Hello guys..
I'mma let you in on a problem that has been driving me nuts for the past 72 hours.
It's my girlfriends PC, which I built on my own about 2½ months ago. The specs are as follows.
Asus Z87-A motherboard.
i5-4670K processor
Geforce 660 GTX (OC) graphics card
Corsair 650W PSU
Corsair Red vengeance 2x4G RAM
For about 2 months the PC ran superfine and smooth, high fps, good stable system all together. untill 2 days ago when she decided to hit up a bit of nostalgia and bought Sims 3 to play with her sister. What would happen was that the screen would flicker, almost as close to "artifacting" as i call it. By that time I was super-quick to open MSI Afterburner to see the temps, and they we're pretty normal. about 40 degrees 2 hours into the gameplay. So it wasn't the temps.
However, after this happened I told her to reboot the system and play a heavy graphic demanding game, so we installed Skyrim with ULTRA HD mods to see if it would happen again. She played for about 4-5 hours (first time she played it, and enjoyed it ^^) Nothing would happen, it went up to 65 degrees in heavy load during that session, and everything was fine. She shut down the computer and went to sleep. The morning after, I booted it up to see if the problem was fixed. Well, shit.. No, it was 10x worse than before. Every 5-10 seconds the drivers would crash and recover with a black screen. The screen icons and bars would flimmer all over the screen before the crash happened.
So.. I driversweeped the whole thing in safe-mode thinking the drivers was causing the issue. Installed stable drivers from 310, the problem came back 10-15 minutes thereafter, and would crash with the same 5-10 seconds intervals as before. I sweep again in safemode, and install the newest ones released just recently. Bam, same issue again.
Okay I thought, So I decided, let's just format the whole pc, that will surely fix it.
Well guess what, It didn't. The crashes would happen again, as soon as i installed nvidia drivers.
Alright, this is where I decide to underclock the gpu by -25 at a time, to a maximum of -100 and increase its voltage slowly by 5 at a time. At 12+ voltage the crashes would occur every 1-2 minutes instead of seconds. And higher than 12+ voltage, it would go back to 5-10 seconds interval of crashing again.
By this time i'm getting really frustrated, so i try to switch PCI-e slot at the motherboard, I put the 660 gtx in the second slot, and it worked fine for about 5 hours? I ran some benchmarks, heaven for example and got really good results on both extreme overload, and optimal runs. No flickers, nothing. I shut the computer down last night, thinking oh I solved it.
Only to boot it up today to see that the problem is back, and now I can't even touch any applications whatsoever otherwise it'll blackscreen me instantly yet again. However, having windows on and not moving anything doesn't seem to make it crash. Only when I actually open a folder, google chrome or anything that has to run a application, makes it crash immediately.
Short list of what I have done so far
*2x Formats of PC
*Used different PCI slots
*Driversweeped in safe mode several times
*Cleaned out the fans, removed dirt from the whole computer
*Checked the PSU
*Installed old stable drivers 310, aswell as new ones 370, and some in the middle 330. Still crashes
*Uninstalled AUDIO devices completely to see if the sound was causing it, or drivers clashing with one another.
*Uninstalled Kernel 1.11 drivers in the windows update history (Didn't do a thing.)
I really have no idea what to do anymore.. I've had talks with two others who had the same issue, even when they replaced the old so called "defective" card, their new ones would crash as much as the old one. So getting a new one ain't the solution. I'm narrowing it down to.. drivers, or something else.. The card had excellent results in benchmarks the moment I managed to get some in and the temps are super.
What the heck shall I do next?
I'mma let you in on a problem that has been driving me nuts for the past 72 hours.
It's my girlfriends PC, which I built on my own about 2½ months ago. The specs are as follows.
Asus Z87-A motherboard.
i5-4670K processor
Geforce 660 GTX (OC) graphics card
Corsair 650W PSU
Corsair Red vengeance 2x4G RAM
For about 2 months the PC ran superfine and smooth, high fps, good stable system all together. untill 2 days ago when she decided to hit up a bit of nostalgia and bought Sims 3 to play with her sister. What would happen was that the screen would flicker, almost as close to "artifacting" as i call it. By that time I was super-quick to open MSI Afterburner to see the temps, and they we're pretty normal. about 40 degrees 2 hours into the gameplay. So it wasn't the temps.
However, after this happened I told her to reboot the system and play a heavy graphic demanding game, so we installed Skyrim with ULTRA HD mods to see if it would happen again. She played for about 4-5 hours (first time she played it, and enjoyed it ^^) Nothing would happen, it went up to 65 degrees in heavy load during that session, and everything was fine. She shut down the computer and went to sleep. The morning after, I booted it up to see if the problem was fixed. Well, shit.. No, it was 10x worse than before. Every 5-10 seconds the drivers would crash and recover with a black screen. The screen icons and bars would flimmer all over the screen before the crash happened.
So.. I driversweeped the whole thing in safe-mode thinking the drivers was causing the issue. Installed stable drivers from 310, the problem came back 10-15 minutes thereafter, and would crash with the same 5-10 seconds intervals as before. I sweep again in safemode, and install the newest ones released just recently. Bam, same issue again.
Okay I thought, So I decided, let's just format the whole pc, that will surely fix it.
Well guess what, It didn't. The crashes would happen again, as soon as i installed nvidia drivers.
Alright, this is where I decide to underclock the gpu by -25 at a time, to a maximum of -100 and increase its voltage slowly by 5 at a time. At 12+ voltage the crashes would occur every 1-2 minutes instead of seconds. And higher than 12+ voltage, it would go back to 5-10 seconds interval of crashing again.
By this time i'm getting really frustrated, so i try to switch PCI-e slot at the motherboard, I put the 660 gtx in the second slot, and it worked fine for about 5 hours? I ran some benchmarks, heaven for example and got really good results on both extreme overload, and optimal runs. No flickers, nothing. I shut the computer down last night, thinking oh I solved it.
Only to boot it up today to see that the problem is back, and now I can't even touch any applications whatsoever otherwise it'll blackscreen me instantly yet again. However, having windows on and not moving anything doesn't seem to make it crash. Only when I actually open a folder, google chrome or anything that has to run a application, makes it crash immediately.
Short list of what I have done so far
*2x Formats of PC
*Used different PCI slots
*Driversweeped in safe mode several times
*Cleaned out the fans, removed dirt from the whole computer
*Checked the PSU
*Installed old stable drivers 310, aswell as new ones 370, and some in the middle 330. Still crashes
*Uninstalled AUDIO devices completely to see if the sound was causing it, or drivers clashing with one another.
*Uninstalled Kernel 1.11 drivers in the windows update history (Didn't do a thing.)
I really have no idea what to do anymore.. I've had talks with two others who had the same issue, even when they replaced the old so called "defective" card, their new ones would crash as much as the old one. So getting a new one ain't the solution. I'm narrowing it down to.. drivers, or something else.. The card had excellent results in benchmarks the moment I managed to get some in and the temps are super.
What the heck shall I do next?
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