GTX 780 Ti crashes under high load

[KristapsTigeris]

So, I recently assembled my completely fresh computer, however, I'am having an issue where my GPU seems to crash and pc restarts in high demanding games, I have tried Witcher 2 and Watch Dogs, both on max settings and it crashes few minutes in to the game.

At first, while trouble shooting I noticed that my CPU temp raised about 90, but that problem I fixed, cooler wasn't correctly positioned on CPU, now it never gets above 67-68.

The I red somewhere that GPU power two separate cables should be used, not one cable with two 8pins, so I changed my setup to use two separate 8 pin cables.

After that the issue of crash still remains. All the temperatures are normal, have tested that several times.

Here is my spec:

MB: Asus Z87 Pro
CPU: Intel Core i7 4770K
CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i
GPU: Asus GeForce GTX 780 Ti
PSU: Corsair AX860i
Mem: Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB (2 x 8GB)
HDD: Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB

I haven't done any overclocking and of course I have all the latest drivers.

 

[JOHNN93]

well you have intergrated graphics hd 4400 remove the card and give it a try.just have it on low and antialiasing turned off.see what hapens will you experience a crash.

 

[Mahisse]

Did you remember to update to last BIOS version as well? If the temperatures is OK maybe it's just a bad driver installation. Try to do a clean installation of the drivers. Do you get any error messages?

Other than those things it does sound like a PSU problem. Like it's not getting enough power when going into boost mode. To test this you can lower your clock speed or power consumption.

 

[JOHNN93]

Did you remember to update to last BIOS version as well? If the temperatures is OK maybe it's just a bad driver installation. Try to do a clean installation of the drivers. Do you get any error messages?

Other than those things it does sound like a PSU problem. Like it's not getting enough power when going into boost mode. To test this you can lower your clock speed or power consumption.

he can download the corsair link installer and monitor his psu.
http://www.corsair.com/en/ax860i-digital-atx-power-supply-860-watt-80-plus-platinum-certified-fully-modular-psu

 

[KristapsTigeris]

Thanks for the suggestions. I actually had forgotten about BIOS update. I will try that first.

I already have corsair link, that's where I was getting all the temperature readings from, not sure I know how to read power reading correctly, but will try to make sense of that.

Will update the status when I'am done with these few things.

 

[KristapsTigeris]

BIOS update didn't help, even after that PC still crashes.
Whats interesting about BIOS update though, when doing CPU stress testing, CPU temp is no longer ~67, now it stays around 57-60. Quite the difference.

As for trying with internal video card, Witcher 2 doesn't even launch with that and Watch Dogs I uninstalled yesterday when I got frustrated with crashes, will have two wait few hours while it downloads from Steam.

As for readings about power from corsair link, it is a little hard for me to see, since currently I have just one monitor, but here is one weird thing I noticed.

I have GPU connected to two separate PSU outputs, , Corsair Link shows ampere reading for both, however, one of them always stays at 0 newer kicking in. The other one the max I have seen I think was about 8.

One more thing, while Witcher 2 and Watch Dogs crashes, playing Arma 3 on max settings is not an issue, pc never crashes.

I will try lowering GPU clock speeds and see how that will help.

 

[KristapsTigeris]

It seems that knocking down GPU Boost clock to minimum 920MHz really did prevent GPU from crashing.

Makes me wonder though, why it can't handle higher boost clock? Is it the PSU? The PSU itself is quite good and should have no issues handling it. Could the actual problem be that I just happen to have shitty electricity? If so, can UPS unit resolve that? I figured that I will need one anyway. Any suggestions to what kind I should get?

 

[Mahisse]

BIOS update didn't help, even after that PC still crashes.
Whats interesting about BIOS update though, when doing CPU stress testing, CPU temp is no longer ~67, now it stays around 57-60. Quite the difference.

As for trying with internal video card, Witcher 2 doesn't even launch with that and Watch Dogs I uninstalled yesterday when I got frustrated with crashes, will have two wait few hours while it downloads from Steam.

As for readings about power from corsair link, it is a little hard for me to see, since currently I have just one monitor, but here is one weird thing I noticed.

I have GPU connected to two separate PSU outputs, , Corsair Link shows ampere reading for both, however, one of them always stays at 0 newer kicking in. The other one the max I have seen I think was about 8.

One more thing, while Witcher 2 and Watch Dogs crashes, playing Arma 3 on max settings is not an issue, pc never crashes.

I will try lowering GPU clock speeds and see how that will help.

Yep.. Always have the latest BIOS driver hehe.

You were not meant to try to play with the integrated video card put totally disable it in the BIOS to ensure there's no conflict with your dedicated card and the intergrated card.

Could you take a screenshot of the you corsair link overview?

The 0 amps may be a bug in the program and you will maybe need to do a stress test to get the true values to show. So try to run a furmark benchmark and keep an eye on the software... and hope it does not crash under stress test.

Edit: Here's why you can't see any current when idle:
"I have stated this previously several times but there has to at least 3 amps of load before any specific rail will show the current draw."

 

[KristapsTigeris]

Yep.. Always have the latest BIOS driver hehe.

You were not meant to try to play with the integrated video card put totally disable it in the BIOS to ensure there's no conflict with your dedicated card and the intergrated card.

Could you take a screenshot of the you corsair link overview?

The 0 amps may be a bug in the program and you will maybe need to do a stress test to get the true values to show. So try to run a furmark benchmark and keep an eye on the software... and hope it does not crash under stress test.

Edit: Here's why you can't see any current when idle:
"I have stated this previously several times but there has to at least 3 amps of load before any specific rail will show the current draw."

Yea, you are right, when running funmark benchmark, both show power outputs for GPU show something.
Here is a screen:
http://s21.postimg.org/teoblx8j9/920.png

Also, funmark didn't crash PC. I tried running it with three different GPU clocks, minimum 920, default 1000 and maximum 1220.

I don't get why benchmark runs fine with those clocks, while a in game GPU crashes with higher clock, but runs with lower one.

 

[Mahisse]

Okay so Furmark does not crash as well as ARMA 3? That's a bit strange. I can't remember but does Watch Dogs and Witcher 2 uses PhysiX or some other unique features?... Oh, and please tell me that you are not running pirated versions of the games since that could easily explain the crashes.

I don't get why benchmark runs fine with those clocks, while a in game GPU crashes with higher clock, but runs with lower one.

So you could play the games on underclocked settings or what?

 

[KristapsTigeris]

Okay so Furmark does not crash as well as ARMA 3? That's a bit strange. I can't remember but does Watch Dogs and Witcher 2 uses PhysiX or some other unique features?... Oh, and please tell me that you are not running pirated versions of the games since that could easily explain the crashes.

I don't get why benchmark runs fine with those clocks, while a in game GPU crashes with higher clock, but runs with lower one.

So you could play the games on underclocked settings or what?

Games are not pirated. Every game I have tried out here comes from Steam.

Also, none of these games use PhysX, not Watch Dogs, not Witcher or Arma 3
You can see the list here that supports PhysX here: http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/physx/games

I can play with underclocked. Since it doesn't affect performance too much anyway I will probably leave it like that.

Still it would be interesting to know why it crashes like that on default clock.

 

[Mahisse]

If you can play underclocked I think there's something wrong with your PSU or graphic card but I can't figure out which one. Otherwise it's maybe a driver problem with the boost mode and those games. You can try to roll back a driver to rule out that possibility.

You should definitely not settle with an underclocked 780 ti. I have unselected your best answer in hopes someone will come up with different ideas.

 

[JOHNN93]

http://www.corsair.com/~/media/Corsair/download-files/manuals/Corsair-Link-Manual_v2docx_.pdf
padge 12 power tab
open this it says how muck the voltage is supoder to be 12 v 5 v 3.3 v.
while looking at this download prime 95
http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/download.php?fh=84aa92208050bf61b75f20c454fd87a7
and furmark
www.geeks3d.com/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=396
to stress cpu and gpu on 100% while monitoring the voltages.
you whould want to look for voltages going beyond or under the values written.
although its realy realy hard to be the psu.
if voltages are correct and do not fluxuate and you get reboots i whould advise as i did before removing temporarily the card and running with the integrated gpu so you can determine the cause of this problem.if nothing happens with the integrated its probably a faulty gpu.
also download hw monitor
http://www.cpuid.com/downloads/hwmonitor/1.25.zip
to keep monitor of temps.although furmark does have temp monotoring.
and when you mean it crashes do you mean blue screen is there a error log anywhere created?it whould be helpfull.

 

[KristapsTigeris]

http://www.corsair.com/~/media/Corsair/download-files/manuals/Corsair-Link-Manual_v2docx_.pdf
padge 12 power tab
open this it says how muck the voltage is supoder to be 12 v 5 v 3.3 v.
while looking at this download prime 95
http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/download.php?fh=84aa92208050bf61b75f20c454fd87a7
and furmark
www.geeks3d.com/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=396
to stress cpu and gpu on 100% while monitoring the voltages.
you whould want to look for voltages going beyond or under the values written.
although its realy realy hard to be the psu.
if voltages are correct and do not fluxuate and you get reboots i whould advise as i did before removing temporarily the card and running with the integrated gpu so you can determine the cause of this problem.if nothing happens with the integrated its probably a faulty gpu.
also download hw monitor
http://www.cpuid.com/downloads/hwmonitor/1.25.zip
to keep monitor of temps.although furmark does have temp monotoring.

Did stress testing with prime 95 and furmark running at the same time. No issues during tests, those 3 voltage values was all the more or less the same, only fluctuated about 0.01 - 0.03 which I guess is acceptable, temperature didn't go to extremes, no reboots.

and when you mean it crashes do you mean blue screen is there a error log anywhere created?it whould be helpfull.

When pc starts up after reboot, there is this crash report message. This is what is says:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 2057

Additional information about the problem:
BCCode: 116
BCP1: FFFFFA8014405010
BCP2: FFFFF8800FDABD1C
BCP3: FFFFFFFFC000009A
BCP4: 0000000000000004
OS Version: 6_1_7601
Service Pack: 1_0
Product: 768_1

I don't see bluescreen itself as the message says, but that might as well be because my GPU shuts down before bluescreen actually appears.

Message also give me two files, some dump and sysdata.xml. You can get the latest ones:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5hp6hrbl4uva6ly/AAAE5x0bZI-HjvRQvrE2yzIka

Downgrade of GPU driver also didn't help.

And here is one more weird thing (I know, this keeps getting weirder and weirder), I noticed that in Witcher 2 crash will only happen during dialog. I can play for hours without dialog and it won't crash, but as soon as I will start dialog, characters will start talking and crash will happen sometime during dialog. Remember that this doesn't happen if I underclock my GPU...

I'm maybe starting to think that this is more fault with the games themselves, not the actual hardware. Witcher 2 is 3 year old, maybe some weird incompatibly with newer GPUs. And Watch Dogs itself actually had quite a bit of technical problems itself on release, like, not properly optimized, I can only bet that there are still things not patched.

Outside of those two, from more or less demanding games I have tried only Arma 3 and latest Simcity, none of which is are this years release and Simcity is not that demanding at the start of the game and taxes more on CPU anyway. None of those two would crash.

Maybe I should look in some other recent game with that has high hardware demand, would hate to spent money just to try my hardware though, besides, I don't think there has been any recent release like that, maybe Titanfall though.

 

[JOHNN93]

your psu is ok.
the minidump shows that a problem with the video driver and memory.
because you have updated the driver i whould advise you to download and run memtest http://www.memtest.org/
memtest runs non stop let it make a pass be patient if you can leave it all night it whould be good.

 

[KristapsTigeris]

your psu is ok.
the minidump shows that a problem with the video driver and memory.
because you have updated the driver i whould advise you to download and run memtest http://www.memtest.org/
memtest runs non stop let it make a pass be patient if you can leave it all night it whould be good.

Left memtest to run for about 4 hours, seems it ran 2 full passes, no errors, here is picture:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/t4v9zrfu88i5mn6/IMG_20140725_043645.jpg

 

[JOHNN93]

open command prompt in as administrator and type sfc/scannow
this will scan your file system.if there is a problem it will be reported.
because your system did not restart during furmark your gpu is fine theproblem relies somewhere in sofrtware.
furmark stresses gpu beyond its capabilities.
if you have intel xmp enabled desable it.(bios)
and run c cleaner to clean up the registry.
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download/standard

 

[KristapsTigeris]

open command prompt in as administrator and type sfc/scannow
this will scan your file system.if there is a problem it will be reported.
because your system did not restart during furmark your gpu is fine theproblem relies somewhere in sofrtware.
furmark stresses gpu beyond its capabilities.
if you have intel xmp enabled desable it.(bios)
and run c cleaner to clean up the registry.
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download/standard

did sfc /scannow, here is output:

C:\Windows\system32>sfc /scannow

Beginning system scan. This process will take some time.

Beginning verification phase of system scan.
Verification 100% complete.

Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations.

XMP was disabled already, I haven't touched any BIOS settings yet outside of Intel Virtualization, but already tried disabling that.
Just to check, I tried with XMP enabled, but still crashes.

ccleaner cleans a bunch of stuff, that's great, but after that it still crashes.

Just noticed that there are few Windows updates waiting, but those are optional, just Silverlight, Bing Desktop and Security Essentials update.

 

[JOHNN93]

the problem is with the video driver. (at least that's what the minidump points out).no memory problems no defect file system.
do updates uninstall all drivers and reinstall.did you install chipset drivers?
im asking this becuase ive seen peaople forgeting to install drivers.altough there is no way there is such a problem in your case.
the last thing i whould want you to do is reinstall windows.
did you take out the gpu and run witht the integrated gpu?

 

[Mahisse]

Well good news. It does actually seems to be an issue with the game (at least for Withcer 2) according to this thread
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1893879&page=6

Try the various suggestions in that thread. Especially enabling V-Sync.

I would expect your crashes with Watch Dogs could be bad luck or just a poorly patched game.


I would actually suspect the issue with Witcher 2 to be a sound driver issue. You may want to consider updating Realtek HD Audio driver
http://www.realtek.com.tw/Downloads/downloadsCheck.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=24&PFid=24&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&
And maybe Nvidia sound drivers as well.

Many games crash because of conflicting sound drivers. Experienced this personally a couple of times.

 

[JOHNN93]

ive seen that people complain aboult watchdogs crashing in full screen mode change it to windowed see if it it crashes again.

 

[Mahisse]

Yeah I was about to suggest trying to run the games in windowed mode as well.

 

[JOHNN93]

and one more thing when running watchdogs on max settings it uses more than 3gb of vram turn down textures.
i know its a 780 ti but your running watchdogs.one of the world most heaviest unoptimized games.
there is no way it is the gpu.maybe download and run 3dmark.theres nothing else.its asus where takling about.

 

[KristapsTigeris]

All the drivers are installed, device manager doesn't show any unrecognized device, device without driver or nonsense like that.

I agree that most likely I'am just being extremely unlucky here and wasting yours and mine time as a result.

With all the tests we have ran, there is no way there is a hardware issue.

I will check those soundcard drivers, but honestly I think that we can put this to rest.

As for those Watch Dogs setting, I always try to use the settings that the Nvidia Geforce Experience app suggests as the optimized settings, though I don't really know how good that is. And in fact it actually has Ultra for textures for me, will knock that down.

Thanks for the huge help!

 

[JOHNN93]

no problem.
althogh if you experience anything post it.