evga gtx 260 problem?

hossdaddy

hossdaddy

2[H]4U
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Mar 1, 2007
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hey guys, I was playing some L4D last night on my main rig in sig. I was playing approx. 1 hour and it started dropping fps big time. I avg 90+ fps with full aa and af and have had these settings for 4 months since I bought the card. It just started chugging and eventually exited the game to the main game menu. It came stock @ 626mhz and I had it slightly oc'd to 650mhz with the fan @ 50-60% When it exited I checked the temp it was 50c. I then ran hardware monitor and the cpu was @ 40c, and case temps were totally acceptable. The pc is in my basement where the ambient temp is no higher than 22c.

After this happened I changed the clock speeds to default on the gtx 260 and rejoined the game. It played for about 5-10 mins then the exact same thing happened. WHen this happened I hopped on to my back up machine and finished the game without incident.

I am really stumped here? I will run memtest86+ on the ram today, but do not have a clue what the issue is? Normally I would suspect the psu but its very high quality and in the bottom of my CoolerMaster 690 with plenty of fans and great airflow. Its not even a year old.

Ideas? :confused:

TIA.
 
could also be the hard drive.. does it start screwing up when its under heavy load? or also if you have a virus scanner that does active scanning.. it might be getting stuck on one of the game files you are accessing..
 
something in the processes is popping out of no where, vid card is fine.
 
I spoke with eVGA tech yesterday and we turned the fan up to 75% and it kept the temps around 65c for an hour. This is a good thing but what worries me is that it never used to get that hot since I have had it(purchased in April this year) and now I need to up the fan speed by 35% to keep it cooler. It would get up to 75c when I first got it at 40% fan speed, now its hitting 84c under stress with the fan @ 60%. This seems to be a bad trend. Is the fan failing? Is the card generating more heat than before?
 
Did you clean it? Theres probably a ton of dust inside, i had the same thing with mine 260. When I got it on load it would go higher then 75 but after couple of months 90 on load was all ive seen. I got rid of the dust and now its back to normal.
 
regular cleaning is a must LOL i took my gaming desktop with me to iraq and 15 months i cleaned it once LOL when i got home the whole insides were orange and the PSU fan had already locked up so i rebuilt and now i clean it out regularly!
 
I blow out the pc and components every 3-4 months. Yes I did try to clean the card but there was not really anything to clean. I shoved the canned air nozzle into every conceivable hole and nothing came out.

Anyway its half way to the mothership right now so I will update when I get somthing back.

In the mean time I am back to gaming with my Asus 8800gs 384mb, which I must say is holding its own. I cant run all the eye candy I would normally run but its getting by.
 
It sounds like the card is automatically clocking down to 2D speeds. I've had this happen to me (in L4D no less) on rare occasions. A power cycle seems to ward it off.

An easy way to tell is to record/monitor your core speed via Rivatuner (or something similar).

The fact you temporarily fixed it by manually restoring your clocks is enough proof to me what's going on (your low core temps even more evidence). As a crude & annoying fix, you could assign a hotkey in RT to restore your clocks while in the game.

I'm not sure if it's something related to EVGA brand, GTX260 drivers, or L4D, but I haven't figured out the source of the problem. It's not something easily reproduced (at least for me).
 
You can manually set perf 3d mode in rivatuner if your like, it'll keep the GPU from downclocking during gameplay, when i first set up my 260's i would game fine until i ran for instance close to a wall in the game so the cards would downclock since displaying a textured wall didnt take much, after that they never recoved to normal without restarting the game, so i set force perf level in rivatuner to 3d perf mode and havent looked back since.
 
Hmm. I use vsync so you're on to something there, Shadowmonk.
 
Not sure if this helps but have you tried disabling multicore rendering in L4D's options?

Multicore rendering causes issues with freezing and stuttering.
 
O lowered the oc from 3.2 to 3 gig and played over 2 hours without issue. Im upgrading the cpu and mobo.
 
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