HokieRif Posted January 18, 2006 Posted January 18, 2006 I'm not sure about your benchmarking lockups, but I think I may be closer to at least locating the problem(s). I fooled around with Far Cry earlier this morning for about 20 minutes with each of the cards underclocked to 350 mhz (chip) and 802mhz (mem) and couldn't get it to crash. This was still with the 3-3-3-8 timings. Also, I checked the temps on each card after exiting and they were reporting 64 and 61c respectively (top card and bottom card, in order). Well within operating range, but higher than what I would expect... More Far Cry troubleshooting tonight when I get home... I hate having to play games to solve problems Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anakin_hollan Posted January 18, 2006 Posted January 18, 2006 Just installed Doom3, got it with my previous card but never played it, and I could play that on Ultra High setting on 1280x1024 and FSAA 4x from driver-setting. I'll have a go at game unclocking the Video-card and lowering resolutions... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
HokieRif Posted January 18, 2006 Posted January 18, 2006 Yeah, Doom 3 and Quake IV were both playable at the highest res. levels without any lockup problems. Different engines by different developers cause different problems I suppose... Definitely install Coolbits and lower the CPU and mem frequencies on your card to see if that helps. I would suggest lowering the CPU by 20-25% and the mem by 10-15% at first until you get it stable, or, take the overcloker's guide approach - lower the mem frequency to a point that is well within range (50% of listed max), and then get the CPU frequency as high as it can go until you start running in to problems. Bring the CPU back down (5 mhz steps) until it's stable again, and you have your CPU max. Do the same for the memory - halve the CPU frequency, and slowly bring the mem frequency up until you crash, and then back it down until stable. Finally, combine the results and test.... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anakin_hollan Posted January 18, 2006 Posted January 18, 2006 Ok, tested some more. This is getting awkward. Default for my card is GPU 450Mhz / mem 1050 Mhz. 1 - Underclocked to 400/960, put BF2 to all low settings on 1280x1024. Worked great. Could play for 45 mins, then I stopped it myself. 2 - Put the card back to default settings, kept BF2 on all low settings on 1280x1024. No problem. 3 - Kept the card on default settings, set BF2 back to all high settings on 1280x1024. Played for a while, not problem. But then, all of a sudden the textures started dissapearing... From one second to another I had myself an blue army-camouflage tank! I immediately stopped the game, and again tried to underclock the card. I dropped as low as 350/700, but it kept failing at the test.... After I rebooted, it accepted 420/1000 right away. During this session, the GPU Core never came above 64 degrees Celsius. Second to that, I installed MBM5 and datapack, together with the plugin for the nvidia-cards. MBM5 works, but no GPU ambient value? It just says 0 degrees... I'll have a go with an table-size fan directed at the card... Greetz! P.S. Would it be safe to say that ATM we only have problems running Direct3D-games, while OpenGL runs fine? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
kam33mitch Posted January 18, 2006 Posted January 18, 2006 Anakin, The X-fi extreme music card and nF4 boards have a bad history and DFI has not issued a BIOS to fix it although a lot of guys with your board and 623 say it is OK. When your PC boots up, do you see a lot of unknown PCI devices scroll by? You may want to take out the X-fi and use the MB sound to see if the problem goes away. It's a quick test compared to tweeking your Freq's for hours. Keep us posted. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anakin_hollan Posted January 18, 2006 Posted January 18, 2006 I don't use an X-fi, a of mine friend does. And he has no problems using BIOS dated 12/07. BTW, that 623-BIOS isn't for the "Expert"-board, is it? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
HokieRif Posted January 18, 2006 Posted January 18, 2006 Did you try high settings running at the 400/960 speeds? What are your other temps reading (CPU, PWMIC, chipset) under load? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
kam33mitch Posted January 18, 2006 Posted January 18, 2006 My bad on the sound card. No, the newest one for the expert is DC07 released on 7 December. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anakin_hollan Posted January 18, 2006 Posted January 18, 2006 Did you try high settings running at the 400/960 speeds? What are your other temps reading (CPU, PWMIC, chipset) under load? Yeah, just played for about 45 minutes, without a problem. GPU speed: 420/1000, 1280x1024, all high settings. Temps (Celsius/Fahrenheit): CPU: 39/102 PWMIC: 39/102 NF4: 45/113 GPU: 73/163 (was lower before... I guess 20Mhz differs a full 9 degrees... ) BF2 is a real resource-hog though, 100% CPU-load continuously, and ~1.2GB RAM. But I guess Far Cry is as well? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
magikempire Posted January 18, 2006 Posted January 18, 2006 OMG! I am not as crazy as I thought I was! I too am passing all benchmarks with flying colors but then when I get ingame I get random issues "Looping clicky sound" and also a frozen ingame frame. I have gone indepth with the RAM settings and clocks. I am also running an X-Fi Platinum, not sure if this relates but I am thinking it is too odd that these issues are occuring with X-fi users. So I will take out the X-fi card tonight and use onboard to see if I can repeat the results. Thanks for the thread! I thought I was alone in this fight! -Magik ***Note: These issues only occured after a fresh install was done to the system with my new SLI-DR Expert Board. I did not have any issues with my SLI-DR Regular version board before moving to the Expert mobo. The X-Fi worked great on that system for me. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
HokieRif Posted January 19, 2006 Posted January 19, 2006 Uninstalled the X-Fi, removed drivers, installed Live!, installed new drivers... and it still crashed... Ok, back to square 1... Reinstalled the x-fi, more far cry, dies a few minutes in to it. So, as I'm banging my head against the desk, I power the computer off and start touching all of the heatsinks in the darn case... Graphics cards seem OK (were reporting 60c before shutdown), I laughed at how cool my CPU heatsink was... and then there was the memory. Not knowing exactly how hot to the touch these things usually get, I thought they felt a little warm. So, I go back in to the genie bios and take the memory voltage down .1v... Another post coming along in an hour to let you know if things are still stable... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anakin_hollan Posted January 19, 2006 Posted January 19, 2006 Here a final update to one of my previous posts regarding SiSoft Sandra and the SLI-DR Expert: It's reading the SMBus all wrong... Solution: http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showpost.p...920&postcount=6 Same goes for Speedfan 4.27. It makes my PC power down!? It starts scanning: Scanning nForce2 SMBus at $1C00 Scanning nForce2 SMBus at $1C40 nForce2!? Is the chip-recognition skrewed, or the chip-advertisement? So, ATM only the locking during games persists... Greetz! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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