[SOLVED] Trouble shooting GTX 1070 Ti with old GPU?

[silversongshelties]

Looking for advice on how to go about switching out my 1070 Ti with an old GTS 250 GPU from 2009 to trouble shoot freezes/crashes. Both are Nvidea cards. I've found lots of advice on upgrading GPU's, but nothing on going back (especially this far back). I located the drivers for the GTS 250, but don't know what I need to do to get them working with this PC, or even if I can. Will I need to do anything with BIOS? Do I have to remove my GTX 1070 Ti drivers for this test using DDU? I'll only be running the old card for a few hours to see if it gets rid of the issues my PC is experiencing (freezes/crashes). I don't have integrated graphics anymore apparently (oops), so if I remove the 1070 Ti drivers and the GTS 250 drivers don't work, am I done for?

OS: Windows 10 64 bit
BIOS Updated Feb, 2021
GPU: EVGA GTX 1070 Ti, drivers updated Jan, 2021
MOBO: Tampa2 https://support.hp.com/ca-en/document/c06177288
CPU: i5 8400
RAM: CORSAIR VENGEANCE® LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4 DRAM 2400MHz
PSU: Seagate Focus PX-750 (recent upgrade)

 

[JohnBonhamsGhost]

you should remove all previous Nvidia settings and drivers with DDU.
power down and switch the cards.
then power on and install the latest package available for the GTS 250.

if for some reason you get a blank screen or a "no signal" error;
the i5-8400 does have an integrated graphics chip, the Intel UHD Graphics 630.
there is an HDMI and DP port on the rear I\O panel.

 

[geofelt]

Do not complicate matters, use the integrated HD630 graphics on the motherboard.
If not already there, install the intel HD630 driver downloaded directly from Intel.

Your old gts250 card will likely need a legacy bios to be detected at all.
And, it is no better than HD630 anyway.

 

[silversongshelties]

Do not complicate matters, use the integrated HD630 graphics on the motherboard.
If not already there, install the intel HD630 driver downloaded directly from Intel.

Your old gts250 card will likely need a legacy bios to be detected at all.
And, it is no better than HD630 anyway.

Thanks geofelt, less complicated is what I need about now

 

[silversongshelties]

you should remove all previous Nvidia settings and drivers with DDU.
power down and switch the cards.
then power on and install the latest package available for the GTS 250.

if for some reason you get a blank screen or a "no signal" error;
the i5-8400 does have an integrated graphics chip, the Intel UHD Graphics 630.
there is an HDMI and DP port on the rear I\O panel.

Yep, but the UHD graphics drivers no longer exist on my PC (I followed advice to "delete" them when I installed the 1070 Ti...regrets happen lol). I managed to locate the UHD630 drivers off the HP website, so will try installing and see what happens. Question now is, do I disable the Nividia drivers in Device Driver or leave them alone when I pull the GPU?

 

[John Chesterfield]

Either uninstall or disable the NVidia drivers, I'd probably uninstall but that's me.

 

[silversongshelties]

well, no luck installing the UHD630 drivers, they failed.

 

[geofelt]

Drivers for different adapters will not interfere with each other; leave them be.
You should be able to run either adapter at a default resolution with either card.
It is the driver that lets you see the full resolution of your monitor.
When you do a clean install of a driver, it should replace whatever was there.

What is the problem you are trying to fix?

 

[silversongshelties]

What is the problem you are trying to fix?

Hi Geofelt, I'm trying to figure out what's causing my PC to intermittently freeze and/or crash.

So far I've updated all the drivers, bios, etc.. I could think to, been on the phone with HP support (before my warranty expired in Feb), upgraded the PSU to a PX-750, ran OCCT on components with no errors and am working through testing my RAM and RAM slots atm. Just waiting for that next freeze to move on to the next ram stick

 

[Th4nato5]

Does it freeze and produce a buzzing sound?

 

[silversongshelties]

Does it freeze and produce a buzzing sound?

If I have audio on (i.e. a video playing or music), yes a loud buzzing, sometimes the sound is just distorted. If not, then it sounds more like a boot up of some sort. At the risk of sounding silly, try this in a deep voice, starting low getting louder at the end...birrrRRRRTTTT. Lasts anywhere from 1 to 5 seconds or so. Longer usually ends in a restart.

I removed one of my extra SATA drives while testing my RAM sticks and so far all's quiet. There are only so many things that move in a PC and I noticed the hard drive sound was more noticeable than perhaps it should be. Now the wait lol.

What were you thinking when you asked?

Thanks!
Silver

 

[Th4nato5]

Are you overclocking your RAM? Also, this is usually the sign of a hardware fault with the PSU, RAM, or GPU.

 

[geofelt]

The buzzing sound you hear is probably from the audio when the pc fails.
That is what you might hear if a pc shuts down to excessive overclocking.
If you have any overclocks active, on either cpu or gpu, turn them off.

Also, fwiw, on your motherboard, it says that if a graphics card is present, the integrated adapter is disabled.
Don't know if you can later enable it in the bios to use two adapters.
This is normally what should happen, but oem makers will purposefully dumb down the bios for whatever reasons.

Since you can run OCCT without issue, I would expect your failures to be of a software issue.

 

[Th4nato5]

The buzzing sound you hear is probably from the audio when the pc fails.
That is what you might hear if a pc shuts down to excessive overclocking.
If you have any overclocks active, on either cpu or gpu, turn them off.

Also, fwiw, on your motherboard, it says that if a graphics card is present, the integrated adapter is disabled.
Don't know if you can later enable it in the bios to use two adapters.
This is normally what should happen, but oem makers will purposefully dumb down the bios for whatever reasons.

Since you can run OCCT without issue, I would expect your failures to be of a software issue.

I wonder if it's the audio driver clashing with the Microsoft default HD audio driver or the Nvidia audio driver.

 

[geofelt]

Unless you will possibly use the audio on a monitor, I would do a custom install of the nvidia drivers and omit sound.
There should be no conflict with using both.
Audio drivers are a bit finicky. See if reinstalling the motherboard audio drivers helps.

 

[silversongshelties]

As I understand it, my HP system doesn't support overclocking (and I'm okay with that ). Ugh, audio drivers. Okay, found an update for Realtek HD Audio drivers for my HP Omen. Next a custom (re)install of the Nvidea drivers (those are for my gpu, correct?...just checking

 

[silversongshelties]

Do you suggest I do a clean install and uncheck PhysX system software as well? I'm going for the studio drivers this time as I do work with video editing and graphics as well as game and stream.

 

[Th4nato5]

Do you suggest I do a clean install and uncheck PhysX system software as well? I'm going for the studio drivers this time as I do work with video editing and graphics as well as game and stream.

Check if HP has drivers for your system. I run a custom PC with a GTX 1070, so I would usually download the GeForce Driver and do a custom clean installation when installing it. As for the software, I would ask around.

 

[JohnBonhamsGhost]

you should remove all previous Nvidia settings and drivers with DDU.

Do you suggest I do a clean install and uncheck PhysX system software as well?

no, remove ALL drivers, software, & settings related to the 1070 Ti with the software DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller).

Also, fwiw, on your motherboard, it says that if a graphics card is present, the integrated adapter is disabled.

if this is true, than when removing the dedicated GPU from it's PCIe slot the integrated graphics will be re-enabled upon reboot.

so after removing the current Nvidia driver\settings
then powering down the system and removing the 1070 Ti
switching the display cable to the rear I\O DP or HDMI port
and then powering back up, you should be running again with the iGPU functional.

 

[silversongshelties]

Update. Think I found what's causing the freezes/crashes. When testing my RAM sticks I removed a spare SATA drive that I thought sounded a bit louder than the other. It's been almost a week and no more issues. When I Googled HDD failure sounds I found one that matched and it's caused by the motor getting stuck on the platter. Eventually I'll get around to testing it further, but for now I'm just going to take some deep breathes and relax lol. Thank you ALL for being so great to help and put up with my inexperience! You're great!

 

[John Chesterfield]

You say that you're inexperienced, but you've actually done your troubleshooting far better than some IT techs would, really. Good work.

I'm glad you got to the bottom of it too, you probably learned some stuff along the way and that's a nice feeling.