Gigabyte GTX 470 SO kernel crashing outside of games

I recently picked this up second hand. I don't know much about the history of this card. I replaced my 4850 crossfire setup with the GTX 470 , installed the latest drivers (275.33).

So far, I've never seen it crash in game. I've been able to play Crysis Warhead, Starcraft 2, and Arkham Asylum for a few hours each and never experienced a crash in game.

After a few days, the card started to crash while just browsing the web (just been using firefox) and had steam open at the same time. The computer goes unresponsive for a second, then the monitor displays no signal for a second, and then the display comes back and the computer warns that the kernel crashed and was successfully recovered. Sometime its very frequent, every 5 seconds and other times I can use the computer at least a half an hour and nothing occurs.

I tried reinstalling the drivers and re-seating the graphics card. My power supply is a HX620. Any other details can be found in my signature. I've monitored the temperatures under GPU-Z and all the temps remained under 60 degrees.

I'd really appreciate if someone could solve this problem as it seems like a great functioning card in games but some odd behaviors.

Edit: I've found one method of crashing it. Taking the firefox window and decreasing the size of the width. That doesnt always work but it did work twice in a row. Also, I turned off Aero to see if that was causing the problem but it still occurs when using the basic UI.

Maybe the card can't handle the factory overclock or the previous owner abused the hell out of it running an absurd OC? I've had the former happen with not one or two but THREE GTX 260 Black Edition cards. I'd mostly get hard locks with looping sound and/or garbage on the screen. Once clocked to default GTX 260 c216 clocks all was well.

Also, have you tried a previous build of drivers? Sometimes rolling back can help if a particular driver decides to hate your system. I used to have nightmares with AGP cards equipped with PCIe-AGP bridges, and certain ForceWare releases in the past. do you have a beefier PSU or another PC to test this in? Does this happen with other browsers or just FireFerret? That would also be a good place to start.

Sorry if I was a bit of a captain obvious, but I'm just trying to help.

Disable flash hardware acceleration... This has caused the same issue for me in the past.

if you have the hardware accel enabled in FF disable it. flash hardware acceleration shouldn't be an issue though..

to turn off hardware acceleration in FF go to option/advanced/general tab and uncheck use hardware accleration when available. see if that helps. if not try going to an older driver version and see what happens.

Thanks for the suggestions. I tried playing BFBC2 and the game did crash. (game froze, the geometry was distorted). After that the graphics driver failed completely and the system didn't detect a graphics card until I uninstalled the driver and restarted.

I disabled flash hardware acceleration. I then installed the 197.75 drivers (I got them from the Gigabyte website for this GPU). I still noticed the problem from regular use (I had 2 crashes in a row and then its been fine since then. I installed MSI afterburner and Furmark. I tested it twice, once with the fan manually set to 85/100 and with Auto. Neither time did the system crash.

When using auto fan speed, it hovers around 42 and peaked at 82 during the test.

Core Clock is 700 MHz, Shader 1400 Memory 1674.

Fan speed defaults to 40 but peaks 52.

Voltage defaults to 0.875 but instantly goes to 0.987 when testing.

I changed the test to last 4 mins, the temp rose to 93 (stabilized at 92), Fan speed rose to 75.

The GPU did not crash during any of the tests but right after the 4 minute test ended (and the score sheet popped up), it did crash.

In a week, I'll be able to test it in a different computer.

Excuse the large image but I believe it contains some valuable information. Since I got a crash right after the 4 minute furmark ended, I wanted to see if I could get the same results but this time I tested it for 16 minutes. After the test ended, I got the score popup but it did not crash to my dismay (I want a method that can guarantee a crash). So I then opened up hardforum and a second later two crashes in row. I then switched to the hardware monitor so I could snap a picture and it crashed again as I was positioning it to take a picture.

At the very left side of the picture, you can see the single crash after the 4 minute test. At the left, you can see many dips where it crashed multiple times after the 16 minute test.

As you can see, it seems to be fine under constant conditions but has a lot of trouble when I change tasks.

Test at stock settings, if the crashing persists just RMA it.

PersonalJ said:

Test at stock settings, if the crashing persists just RMA it.

Click to expand...

I think these are the stock settings for a GTX 470.
607/1215/1674

I'll test soon but normally problems of overclocking would show up when the GPU is running at 100% such as in FurMark, not during normal use or after doing a test, correct? I was wondering if perhaps I should try and force the voltage to stay at 0.987 and perhaps the problem is 0.875 not enough/barely enough.

Kelv said:

I think these are the stock settings for a GTX 470.
607/1215/1674

I'll test soon but normally problems of overclocking would show up when the GPU is running at 100% such as in FurMark, not during normal use or after doing a test, correct? I was wondering if perhaps I should try and force the voltage to stay at 0.987 and perhaps the problem is 0.875 not enough/barely enough.

Click to expand...

The lower voltage is normal, it doesn't need high clocks and high voltage during 2d use.

Yesterday I was viewing an online stream that was causing frequent crashes (every 20 seconds or so). I tried the HTML5 stream and the Flash stream and both had the same result. I made sure that hardware acceleration for flash was turned off (I'm not sure if that is an option in HTML5).

So I tried changing the clocks to the stock settings for a 470 but it didn't help at all. I think it must be some corrupted chip on board and definitely don't think its linked to the clock speed or temperature and probably not the voltage either. I don't think it could be the power supply.

I was wondering if flashing the firmware could possibly help. If so, will any GTX 470 firmware work? (does that void the warrenty?)

with a misbehaving card like that I would rather rma it than try a risky fw flash... if you clocked it back to vanilla 470 speeds and it still crashed, a fw fix will likely not change much... just for grins, in the advanced power settings, try setting PCI express 'link state power management' to 'off'. I think some of these cards are more sensitive to power transitions than others.. worth a shot.

revenant said:

with a misbehaving card like that I would rather rma it than try a risky fw flash... if you clocked it back to vanilla 470 speeds and it still crashed, a fw fix will likely not change much... just for grins, in the advanced power settings, try setting PCI express 'link state power management' to 'off'. I think some of these cards are more sensitive to power transitions than others.. worth a shot.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately link state power management set to off didn't fix it. I tried the card in my new build and the symptoms were the same. Requested an RMA and I hope to hear back soon.

Gigabyte is sending me the card back and apparently replaced a memory chip. I can't wait to try it out next weekend.