EVGA GTX 480 Crashing/Artifacting - Totally stumped

[Horizons]

Recently received a GTX 480 from my RMA of my old GTX 480. Thinking this one is dead/dying too.

The issue is that the card is crashing on nearly every single game as soon as the game is about to start. It works in the menu, works in the loading screen, but when actual game movement starts, it crashes (in a strange way). Some games crash different ways. I'll explain below.

So far, I have tried to: Lower voltage/raise voltage, same issue. Update drivers, same issue. Checked heat, obviously not an issue since it doesn't have time to heat up anyway. Card doesn't past 60c when crashing.

Games and how they crash(or don't):

Runescape(Browser Based--pretty sure it doesn't use GPU): Works fine. No issues.
Minecraft: Works fine, no issues.

League of legends: Horrible artifacting. (If that's what you would call it.) Random different colored lines appear all over the screen and blink in and out rapidly.

Far Cry 3: Game works fine in menu and loading screen, crashes as soon as the loading screen is ending, you can hear 1-2 seconds of sound and then it black screens, windows out, windows back in, windows out, windows back in, and fully crashes the drivers. After I use the process list to close it, about 10 seconds later the Nvidia driver crash error recovery message pops up.

TES V Skyrim: Same thing as FC3

Tropico 4: Constantly windows in and out every 3~ seconds during gameplay, if time is not paused. If time is paused, (game time, not the actual game) then it doesn't do it.

I have tried windowed and fullscreen, and it still has these issues.

I'm totally stumped. Problem persists across all drives.

My rig:

MOBO: Gigabyte-GA-970a-ud3
CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 965 be OC to 3.8ghz
SSD: Corsair Force Series 3 60gb
HDD1: WDC 250gb
HDD2: Maxtor 200gb (old reused drive)
PSU: PC Power & Cooling silencer MKII 950w high performance.
Case: Rosewill thor v2
GPU: EVGA GTX 480
RAM: G.Skill ripjaws X 8gb (2x4gb)
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate


If you need any more information, let me know.

Checked event viewer - 17 instances of this.

- System


- Provider [ Name] Display


- EventID 4101 [ Qualifiers] 0


Level 3

Task 0

Keywords 0x80000000000000

- TimeCreated [ SystemTime] 2012-12-18T05:27:51.000000000Z


EventRecordID 30119

Channel System

Computer Zach-PC

Security

- EventData

nvlddmkm


- Currently fully updated drivers, completely stock clocks. Have set power management to max performance instead of adaptive. Still having the issue. I don't know what else it could be except a defective GPU.

 

[smorizio]

try the newest mb chipset drivers...also try the card in another pc. could be that your power supply 12v line has a lot of ac ripple or not holding under load.

 

[Horizons]

Currently downloading updated drivers. There is no other computer here with a sufficient power supply to run the GTX 480, so I can't test it in another PC.

 

[bigshootr8]

You know since you have a EVGA card chances are the card is still under warranty 3 year warranty normally with most cards. I would honestly check it out the card is only 2 years old now the 480 so you should have a easy time working with them to fix the issue if its Arti-Facting you can check the temps and see if they are high honestly though give EVGA a call you are lucky you have a company that excels at customer support and RMA'ing of cards DO ET DO ET NOW!

 

[Horizons]

Yeah the card is still under warranty. The first one is 5 months old, I got this one last friday from an RMA.

Temps aren't even remotely high. Doesn't pass 60c (which for a 480 is pretty damn low).

I'll call up their support tomorrow and see if they can figure it out. I really don't want to RMA the card, plus I'm pretty sure they're closing soon and I'll be fucked until like early january.

 

[bigshootr8]

Oh for the holidays snap that is bad hmm...... Yea I think this time around since its a 3rd time card I would get a little more unhappy with them as your cards haven't lasted all that long.

 

[Horizons]

My best guess at this point would be what the guy up there said. My PSU might be going bad, but I don't have any way to test it as for as I know. Have any ideas?

The highest power PSU I have other than this one (950w) is like 450w and low amperage (can't remember); I don't think it would handle it at all to find out if it's the PSU or GPU.

Maybe I could buy a PSU from best buy or something, test it, and return it. I don't know.

 

[bigshootr8]

You could go into your bios and check the voltages and see. I wouldn't go to best buy and buy a PSU if you have a frys near by or a microcenter I would do that over best buy. look into a corsair psu or xfx.

 

[Horizons]

Thanks, I'll look into it. I really hope I don't end up having to RMA my PSU, after reading some of the *** from newegg reviews about PC P&C rma's after OCZ took over.

 

[Horizons]

Sorry for double post - Checked bios; 12v was normally was sitting at 12.175, but occasionally jumped to 12.239 like once every 30 seconds or so. I have no idea how I would go about checking amperage, but that's the only semi useful information I was able to obtain from the bios. Other than that, I set my cpu back to stock voltage/clocks to see if I could kind of squeeze out the extra power the gpu might be needing. I don't know.

 

[bigshootr8]

I would put your card through a benchmark/ and or game and see if the artifacting continues maybe furmark or 3dmark or a game it happens in for you. Either way it makes me a little uneasy to have that happen so soon after you received a rma return.