of all I have pretty much confirmed my theory. The GPU runs in three modes, P8, P3, P0 (I MIGHT have my numbers wrong) but it is 50Mhz, 450Mhz, and 850Mhz respectively. When Chrome or a Game is running the GPU is set to P0 mode (850Mhz) and it will stay there as long as Chrome is open or the game has focus. So basically I can turn on Nvidia inspector (force P0 mode) or Chrome, play whatever I want for however long I want and then leave my game without anything crashing. If I close chrome shortly after I leave Skyrim it crashes but if I wait a few minutes it will not. (weird eh?) At least now it is manageable... I might still do that BIOs update but I do not have the money at the moment to buy another graphics card if things go wrong so I am a little hesitant. I am pretty happy now, I shouldn't have to run extra applications to make my computer not crash but at the same time it is a quick solution to a terrible problem. If it crashes again I will do the BIOS update, I have the backup and the bootable USB ready and report back. Thanks everyone!
Chrome shouldn't be causing the graphics card to go to 3D mode, you can use Rivatuner to stop that. I'm 99% sure Afterburner and Rivatuner and/or a bios update would solve all your problems without having to burn your gpu 24/7.
did u try these http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=383813 u can also disable hw acceleration for browsers
would you send me your original bios saved with gpu-z? i am thinking maybe the card was flashed before like a lot people flashed only for lower 2d volt?but not all cards could handle that. just an idea.
Responses I did not try those. I might but for the last 3 days I have been playing an absolute ton of skyrim, I have been able to window switch during the game and I have had no crashes at all plus I am only burning my GPU during the day when it gets the most use anyways. I do understand my situation isn't optimal but I am really really hesistant to make any more changes while it is working so well. I can disable HW acceleration in Chrome but I use it so little on this comp it isnt a big deal, just using it as an example. @basco: Sorry, couldn't find an easy way to quote you from the reply screen but here is a download link to my BIOS I gathered from GPU-Z. Sorry it took me so long to respond, since my GPU has been working well I hadn't had much of a reason to check on this topic. mediafire(dot)com/?z51v9d0adbjq76b Cheers, JC
cannot see any difference except date of release in both bioses. there should be nothing wrong with yours. before ya even consider flashing i would play with nvidia inspector and see if plus or minus on volts or clocks would change something. but its no prob to use it like ya doing right now if you are happy and can play.
