Here's a warning tale: I had a pair of GeForce 580s in SLI configuration. My PC began having issues which I didn't immediately realize was related to one of the video cards. It was temperature related at first and problems only became apparent during gaming sessions which put more of a load on the cards than just normal PC stuff. Crashes were random sometimes happening in a few minutes while other times things worked for hours on end. From the keyboard side the PC/game froze, locked and crashed. The GPU fans would speed up until the PC sounded like a helicopter trying to take off. What was happening was the card reached a temperature -206F- at which it went into self-protect mode. What was happening was to protect itself the GPU slowed down the clock and sped up the fans to cool it. The clock speed changing is what I assume was causing the freeze and crash.
Another issue was sometimes when the PC rebooted it would go into an error state where it would say something like 'your computer was unable to boot...' and would go into a repair mode which would not complete, generate a message that said that it was shutting down to protect itself. I could keep restarting it and it would eventually boot up to Windows. I always leave my computers turned on so unless Windows Update or some program installation rebooted it, the boot failure was a regular but, but not frequent because it was on all the time. Still, the crashes and boot issues gave me that unsettled feeling like when I'd help a friend with his/her PC issues and learned that the method of shutting the PC off was via the power button rather than the 'Shut Down' command. A lot of times no harm is done, but the potential is always there.
A fellow gamer gave me the clue my issue was GPU/temperature related. He had seen the same issue before. I followed his suggestions and downloaded one of those gadgets that monitor the GPU and sure enough, I saw one card was consistently 30 degrees hotter than its mate. When gaming I watched the temperature of that card climb to over 205F and the crash/freeze would occur. (Some tech actually people get angry at the use of Fahrenheit rather than Celsius but I'm old, used F my whole life and while I do use C, F is more natural. besides the gadget displays both scales) I looked up the data for my GPU and found the temperature at which self-protect kicked in was 206 degrees. Confirmation of what I was seeing!
Continuing to follow his advice, I downloaded a utility from the mfg. of my GPUs, eVGA in my case, that allows full control of the GPU's settings. While it would allow adjustment of about everything on the card, my only interest was setting the GPU fan speed control to 'manual' and moving the slider to speed the fan up to near maximum. Default was at 40%. It worked! Even the most intense gaming sessions with tons of things for the GPUs to render, the extra fan speed kept the temperature of the board that was getting hot to about 180 degrees at the highest.
There are a number of these GPU control utilities out there and most brands of GPU offer one. Even though there are basically NVidia and ATI chipsets, my advice and preference is to use what the manufacturer of your card offers. eVGA's utility was called Precision X. It was very easy to use and the GUI is very intuitive. And it’s free!
Still, all the crashes, incomplete boot-ups, failed attempts at self-repair by Windows took a toll. While things seemed to work and the random crashes had been resolved, every so often something wouldn’t work quite right and the computer would occasionally just seem to get lost in what it was doing necessitating a reboot. I run/ran Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit, by the way. If this had been an XP system I would have done a repair reinstall which would have left my data intact, existing programs installed, and returned Windows to a functional state. That saved me more than a few times. Windows 7 is capable of that in a roundabout way, but in looking to do that, revealed another problematic issue. My PC came with a copy of Windows 7 pre-SP1. Mine was upgraded to SP1 via Windows Update. Later W7 releases included SP1. When I attempted to do a repair reinstall with vanilla W7 it generated an error "the program you are trying to install is older than the version already installed. Setup will now exit" or words to that effect. I did some more research and found there was a way to have SP1 on a flash drive and do something called 'slipstreaming'. Like so many things on the Internet like this, there is right information, wrong information, contradictory information, and worse all tied up with a big ribbon of lack of clarity. It was not for me! I kept plodding on slowly because the PC was mostly OK and worked 98% of the time.
Finally, the hot running GPU began to cause problems again. Mostly trouble with booting up the computer but I was now getting an occasion freeze up but never a BSOD and the issues flag by the clock never showed any errors. Even the Events monitor was usually something general or seemingly unrelated.
While I do play a lot of PC games I still do a lot of serious stuff with my PC. Right next to my personal internal components, my wife, & my cats, my computer is one of the most vital components in my life. I am as dependent on it as I am air, food, and water. When issues again began appearing I grew desperate and I still felt like a repair reinstall would be my saving grace. More research into it and I found other reasons why I couldn't do it. One was that the version of Windows PC builders install are tied to that one machine. If it would have been a regular retail copy I could have borrowed somebody's copy, done the repair reinstall and used my product key. Sadly, that was not an option for me because of the version of W7 that was installed. This was later confirmed by Microsoft when they got involved.
A clean install was a no go. I have a 1.5 TB secondary drive 85% full, a 256 GB SSD for my primary drive 80% full, and external drives amounting to another 5 TB of storage about 70% full. I back up my system weekly but with the PC issues I had it meant my backups were perfect copies of a screwed up installation, hence about useless.
Another particularly stubborn spell where I couldn't get the PC to boot to Windows that lasted over two days began to make me desperate. After it finally loaded, I started searching for help like a drowning man looking for a straw to grab onto. I came across this site offering exactly what I needed. I won't name them, but they have 'reimage' in their name. Their spiel was basically they didn't install/reinstall a complete Windows OS but had all the individual files that make up Windows. You pay your money, install their software after which it scans your PC, finds and replaces all the missing and corrupted files thereby restoring Windows to its original state! Wowee!! The PC Gods are smiling upon me! I read and reread everything on their site and it all made perfect sense. I'm a retired electronics tech with decades working with PC based systems among other things so I wasn’t exactly groping in the dark. I bit and paid my money, installed the software and ran it. It did its repair, the immediate result of which was no more crash on booting up. I was happy as hell!
Eventually though, the GPU that I thought was only running hot fully died and my system was unusable. Now, every boot attempt did generate a BSOD. I was able to translate the errors codes to a video card issue. I pulled each GPU out and ran the PC with only one installed. One allowed normal operation, one wouldn't even let it boot. Problem solved but then I began to realize that very likely, all along that GPU had been failing and was responsible for everything that was happening, I ran it for a couple weeks with no issues.
The program that I thought saved me started making me wonder if it was all it was cracked up to be. I dislike registry cleaners. I think they are all scams at best, dangerous at the worst. This utility apparently had one hidden within it to help raise an error count and make it look like it was kicking error butt. Its window would flash up and say ‘XYZ has detected 423 errors on your system! Click 'Run' to repair these now.’ It would finish and announce my PC was now error free! I could walk away without touching anything, not even the mouse, and come back two hours later to see another window announcing ‘XYZ has detected 719 errors on your system! Click 'Run' to repair these now!’ It would repeat this all day coming up with a different number of errors each time. Knowing at this point I had been duped, I researched this program and found almost nothing positive said about it. It was, as I now knew, a cleverly disguised registry cleaner with a few other ‘enhancements’ and a slick GUI to give it some polish and legitimacy. It was just shy of being ransom-ware as I was to find out when I removed it. It had spread like a cancer through my system making it so any all updates to Windows and other software were controlled by it. It was unbelievably difficult to remove because it hid itself so thoroughly. It had done things like disable several Windows services, Windows Update among the things it shut off. When it was uninstalled it turned none of it back on I assume to make people go running back to get it to ‘fix’ their problems.
Another process it affected was installation of software. My Microsoft Installer stopped working likely to prevent installation of MS Malicious Software Removal Tool, Security essentials and the like. I discovered this when the subscription based backup software I had been running expired and I uninstalled it –I had difficulty doing that and had to use a utility from Microsoft Fix-It to do so. It gave me a pause. I had decided to switch to another version of backup software that was highly recommended by some tech sites I have enormous respect for. I downloaded a trial version and it wouldn’t install. I thought maybe it was an issue with the trial version but I had downloaded an upgraded WinZip and the same thing happened. I ran the Microsoft Fix-It tool and it found no errors.
I was very uncomfortable having all my mountains of data and vital information at risk because I couldn't do a backup! So, once again, things just weren't right.
On January 18 (2015) I threw in the towel and called Microsoft Technical Services. I learned: 1) No more free support for Windows 7 as of the previous Friday. 2) Retail versions of Windows 7 are no longer available except for whatever is left on store shelves. 3) The site that had free downloadable images of Windows 7 in all its various incarnations for situations such as mine was now closed. BUT- I still had one last option not involving a clean install: I could buy a 1 year service contract which was good for all Microsoft products on my PC! Since I had considered buying a new copy of Windows, the $150 contract cost was cheaper than a full new copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64 if I could have found one and been able to use it. I bought the contract.
Their techs, who I have enormous respect for, worked on my PC via remote access for almost 9 hours that day and another 6 hours Monday. They could not fix it and were truly stumped, especially by the installer failure. Since I wasn’t hearing about a clean install having no reliable backup, the only option I had was an upgrade to Windows 8 although with 24 GB of RAM and because of some software I use I went with 8.1. Another $199.00 on top of the $150 service contract.
I am now on the learning curve foe Windows 8.1. I’m struggling a bit to learn my way around but I know I'll get it eventually. My data and almost all my programs stayed intact although I did have to reinstall a few of them. So far I have only found a few programs, mostly tools/utilities, that won't work with W8. So, right now all is good and the next battle is trying to get the computer builder to honor the warranty, something he seems intent on tap-dancing around. Still, I am relieved my data was saved and I can make reliable back-ups again.
I know this short novel didn't directly answer your questions but I think my experience has some very useful lessons and information. I hope it helps in some way. I will get my W7 official manuals out later and see exactly what those error codes are and post back.
Epilog: In the long run there is one more chapter to this sorry tale that continued the saga into the next day. After the W8.1 install, my Office 2010 Professional asked me to reactivate it. It wouldn’t. When I contacted Microsoft again about it I found out the key to my Office 2010 Professional was blocked. Apparently there had been multiple attempts at using it around the planet thanks to software pirates. It didn't matter mine was bought at a retail electronics chain (now defunct), I still had all the original packaging, that it had been installed for years, activated, had passed umpteen ‘genuine software’ scans my Microsoft and had been routinely updated from Microsoft Update. I use almost everything in Office, especially Outlook. It’s another vital element for my life. I had one option: $219.99 more and I now have Office 2013. All because of a failed video card.
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