My rig's a custom built machine with an eVGA nForce 780i SLI mobo and a single GTX 280 (1 GB DDR video RAM), running Vista Ultimate x64.
A couple days ago, I started to get hard freeze/crashes while playing Dragon Age - Pink Screen of Death, is the term, I believe. (Image from back in February when I last had to RMA my GTX 280.) I *was* able to usually recover from those after a few reboots, until today, when booting up Windows normally results in a hard freeze, with my monitor displaying a single, solid color (sometimes it's blue, like a BSOD, sometimes a pale green, and I even had a orange/yellow in there once... recently it's gone to a greyish-blue).
Anyway, the BIOS screen is fine, and I can boot into safe mode, uninstall the drivers, and then boot up normally. At which point Vista decides to automagically install drivers (stupid *#$%ing P.O.S. OS), and if I reboot, I get a solid color hard freeze. To rectify the situation, I've tried going into safe mode, completely uninstalling my display drivers and everything associated with them (nVidia control panel, PhysX, 3D stereoscopic viewer), rebooting into safe mode again, and installing every single driver revision since 180.48, published a year ago. I've even done this manually once or twice, with 3rd party driver file removal tools and registry diving. And every time I boot into Windows normally with any nVIDIA drivers installed, hard solid color freeze.
Now, I've called up eVGA's support, and got them to agree to a 2nd RMA on this card, but was told that it's probably not a hardware fault, since I can boot into safe mode, and the display's not garbled at the BIOS level. And I don't necessarily disagree with them, since I have a very good cooling solution in place, and the card's never gotten over 85 degrees C (104 degrees C being the max temperature this card can handle, and 85 being well within operating specs, at load). Of course, they also told me the card I originally RMAed passed their hardware tests, despite the fact that it Pink Screen of Deathed on me any time I put any load on the card (gaming, folding@home GPU, anything), so I'm not sure I trust their hardware tests to be worth a damn, to be honest.
Has anyone had any similar experiences with this card? Or have any suggestions for getting it working without exchanging it for a 3rd one which will probably also crap out in another 3 months? Or can someone confirm that this particular card is just utter garbage and prone to flaking out for no reason? (I've tried searching for reviews on the card, but noticed that it's not really sold anywhere anymore, so maybe they did discontinue the product for being a P.O.S.) I'm an IT professional, so this &#^% has me pulling my hair out - I'm not used to technology problems I can't solve, and this one is giving me a splitting migraine. Anyone with a similar experience to share would put my mind at ease, and at this point, there are no bad suggestions, IMO, since I'll have to be without a video card for a couple weeks over the holidays if I go through with the RMA... and I really wanted to catch up on my gaming over the holidays
A couple days ago, I started to get hard freeze/crashes while playing Dragon Age - Pink Screen of Death, is the term, I believe. (Image from back in February when I last had to RMA my GTX 280.) I *was* able to usually recover from those after a few reboots, until today, when booting up Windows normally results in a hard freeze, with my monitor displaying a single, solid color (sometimes it's blue, like a BSOD, sometimes a pale green, and I even had a orange/yellow in there once... recently it's gone to a greyish-blue).
Anyway, the BIOS screen is fine, and I can boot into safe mode, uninstall the drivers, and then boot up normally. At which point Vista decides to automagically install drivers (stupid *#$%ing P.O.S. OS), and if I reboot, I get a solid color hard freeze. To rectify the situation, I've tried going into safe mode, completely uninstalling my display drivers and everything associated with them (nVidia control panel, PhysX, 3D stereoscopic viewer), rebooting into safe mode again, and installing every single driver revision since 180.48, published a year ago. I've even done this manually once or twice, with 3rd party driver file removal tools and registry diving. And every time I boot into Windows normally with any nVIDIA drivers installed, hard solid color freeze.
Now, I've called up eVGA's support, and got them to agree to a 2nd RMA on this card, but was told that it's probably not a hardware fault, since I can boot into safe mode, and the display's not garbled at the BIOS level. And I don't necessarily disagree with them, since I have a very good cooling solution in place, and the card's never gotten over 85 degrees C (104 degrees C being the max temperature this card can handle, and 85 being well within operating specs, at load). Of course, they also told me the card I originally RMAed passed their hardware tests, despite the fact that it Pink Screen of Deathed on me any time I put any load on the card (gaming, folding@home GPU, anything), so I'm not sure I trust their hardware tests to be worth a damn, to be honest.
Has anyone had any similar experiences with this card? Or have any suggestions for getting it working without exchanging it for a 3rd one which will probably also crap out in another 3 months? Or can someone confirm that this particular card is just utter garbage and prone to flaking out for no reason? (I've tried searching for reviews on the card, but noticed that it's not really sold anywhere anymore, so maybe they did discontinue the product for being a P.O.S.) I'm an IT professional, so this &#^% has me pulling my hair out - I'm not used to technology problems I can't solve, and this one is giving me a splitting migraine. Anyone with a similar experience to share would put my mind at ease, and at this point, there are no bad suggestions, IMO, since I'll have to be without a video card for a couple weeks over the holidays if I go through with the RMA... and I really wanted to catch up on my gaming over the holidays