EVGA 7900 series cards artifact/bsod fix?

[likewhoa]

If any of your 7900 Series Cards are experiencing any of the following symptoms read on.

 

1. Artifacts, tearing, fine colored dots, black spots with missing graphics.

2. Severe distortion during Deep Freeze test.

3. Complete system hangup during Deep Freeze.

4. Flickering desktop about 1 or 2 second intervals after the test is over. Desktop may have colors missing or black spots in windows, taskbar and start button. You may see this distortion earlier between 3D tests when 2D desktop is exposed.

5. BSOD with infinite loop on nv driver

 

source from EVGA Forums

 

Myself and others have experienced this and I figured a way to stabilize my card at stock speeds or while OC'in it

 

What I suggest is that you increment your PCIe bus Frequency to 120Mhz and retry to reproduce the above problems.

good luck, so far I have confirm this working for everyone that has tried it,.. under ASUS boards which show the pcie frequency at 200Mhz when trying to increment, lower this to 120Mhz, on the DFI it should read 100Mhz, again increment this by 20Mhz.

 

There could be other issues that could be causing all of the above problems, some tips below should help.

 

1. Your 12V rail,. monitor this and make sure it doesn't decrease in voltage.

2. Chassis cooling should be efficient, make sure your cpu does not idle at high temps >50C.

3. Consider a Water Cooling setup for your GPU, mine idles at 30C with a Swiftech GPU block.

4. If you're inside a cool room ".

5. DO NOT OC the video card with GPU block unless your RAM have heatsinks on them.

6. Users with ASUS boards should disable PEG Link as this has been proven to work for some but not all.

7. Install the AMD Dual-Core X2 drivers, here's a guide you can follow to get that setup and configured. Click here!

8. Might want to try the 84.21 ForceWare Drivers. for better performance as the beta drivers are mostly for newert cards like the X2 cards. 84.21 supports 7900 series

9. Make sure if you're running the card on your second PCIe Slot that it's running at 8x and not 2x. Check under your Nvidia Control panel to see what multiplier the card is running at.

 

 

 

If all of the above are ruled out and certain games give you problems, or just send you back on the desktop and you're

running dual-core cpu, then set the affinity for that game to run on just 1 core.

 

Hope some of this helps some of you with these cards.

[HITandRUN]

Where did you get the info from? Or is this something you found out by you self? :confused:

[Redbeaver]

ill give that a whirl... thx! but..isnt the default is 100Mhz? 220 is abit... far, dont u think? lol.....

 

if it can stop the artifacts on BF2 after playing 2hr straight, i'll b happy....

[watsonte]

Yeah I saw this "solution" posted in the EVGA forums, and yeah 220?, thats insanely high!

[likewhoa]

Yeah I saw this "solution" posted in the EVGA forums, and yeah 220?, thats insanely high!

 

actually 220 on asus boards is possible,. but on the dfi,.. raise it to 120 and retry 3dmark test that failed before..

[red930]

Only for eVGA, what about XFX? XFX has different caps, PCB, what?

[watsonte]

Possible is one thing but the effect it has on the hardware is relatively unknown, considering it runs at 100 stock I wonder what the difference is between running at 100 as opposed to the 220 solution. Basically what does raising this value actually tell the card or allow the card to do that it "fixes" the issue.....

[likewhoa]

Possible is one thing but the effect it has on the hardware is relatively unknown, considering it runs at 100 stock I wonder what the difference is between running at 100 as opposed to the 220 solution. Basically what does raising this value actually tell the card or allow the card to do that it "fixes" the issue.....

 

no don't raise it to 220,.. set it at 120 from the stock 100 and retry your 3dmark test.. this pcie frequency raise allow me to pass all 3dmark01,03,05,06 test at 1600x1200 and with high video card settings.. will post screenshots tonight after i finish priming at 334x9-1.400+110%

[likewhoa]

Only for eVGA, what about XFX? XFX has different caps, PCB, what?

i think this might work with any 7900 series card since this seems to be an issue with nvidia itself..

are you getting artifacts/blinkin screen/bsod in 3dmark deep freeze?

[red930]

What about games, did you have any artifacts/BSOD in any of your games before even?

[likewhoa]

What about games, did you have any artifacts/BSOD in any of your games before even?

I was getting artifacts/blinkin screen/bsod in 3dmark02,05,06 then i raised the pcie frequency to 120 and all my test passed with no errors/bugs

[red930]

Okay, i see now so all your games worked fine, only benchmarking issues correct? I'm getting artifacts/Flickering only when i try to overclock from default (520/1500) to higher frequencies which wouldn't make sense now would it. I'll try but it's on an ASUS motherboard, but i don't think it will help in my case or am i mistaken?