6800GT and 3dMARK05 : Game 2 Firefly

[OldM3ta]

Hello all!

I bought a PNY Verto 6800 GT a couple months ago and it's been great. I have a waterblock on it and sinks on the ram. However, the one thing I have noticed is that although the temperature is great at 400/1100 .... 38c/44c idle/load... after a few cycles of the firefly game 2 benchmark in 3dMark05, the screen starts corrupting and not showing the nature leaves right. Like big areas of black occur on some parts of the screen.

It is only in this benchmark that this happens. I can play Doom 3 at 460 no problems. Farcry plays at 460 as well. For hours for both games. But even at 400, Game 2 creates this problem for me. Is there something going on with game 2? I have 61.77 omega corner drivers on my pc right now. I also have remade my bios to make both my 2D and 3D voltages be at 1.4v.

My AGP port voltages is set to 1.7v. Should I make my GPU 2D/3D voltages 1.5v? I hear people reporting temperatures in the 80s and 90s and I load at 44, so I am wondering whether to try 1.5v or not, or whether to just ignore the problem (although I really want this baby overclocked and solid)..


Thanks for your input...

Please don't post.. "keep it at stock" or some junk like that.. this board _is_ for HardOverclockingPeople okay?

peace

 

[tranCendenZ]

couple of things
* game2 works fine for me on my 6800GT
* i havent seen people who overclock their 6800GT gain any performance past 440mhz due to it only having one molex & power throttling

 

[OldM3ta]

P.S. My voltages never drop below 3.38, 12.16, or 5.09 for power on the rails with an Enermax 550w powering my rig...

 

[Xxplosiv]

my GT @ 450/1200 loves it, recently stuck my waterblock on, strange how i cant hit 460 with a waterblcok but could with old reference heatsink/fan in RTHDRIBL, with 4x multi sample, and 4x aa/ 8x af, i hit 70-80 FPS. man this is blowing my mind lol

 

[OldM3ta]

couple of things
* game2 works fine for me on my 6800GT

What's your make? What's your CPU/RAM clock? What's your bios version? What's your driver version?

* i havent seen people who overclock their 6800GT gain any performance past 440mhz due to it only having one molex & power throttling

Where do you see information on this or proof of it please?


Thanks for your post and future reply

 

[chrisf6969]

Sometimes it doesnt matter how much volts you use if you've reached your card's particular limit.... you are stuck. Granted vaporphase cooling (sub-zero) can greatly increase your OC, but normal air/water OC's are usually similar.

Many times watercooling doesn't really help your max OC that much over aircooling. It lowers temps, but sometimes max OC isnt always a temp problem.

So my guess is you're reached your cards potential.

So either buy a new card and try your luck again, or invest in vaporphase cooling for your videocard.

 

[OldM3ta]

my GT @ 450/1200 loves it, recently stuck my waterblock on, strange how i cant hit 460 with a waterblcok but could with old reference heatsink/fan in RTHDRIBL, with 4x multi sample, and 4x aa/ 8x af, i hit 70-80 FPS. man this is blowing my mind lol

Okay.. so what is your suggestion to me? And.. please post for me your make type, bios version, if you did any volt modding and if so to what? Plus your driver version and if you can do a 5 run pass of game 2 in 3dmark05 with no corruption... thanks

 

[chrisf6969]

What's your make? What's your CPU/RAM clock? What's your bios version? What's your driver version?



Where do you see information on this or proof of it please?


Thanks for your post and future reply

Make model, doesnt really matter. Come on, get over that.

I doubt its a driver problem. Since NVidia seems to only have one thing on their driver team's agenda.... increase 3dMark2005 score with out a noticeable decrease in quality that would results in "cheaters" being claimed.

Look at the pics of an ultra vs. GT. there are quite a few more powercaps/mosefts/etc on the ultra. The core I dont think can take much more than 440Mhz with the GT's power circuitry. As Transcendz said. Once you go over 440 you're going to start having issues from the power supply.

 

[OldM3ta]

Sometimes it doesnt matter how much volts you use if you've reached your card's particular limit.... you are stuck. Granted vaporphase cooling (sub-zero) can greatly increase your OC, but normal air/water OC's are usually similar.

Many times watercooling doesn't really help your max OC that much over aircooling. It lowers temps, but sometimes max OC isnt always a temp problem.

So my guess is you're reached your cards potential.

So either buy a new card and try your luck again, or invest in vaporphase cooling for your videocard.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't have a problem with anything else other than game 2. However, I understand game 2 is the most powerful and power hungry of all three game types in 3dMark05. Yet for it not to run a 5-pass cycle right at 400 MHz, and yet FarCry HDR 12x10 with 4xAF or Doom3 12x10 4xAF4xAA run at 460 MHz fine doesn't seem to match up.

But I see what your getting at about temps... yet, doesn't extra voltage help cores stay consistent in their processing?

 

[d34dly]

I am getting this problem at STOCK speeds. Happens to me too. Check my other thread for some other anomolies I am getting.

 

[Xxplosiv]

Okay.. so what is your suggestion to me? And.. please post for me your make type, bios version, if you did any volt modding and if so to what? Plus your driver version and if you can do a 5 run pass of game 2 in 3dmark05 with no corruption... thanks

i never d/led 05 cause all you need is 03.. i never flashed my BIOS, and am running a first gen PNY 6800GT with the bios 5.40.02.15.01 and with the waterblock now installed, ive never seen temps higher than 75 C, and thats after running RTHDRIBL full screen for 6 hours
(need to reapply AS5)

 

[OldM3ta]

I am getting this problem at STOCK speeds. Happens to me too. Check my other thread for some other anomolies I am getting.

Thanks for your reply to my post. What make and model do you have of the 6800 series? What drivers are you using? What revision of bios are you using? What are your temps? Thanks....

 

[OldM3ta]

i never d/led 05 cause all you need is 03.. i never flashed my BIOS, and am running a first gen PNY 6800GT with the bios 5.40.02.15.01 and with the waterblock now installed, ive never seen temps higher than 75 C, and thats after running RTHDRIBL full screen for 6 hours
(need to reapply AS5)

Yeah.. well I don't have a problem with 03 either! 03 runs great... in loops.. its only happening in my game 2 of 3dMark05... can you try to download 3dMark05 and run game 2 when you get a chance in 5 to 10 loops and post your results? .. If you don't want to.. thats cool... but that's what this post is about...

 

[chrisf6969]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't have a problem with anything else other than game 2. However, I understand game 2 is the most powerful and power hungry of all three game types in 3dMark05. Yet for it not to run a 5-pass cycle right at 400 MHz, and yet FarCry HDR 12x10 with 4xAF or Doom3 12x10 4xAF4xAA run at 460 MHz fine doesn't seem to match up.

But I see what your getting at about temps... yet, doesn't extra voltage help cores stay consistent in their processing?

John Carmack said when Doom3 came out that you may find your cards unstable at previously stable overclocks because Doom3 engine will use parts of the card differently than anything else out. I think with newer games being able to use SM3.0 shaders you may find that certain usage patterns (engines) may cause a problem and others may not. They might be hitting that one weak circuit that can only handle 390Mhz, and thats why it was sold as a GT, not an Ultra!

Ex: when the P3 1133Mhz came out, it only had an error on like one program. But it showed an inherent weakness over 1Ghz.

Maybe something of the same sort. Game2's usage really heats up a certain part of the core...and in your core (or all cores) it may limit your OC.

 

[Xxplosiv]

ok, gimme a min, i only get 160kb/s d/l speeds, ill get back to ya when im done

 

[Xxplosiv]

gah 30 min wait. stupid fileplanet

 

[OldM3ta]

Okay .. here are some pics of the problem.. this is at 400/1000

But like I said.. it only happens in this benchmark. No games get this. Not even FarCry with very high across it all, HDR, and 12x10 with 4xAF.

 

[Xxplosiv]

ran it 5 times, no artifacts like that. must be either not enought themal compound, bad memory on the card, or a bad core.

 

[OldM3ta]

ran it 5 times, no artifacts like that. must be either not enought themal compound, bad memory on the card, or a bad core.

Thanks for the run. Yeah, I'm attempting it at a lower clock and core and even at 360 core, 1000 MHz, the artficating is happening. Fastwrites enablke and disabled.

 

[Xxplosiv]

it was fun for me, found out my system scored 5330

 

[OldM3ta]

Shit.. now I dropped all my overclocks back to stock on rest of system and tried again, this time downclocking back to stock 350/1000.... still with the 1.4v bios.. and the artificating in game 2 comes immediately....


umm...


yeah...


reverting back to original bios... and trying again with clean drivers, no riva...... will post afterwards for reference

 

[OldM3ta]

it was fun for me, found out my system scored 5330

Did you do a bios mod?

 

[Xxplosiv]

sounds scary.
dont do anything stupid like jiggle the card while the power is on lol

 

[Xxplosiv]

Did you do a bios mod?

no, voltage/bios is stock, all i did was raise up in coolbits, then in riva tuner cause coolbits is about .2 mhz off

 

[peacetilence]

It's a bug with the 61.77 drivers. I had the same problem a while back, the 66.81s and the 66.93s don't have the same artifacts. I think it may have to do with the 61.77s not fully utilizing smart shader 3.

 

[OldM3ta]

Okay... explain this one.

So I have the first revision of the PNY Verto bios backed up which is the one that came with my card. I had flashed the bios to a self-modified version of that PNY Verto bios that had not only the 3D at 1.4v, but the 2D/3D at 1.4v, and the 2D at 1.4v. I had my card under a MCW50 water block on 1/2" ID tubing and after that, along with some AS5 under the block, I was getting temps of 42 degrees celcius (38 degrees celius when my CPU core was 1.35. Now with the L11 mod, it's at 1.725 default, so the entire cooling loops works harder and is less efficient).

So using rivatuner, I was able to easily set my clock to 460/1100 with no anomolies in either Doom 3 (12x10), or FarCry (10x7+HDR). This is what has been running for about a week straight. The only thing that had happened was that there was stuttering going on in FarCry anytime a new sound would be about to be played, so I reverted to 61.77s from Omega Corner.

All tests of AquaMark3 ran fine, along with 3dMark2000 and 3dMark2001 (shits and giggles benchmarks). Even Rthdribl would run fine over night at 460 with no problems.

It wasn't until I ran 3dMark2003 Nature or 3dMark2005 firefly over and over and over that I started to see the problems mentioned earlier. And today, as I wrote about it here on my second computer, I observered the problem getting worse and worse where at first it would take three or four runs of firefly or nature to get the artificating, afterwards, it would only take one run.

Downclocking to stock speeds using RivaTuner or Coolbits didn't help. This worried me. So I downclocked all of my CPU and RAM overclocks to stock. Still same problem. Even seeming to appear worse.

I went ahead and went back to my stock bios on the card (the PNY verto 6800GT rev1). And when I loaded up Windows again, still with the 61.77 Omegas, the issue was still present. Artificating and very bad! I thought maybe I had fried something important or something... but then I thought to go ahead and do a drive clean using Drive Cleaner 3 in safe mode, and to remove all my video and monitor drivers. I then went ahead and installed the latest from Nvidia, 66.93 WHQL. Reboot my system and BAM! Problem solved.

I am on a 30 minute run of Game 2 firefly loop over and over and still no corruption (at stock speeds). I believe it is possible that this all came down to problems with Omega's 61.77 and some kind of pixel shader technology on the core. I will attempt to overclock slowly now, monitoring for this system but wanted to share here my experience with all of you.

One more thing to note. A was unable, beforehand, to run 3dMark05 with my Nvidia Properities displaying my temperature in the background. I would always get a NV.dll crash when I would try this using the 61.77s. It appears that this is now resolved to as I am running the 3dmark05 loop with the temp display on my desktop.

...

 

[OldM3ta]

It's a bug with the 61.77 drivers. I had the same problem a while back, the 66.81s and the 66.93s don't have the same artifacts. I think it may have to do with the 61.77s not fully utilizing smart shader 3.

Oh my god.. I just spent the last 10 minutes writing that past post explaining how I came to the conclusion that it might be a driver problem, and here you go and post this a second before I finish my last post. LOL!