GTX 980 High Fan RPM at Startup and Minor Driver Crashes.

[Sassbogs]

This is specific to an EVGA GTX 980 FTW GPU with ACX 2.0 cooling system. I just upgraded from a 680 to this 980, and I noticed a few odd occurrences.

Upon booting to Windows 8.1, the Fans of the GPU will blast, at what I'm guessing is 100%, for a few moments until slowly dialing down to normal. This doesn't seem normal to me, and I'm worried some driver isn't working properly.

I've also noticed that sometimes, while gaming, the driver will cause the screen to momentarily freeze, and when it resolves itself, a window pops up saying something like "your driver was not responding, but we've fixed the issue" (paraphrased). I'm not sure if this is because the GPU is factory overclocked and the driver is crashing, or if I may have created an issue by just attempting to Plug and Play the new GPU. I haven't dealt with overclocked hardware since a disastrous experience in 2008 with a fried dual core processor.

I have reinstalled every driver related to the GPU.

Are these two things normal for this particular card?

 

[cdabc123]

a video card 'revving' is normal. and try installing a older version of the driver

 

[tigerg]

As part of the POST process your GPU goes through at boot up, is to test all components, including the fan. Part of that test is to go to full RPM and then back to an idle state. There are a few technical reasons it does this, but I will not put them here unless requested.

When you get the "driver is not responding" it is because the driver crashed and windows reverted to a default driver. You can expect further crashes unless you restart to get back onto the proper graphics driver.

cdabc123 keeps posting bad information today. Don't put an old version of the driver, go update to the latest version, it will have the most corrections to common issues, like the crashing you are observing.

If you have the option to report the crash, send it to them so they can look into it and roll it into the next driver version.

 

[Sassbogs]

Thank you for the swift responses!

So the fan "revving" on boot is normal, got it. Great news.

I do, however, have the latest driver. I installed the latest driver manually from the EVGA website, and triple checked by checking for driver updates via GeForce Experience. I've also disabled Framerate Target in PrecisionX, thinking, superstitiously, it was having compatibility issues with Vsync or something.

I'll investigate further and see if there is something else that can be done on my end.