7900GT / GTX for those who can't pass Deep Freeze 3DMark06!

MASSIVELY OFF TOPIC I KNOW!

but.. it's not often you're online viper

viper have you still got the diagrams for the 7800 gtx 256 vgpu and vmem mods? can't find them anywhere!

sorry for OT, apologies, beg forgiveness etc etc

 

I had this problem with 2 Inno3D 7900GTX cards.
Deep freeze = exactly as described in the opening post.
Also noticed random glitches and flashing screen in Oblivion and Prey.

Sent both back as faulty.
Then got a 7950GX2 instead

This situation is truely shocking. There are faulty cards being openly sold, people are getting ripped off.
From my experience, I would advise UK people to stay clear of these cards, at least for a few months. It seems etailers are selling off faulty stock cheap. 7900GTX's are appearing for £260-£280 etc. These are usually the etailers "own brand" ie. they dont tell you what brand they are but they will turn out to be one of the cheaper reference design brands such as Inno3D, Point of View, Club 3D etc.
Mine were from Dabs and advertised as "Dabs Value" brand.
2 in a row were faulty, my bet is the whole lot are faulty hence the low price.
They probably think as long as a few people don't run deep freeze they won't notice the problem and return the card. So that's a few cards off loaded at the customers expense.

It's a shame really as they are otherwise really nice cards.
Particually like the cooling solution - very quiet and effective !

 

I whole heartedly agree, I was one such sucker! picked up a 'novatech' 7900gt which turned out to be a POV (or more like POS), emailed them 4 days ago and still no reply and tomorrow is a bank holiday. ffs.. was gonna sell my gtx but now I can't, everyday I'm losing money on it and new cards are just around the corner.

 

I do em from memory myself. With Malves site down for the count it is hard to find the info. There was a topic at OCforums.com (I think) from when we were trying to first work them up that has pictures (or at least it did) but you have to wade through the it to find them. Not even sure where to point you anymore.

ViperJohn

 

cheers anyway m8, been looking for these mods for a coupla months now, all I can find is gtx 512 mods :/

I've read the entire thread over at xtreme but will have a look at ocforums too, thanks again.

ok, normal service can now resume and this thread can get back on topic


[edit] oh bugger looks like I've derailed another thread; Ok, well here's a question - so it's definitely the core that's the problem on these borked cards?
'cos I've heard so many theories, such as bad memory (which is why evga are now using infineon chips instead of samsung), overheating power regulators, a bios 'switch'..

 

I got my card pre-built with the tower I bought. How do I go about returning that? And how do I convince the seller that card is faulty and not something else wrong with my PC?

 

According to your specs you have a 7600GT.
As far as I know the problem is only with the 7900GT/GTX
But if you have seen the same problem in Deep Freeze I quess it must be faulty.
If your seller won't replace it without proof I quess you'll have to hit printscreen during Deep Freeze or something....get some screenshots or footage of it failing.

As for the actual cause of the problem, personally I think it is to do with the memory. On my 2 faulty cards the cores seemed fine, I could overclock to nearly 700 without making the fault any worse.
However when playing with the memory clock, sometimes just a 1MHz increase or even decrease would cause the display to instantly do the black flickering screen thing that occurs directly after running Deep Freeze.

By the way if you want to get your destop back when this happens, instead of rebooting, open Rivatuner and hit the "reload display driver" button. This will stop the flashing but sometimes the core will lock at the 2D clock even if you then run a 3D app !

 

Yes, I am aware this discussion is about 7900GT, but I am getting EXACTLY same problems with 7600GT.

Few posts above, I wrote:

Does that means setting the clock speed to default would get rid of the problem? I haven't messed with my clock speed yet from the factory setting.

Woow. Thanks for the info. I didn't know. Will try this. It'll save me time by continuing to reboot. :grin:

 

7600's faulty as well :eek3: :eek3: :eek3:
This problem gets worse by the day.... uke:

Actually I did read somewhere that some people did eliminate or at least reduce the problem by underclocking their cards.
Personally it didn't affect mine.

At least your card is a 7600, so if you do manage to get a replacement, it is less likely you will get another faulty one !

 

Hi

My BFG 7900gtx has just started freezeing on Deep Freeze, worked fine when i bought it (4 Aug 06).

I got it from Ebuyer UK but theres no point in emailing them because they would proberly send me another faulty card, so i've emailed BFG to see what answer they can come up with.

Hopefully a new revision!!

 

You may still be able to get full refund - we legally have so many days in the UK to demand full refund. If Ebuyer has an automated returns procedure just go through it and see what is says.

BFG apparantly have good cust service - they should look after you
They might even upgrade you to a 7950 for free :roll:
On the down side though, they are a US based company so you may have to fork out for postage to the US :eek3:

 

no more artifacts in deep freeze, or flashing desktop after the deep freeze errors.

since 91.45 i might add, but i have flashed my bios since..

 

Yeh 91.45 worked fine for me aswell until i upgarded to 91.47

Maybe i should try 91.45 again?

 

I did some testing and this is what I found:

Test 1:
I lowered the clock speed and ran Deep Freeze again. It does seem to reduce the problem. I was able to get further into the cinematic than I could with default clock before the screen goes black.

Test 2:
I ticked "Force software vertex shaders" before running Deep Freeze at default clock speed and this time, it actually passed the test. :banana:
So the problem with Deep Freeze is the vertext shaders.


I got my Asus SmartDoctor running in the back to monitor any problems and noticed that it has flashing red text saying "VGA's voltage is out of safe bound. Motherboard doesn't supply reliable 12.0 voltage. Contact with its manufacturer for help."

The voltages shown are fixed at these values:

Vcc = 3.35
Vcore = 1.33
PCIE (12v) = 12.8
FB (Vddq)= 1.96


Oh yeh... can someone tell me how to create a keyboard shortcut for "reload display driver" in RivaTuner cos it would help when its difficult to find the RiverTuner icon in task bar during flashing.


Edit:
Ignore the Voltage error I reported above. I changed the voltage and temperature monitor settings (in monitor tab) to default and its showing as "OK" now.

 

The main reason why I joined this forum was because I came this present topic, which was analyzing the same problem I had while running F.E.A.R. (after which I tested Deep Freeze).

I have finally resolved my problem:

Test 3:
From Test 2 above, I figured that the Shaders were giving the problems in games. So I went back to F.E.A.R. and changed the settings. I chose Maximum settings for everything including the resolution to 1280x960. Once I did that, I lowered the Shaders to Medium. I ran the test in F.E.A.R. which tests your settings and it passed the test!!!

However, I played the game for a while and when I exited the game, short while after this, my PC crashed and restarted on its own.

Test 4:
From Test 3, I figured that I was getting closer to fixing my problem. This time I chose maximum settings as before in F.E.A.R. but selected the "Shaders" option as Minimum. Ran and test, played the game and guess what? NO PROBLEMS AT ALL. It ran fine.

In fact, I noticed that the water in the test they use looks like proper water now. Before, when using maximum shader option, the water looked like as if it was toxic or slightly radioactive! :wanker:

I could notice a slight drop in FPS while playing the game but this problem was there before as well due to the maximum resolution I was using. At 1024x768, the game runs without a glitch and looks awesome.

Anyway, I have exited from the game ages ago and still no sign of any problems with my display or the PC.

Looks like I can finally finish off playing F.E.A.R. :banana:

Thanks to everyone for help.


P.S. I am using 91.36 whql drivers.

 

Well as long as your happy

Personally I don't think people should have to mess around reducing settings and such just to get their cards to work.
We are the people who pour the £££ into nVidia - we deserve nothing short of perfect functioning products :thumbup:

Edit: I tried the the 91.45 drivers with my faulty cards and they were worse than the official 91.31

 

You are right. We shouldn't have to use lower settings to play games using latest graphics cards, but my 7600GT is a mid-to-high range card. If you ask me, I am not happy at reducing the settings but it is better than before when I couldn't play at all.

Maybe this is a software/driver problem after all and not a hardware problem. Maybe it will get fixed with new drivers in future.

Maybe I've been lucky for the couple of tests I did that worked.. Maybe problem will return later.

If I was certain that my card was capable of running F.E.A.R. and Deep Freeze at maximum settings, then I would definitely complain and go for an RMA, but I am not sure.

 

with all these problems y not just get a diff card like a 1900xt?pretty silly to just keep rmaing

 

or 7950

 

or a 7800 series card