Noob question about 2d/3d modes and clock speeds.

[function9]

Hello,
Is it true that gpu's (6800gt/gs) scale clockspeed depending on what mode you're using (2d/3d)? I never knew this, but recently I had my 6800gt die on me 🙁 So while that is RMA'ed I picked up a 6800gs.

I never used Rivatuner before but I wanted something to monitor speeds of the new card to make sure nothing was wrong with my motherboard. I was worried when I kept checking Rivatuner and it showed the gpu was running at 350mhz, when the core speed is 425mhz. But running Q4 and then checking Rivatuner I see speeds are where they are supposed to be.

I guess if this is the case you learn something new all the time and I feel a little embarrassed not already knowing this. Flame away, but at least answer my initial question before you do 😳

 

[mitch074]

2d/3d speeds are available on all 6xxx/7xxx Nvidia cards (you just have to unlock them on lower end cards, using Coolbits). Essentially, as long as you don't use accelerated 3D functions, the core stays at 2D clock (you can clock it as low as 150 MHz, and have super silent video playback); when 3D functions are called, it switches to 3D clock.

However, if your video card fried, it was probably during a game, where GPU use is intensive and heats up most - so 2D/3D mode wouldn't have helped much, however good cooling would have...

 

[function9]

Ah I see, that's pretty sweet.

Well my card didn't "fry"...I guess. I booted up one day and noticed the fan wasn't spinning (NV Silencer) but everything else was fine. So I shut down and use an adapter to plug the fan into the motherboard to see if the fan died or what. Fan spun up, but once I got to the desktop it ran extremely sluggish. And I kept getting a "Power Indicator" popup message from NVCpl telling me the Auxilary power connector was not plugged in, but it was. That's when I first used Rivatuner to try and see what was going on. At the desktop it was reporting the core running at 225mhz and memory down to 350mhz(700 effective).

At the time I didn't know about the 2d/3d speed differences but even so, this seemed bit low (and from what I've been reading since is the memory shouldn't clock down in 2d mode, no?). So I thought maybe my pcie connector went bad. I shutdown and tried another connector, then it wouldn't even POST. Taking the card out and looking it over I noticed a capacitor on the backside almost opposite the fan connector was fried 🙁

Not sure why though as I never OC'ed anything and thought the Silencer fan was well within spec to plug into the card.

What was worrying me until I found out about the 2d/3d clocks is by some bad luck that I seem to have, my motherboard might have been effected. So once I get a replacement card everything should be fine and dandy... I hope.

Thank you for the explanation, definitely cleared things up for me 😀

 

[mitch074]

Looks like you had a power surge or a faulty capacitor - if your card is still under warranty, you should be covered. If it isn't, a good sodering iron and a new capacitor should do the trick - or you could replace your ventirad with a fanless cooling system, and find a way to disable warning messages from the driver - some registry editing would be needed.

Memory with reduced clock: normally, 2d/3d frequency may not affect RAM frequency. However, your faulty capacitor may be used by the memory frequency clock generator - you'll need to fix that if that's the case.