8800GT Troubles?

M

MrHood22

Supreme [H]ardness
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Aug 21, 2007
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I think my 8800GT is being bottlenecked or something. 2.7ghz Dual core shouldn't bottleneck and my PSU is good enough I think.

PSU = http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817182032

Sometimes in COD4 i'll just be refreshing servers and my fps will drop to like 4 or 5 from the 45 I get on the menu. It also freezes up in games sometimes. For instance, yesterday I had off so I decided to get some solid hours of COD4 in, well I played for about 2 hours and then it sorta froze up. It's done it before, it only semi-freezes. It doesn't freeze to the point where I can do NOTHING and therefore am forced to restart. It freezes to the point where I can minimize and stuff and it will take a minute or 2 just to get to the desktop but once it gets to the desktop i'm fine. If I maximize again then it does the same thing until I restart then it runs fine. It runs very cool to, it idles at about 40c and in game it gets to about 53c.

When I have the low FPS when querying for servers I can minimize in the middle of it while at 5 fps and when i maximize I go up to about 20 fps.
 
Indeed maybe something is wrong with your temp sensor or the program you're using to see the temps.

Those symptoms are consistent with overheating IMO.

40c for an 8800gt is weird!

al ;)
 
I use Rivatuner v2.06

Ai Booster (ASUS software that came with my mobo) says my CPU temp is 44c on full load and my system temp is 34c on full load then my case also has a thermometer that is on the bottom of my case and it is reading 24.5c at full load.
 
When this happened, did you go into the Task Manager and see if anything was running or downloading?

I recall having something similar happening to me at times, then, when it started again, I brought up task manager....turns out, during my gaming, my computer was doing a schedualed virus scan I had forgot was schedualed. Would bog down everything.

Just a thought :)
 
It sounds like part of the problem at least is due to overheating.
You can test easily by clocking the card a bit slower and see if it fairs better.
 
How is it overheating?!?!

I can understand if Riva tuner was giving low temps but all my other temps are low. My case temp is 21c so I highly doubt it's overheating.

I don't think it's due to something else running either. I don't have scheduled virus scans or anything. I realize that it COULD be this if it happened once or even twice but this happens every few times I play. Basically i'm sure it would happen everytime I play if I stayed on long enough. Sometimes it happens in 5 minutes sometimes it happens after 2 hours of flawless gameplay.

My computer is in my basement and it's about 65-75f down here (21c = 70f) so I really doubt it's overheating.
 
Its only a suggestion, you dont have to try it.
 
Sorry Nenu, I didn't mean to sound like I was shooting your suggestion down. I'm just saying it's fucking freezing down here lol.



yacoub, That could be the case to but why would a company make a product that would be bottlenecked by an above average CPU. I'd say the average CPU is maybe a 2.4ghz Dual core. I just gather that from the people I know and what they have. Now of course you're always gonna have your Quad cores and then you 1.2ghz Single core but on average I think a 2.4ghz dual core is what most people are around.

I will have task manager up and see if my CPU spikes up to 100% when it freezes, i'll also try to underclock my card but what do you think I should set it at? It's at 625/900 now.
 
Yeah that would probably do the trick but I don't think a CPU BN is causing this issue because it runs fine for 2 hours sometimes then it just hits a point and lags like crazy. I OCed it to 2.9ghz (9 x 323) and I still had the problem. I'm fine if my 8800GT is bottlenecked a little bit and I don't get the full out of it because for getting this for $250 it's not worth it to try to sell it then go back to an 8600GT or something. I plugged in different 6 pin connector and I took out my soundcard (since I sold it) and we'll see if that makes any difference. My CPU is also OCed back to it's normal 2.7ghz.
 
This to me sounds like a memory problem. Your sig says you have 2GB which should be fine, however, I find when your system starts running out of physical memory it will start swapping to the page file which greatly slows things down. Symptoms very similar to yours start happening where the system gets more and more sluggish as you have next to no memory available to work with. Have you ever seen a windows balloon in your task manager mention anything about low virtual memory when the slow downs occur and you make it back to your desktop? Try and adjust your page file size and location and see if that helps. I have to ask as well, does this happen in anything else. You should really try and broaden your testing of issues like this to see if they pop up elsewhere. If every other game and daily task you do never exhibits this strange behavior it could just be the game on your system/setup. Is there any patches for the game you could try and install? Lastly, it could just be a dirty OS install. How old is it exactly and do you maintain it via defragging, spyware removal, virus checks etc? Try a good defrag and see if that helps. If your hard drive is getting very full and your page file is on that same drive/partition it could be badly fragmented and needs to be taken care of. The OS/game files will benefit from this too. Check your hard drive activity light on the front of your case when the slow downs occur. Does it seem like its blinking constantly? Is it solidly lit? If so that is hard drive thrashing which could be caused from bad fragmentation or even the page file being constantly accessed. The only other thing you could do is change out your drivers. Be sure you have the latest chipset and video drivers installed. The latest bios for your board wouldn't hurt either. You have lots to think about and try here, I wish you luck. No one likes problems like you are describing. I only hope you get them sorted. All the best.
 
Thank you for that long list of problems/solutions first of all. I'll try to answer some of those questions but i'm still recovering from going cross eyed after reading that. Try hitting enter a few times, the readers will thank you :)

-I don't think it's a RAM issue though because when I restart my RAM refreshes and sometimes it only takes a few minutes for this issue to happen and I don't think my RAM fills up that much.


1. I've never seen this balloon on this computer ever. I've seen it on other computers and a very old computer we had but not this one.

2.Yes, when it gets very sluggish I can make it back to my desktop and it will be fine but then when I go back into the game I can play for a minute or 2 until this happens again. It also takes very long to minimize/maximize.

3. How do I adjust my page file size/location?

4. I will try to broaden my testing areas. I'll try out CSS and GH3.

5. I have the latest patchs

6. I reinstalled the OS a few months ago.

7. I defrag/spyware/AV once a week. I just did that all yesterday.

8. My game is on a partition of 45 gigs with 9 of those gigs free. It's pretty much the only thing I use off of that Partition besides my Windows XP.

9. I see my HD light when I game but it's not solid. I don't see it when I'm on the web or anything small like that.

10. I think I have all the latest drivers and stuff. I have 169.02 for my GPU. I'm currently talking with BFG over this. The first email asked me for my voltages so we'll see what they say about that.


Thanks for the ongoing help guys :)
 
I had a weird issue with an 8800 GT as well. It was working fine then all of a sudden was working slow. The card was idling cold ( a big hint ), etc, but in game performance was about 50 to 60% of prior (3Dmark06 score about 10K). When I went to the OC component, it did not let me select any overclocking setting as it was already set. I thought the card died, but after checking with new memory, then another 8800 GT, then another motherboard, it ended up being the Enermax Galaxy 1000W PSU. The card was throttling down since it was not getting sufficient power. It seemed to work with a 8600GT card, but not the 8800GT. I used another PSU and things worked as expected, once again (3DMark06 score back to 16K).
 
I listed by PSU above, that should run it fine shouldn't it?


Also, I played Guitar Hero 3 for atleast an hour and it ran perfectly (except for me missing half the notes :( ) I'll try CSS another time since I have work the rest of the day in 30 minutes. Maybe it is just my COD4? Is it a problem that it's on a partition that only has 9 gigs of free space?
 
The mention of the partition of only 9GB of available space does sound suspect. Perhaps the game uses the HD the actually game itself is installed in as some sort of cache or buffer that it uses while the game is running. If there isn't enough free space it could be chugging due to this. The game itself installs fairly large. If you could, uninstall the game completely and reinstall on a much larger partition and see how that works out.
 
Could it be his processor overclock is unstable? I've had similar problems when I push my proc too far. When I throttle down the o/c or go back to stock settings, the symptoms disappear. Your proc at stock should not bottleneck the 8800GT.
 
As others have stated, it could be the OC, even if the temps are good OCs can have hidden instability that only shows up under very specific circumstances. Try taking off 2-300Mhz or so and see if that makes a difference.

COD4 is a recent and demanding game, what sort of settings/resolution are you running at, and are you using any AA? It could be possible that you are either overdoing the 512MB of onboard memory, or possibly filling up your 2GB of ram. If you are running XP, check your systems peak memory usage to see if it comes close to the limit. Surprisingly I run Hellgate London @ 1024 x 768, no AA and medium-high settings, and it uses up about 1.9 of my 2GB. And it doesn't look anywhere near as good as COD4 ;)

Unfortunately it will probably take a lot of detective work to get to the bottom of this :/ As another poster has said, it could also be something as strange as a failing/faulty PSU.

Aggies
 
Stock is 2.1ghz is stock.

I run at optimal setings (Game picked them out) except for turning 4x AA off and uping my resolution to 1280 x 1024. I have about 70FPS on average and never dip under 20 (except for maybe a sec or 2 in some situations).

I'll try uninstalling it and reinstalling it but how do I keep my profile. I'm a 2* general and it took forever to get there and I don't want to lose that.
 
This issue has nothing to do with the 8800GT. It has to do with either the game itself, or the video drivers. I have 2 7900GTOs that I play COD 4 with and I've had those problems, particularly when the game first game out. I was playing version 1.0 and graphics driver version was...something other than the latest ones. I forget. Only sometimes, I would join a server and it would literally lock up for a good 10-15 seconds before going again. By then I would have died once or twice. This only seemed to happen on some servers. Other times, my screen wouldn't lock up, but I would get connection issues where you jerk around on the screen for 10-15 seconds.
Both of these issues have stopped since updating cod 4 to 1.2 (1.3 now I believe) and updating my graphics card drivers.
Again, I don't know if it was the patch or the drivers. But the issues have stopped for me.

Are you sure you're using the latest versions of your stuff?

Could also be a sound issue. Try turning sound off or lowering quality and see if that makes any difference. Might have corrupted sound drivers.

Another problem could be with your punkbuster setting. Try bringing up a console and type /pb_sleep 500 and see if that helps at all.
 
I have 169.02 drivers I think. I got them off of Nivida a few weeks ago when I got my 8800.
 
If you are on XP try the latest 169.09. If you are on Vista try 169.12. I believe these drives came out around, or shortly after the release of the GT cards and were made to address compliance with those cards.
 
Update:

I drag/dropped it over to my other partition with 50gigs free and ran it and it shot back down to 3-6 FPS when querying for servers so i'd imagine that I still have issues in game.
 
Update:

I downloaded, installed, and I saw in riva tuner it said 169.09. I started up COD4 and I had the same problem with querying for the server list. I'm going to test this card out in tf2 and see how it handles. Hopefully it's just COD4.

Edit: I did the steam stress test and I got 85fps with everything on high, 1280 x 1024, no aa, trilinear filtering. That's what they recommended to. I took it like 2 weeks ago and got 147 fps. When I had my 8600GT OC I got 149fps. This is all with the 169.09 drivers to.

Edit2: I got a 7441 on 3dmark06. Does that sound about right?

http://service.futuremark.com/orb/resultanalyzer.jsp?projectType=14&XLID=0&UID=12468166
 
MrHood22 said:
Sorry Nenu, I didn't mean to sound like I was shooting your suggestion down. I'm just saying it's fucking freezing down here lol.



yacoub, That could be the case to but why would a company make a product that would be bottlenecked by an above average CPU. I'd say the average CPU is maybe a 2.4ghz Dual core. I just gather that from the people I know and what they have. Now of course you're always gonna have your Quad cores and then you 1.2ghz Single core but on average I think a 2.4ghz dual core is what most people are around.

I will have task manager up and see if my CPU spikes up to 100% when it freezes, i'll also try to underclock my card but what do you think I should set it at? It's at 625/900 now.
Click to expand...


my opteron 165 @ 2.7 is like 3 years old now, I'd say it is below average? Average matters not, fact is my CPu is 3 years old and this is a new video card. That said I'm pretty happy with the results im getting by adding this card to a 3 year old system.

Most people are not buying 8800GT's either, they run onboard or as cheap a video card as they can get.

Sorry can't help with that game.
 
I know for sure that your CPU is fast enough, I'm running at 2.8GHz A64 x2 with an 8800GT and have no issues with performance.
The difference with a CPU of 2.7GHz is almost negligible.
 
I am willing to bet my life this is a psu/card issue. I have heard of this before. I think the psu is on its way out the door and is not providing the needed power for the card. The card puts itself in a low power mode because of this. It sounds like the card is not coming out of low power mode and is running well below stock to maintain stability. If you have a multimeter handy can you check the 12v and 5v lines under load to see what they read?
 
I checked the VCore, 3v, 5v, 12v in idle and sent them to the BFG guy. They're all a little bit higher. Like 5v is 5.2v or something like that. He said they're alright. How do I check them while under load?

My PSU is only about 4 months old to, do they die that quick?
 
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