New build problem (980ti)

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Zerophin

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Mar 18, 2016
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Hello,

Extremely long time browser of this forum and thankful for all the great advice on here - finally have a question to post for myself :)

I just completed a new build (first one in 4 years so it's a nice upgrade). Opted for the MSI 980Ti Gaming to match with a Dell U3415W, I7-6700K, 750W EVGA PS and basically all new parts aside from my legacy storage drives. It's only been a week of limited action but I've had about a half dozens crashes since the install while gaming.

Summary:

The Division - three crashes, screen freeze in all cases with signal still reporting to monitor, settings mostly ultra GPU temp was reporting in high 70C's (mid 40's FPS). Game has run fine for several hour sessions otherwise. This alone didn't alarm me given it's a new game.

World of Warcraft - about 7 crashes, blackscreen at various points from just launching, to a few minutes in the game. Have had to hard reboot each time (can't get back to Windows). Game has run fine for short sessions otherwise. Settings ultra, temps pretty low (50C's). At least on crash had the game music still playing in background.

Ark - two crashes, same as WoW, blackscreen. Otherwise had a few longer play sessions, temps/fps seemed in line with expectations when the game was running (never exceeded 80C).

Dragon Age: Inquisition - Did not crash yet but seems to have a problem launching (need to launch it twice for it to "stick")


I've tried three iterations of NVIDIA drivers rolling back to December and crashes occur regardless. Card fans are running, temps look normal and have not done any overclocking at all (installed Afterburner/Riva but did not tweak). I've not had much time at all to play so this feels like a lot of trouble early on. In 2 hours alone last night 4 of the above crashes took place.

I reviewed the system logs and prior to each crash there was an event related to the video driver which funny enough said it successfully recovered.

I pulled the card out and am going to swap it out at MicroCenter today and am hopeful that solves it, but am worried it won't :-/

Regards
 
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Hmm I don't know much of an issue it is, but when something like this happens to me I just reinstall Windows. Takes like 20 minutes. Usually solves problems. It's not always the card or the drivers.

I was going to bet on defective RAM but you say there's an event related to video driver, so it might not be RAM at all.
 
I was going to say the RAM as well. I just built a skylake system for a colleague and it would not, under any circumstances, accept anything but the JDEC specifications for the RAM. If I used XMP, any voltage change, any clock or timing change it would cause instability.

Do you have any other cards to test with? If not then I would give Nebell's suggestion a go and see where that takes you.
 
I'd not considered the RAM but that's a good call to check. I probably should also flash the latest bios to the MB but hadn't gotten to that point yet thinking it reeked of a video problem. Just preparing myself for what to do if I plug in the new card and it's still unstable :)
 
Which version of Windows? If you're on Windows 10 you may have to roll all the way back to the 347.88 driver to get rid of the TDR crashes. Unfortunately the first driver to support the 980 Ti was 353.06 when the TDR issue was at its peak, so that doesn't help you...

In which case I would just wipe the drive and try a fresh installation of Windows again. Maybe something went wrong when you were installing other drivers or updates. I always install motherboard drivers and software first with a restart before moving on to the video card.
 
Armenius said:
Which version of Windows? If you're on Windows 10 you may have to roll all the way back to the 347.88 driver to get rid of the TDR crashes. Unfortunately the first driver to support the 980 Ti was 353.06 when the TDR issue was at its peak, so that doesn't help you...

In which case I would just wipe the drive and try a fresh installation of Windows again. Maybe something went wrong when you were installing other drivers or updates. I always install motherboard drivers and software first with a restart before moving on to the video card.
Click to expand...

I'm on a clean Windows 10 install.

So the TDR issue is still a problem? After some googling last night I did see that come up (and my log message was "nvlddmkm.sys has stopped responding and recovered" prior to each crash). I'll admit to being ignorant to the issue till I started researching the problem last night. Is there a driver version that's generally more stable and 980TI compliant - I continually hear the latest "Division" drivers are a hot mess?

And thank you all for the responses.
 
Zerophin said:
I'm on a clean Windows 10 install.

So the TDR issue is still a problem? After some googling last night I did see that come up (and my log message was "nvlddmkm.sys has stopped responding and recovered" prior to each crash). I'll admit to being ignorant to the issue till I started researching the problem last night. Is there a driver version that's generally more stable and 980TI compliant - I continually hear the latest "Division" drivers are a hot mess?

And thank you all for the responses.
Click to expand...
General consensus seems to be that the 362.00 driver is the best one since 347.88. You can try a clean install with those using DDU if you don't want to go through a Windows reinstall. I've been having a good experience on 361.91 with Windows 8.1.
 
Armenius said:
General consensus seems to be that the 362.00 driver is the best one since 347.88. You can try a clean install with those using DDU if you don't want to go through a Windows reinstall. I've been having a good experience on 361.91 with Windows 8.1.
Click to expand...

I will second this statement. I installed the 364.51 for Hitman and extremely low framerates and crashes. I first chalked it up to a bad release but then far cry primal nor the division would even start. Rolling back to 362 ridded me of all issues.
 
You wouldn't happen to have Geforce Experience installed? A few people I know have been having issues recently with Geforce Experience.
 
Update - swapped out the MSI card with a EVGA FTW (happened to be on sale) on Friday and did a clean install of the 362 drivers. Relatively heavy gaming this weekend and zero TDR crashes (the issue I was having with Dragon Age Inquisition struggling to launch also went away). Had just one crash with a lock-up/sound loop on Saints Row 4 but I'm going to write that one off for now :)

Thanks all; hopefully things look good going forward!
 
Darn it :-/ So after a few weeks the crashing continues.

Basically I get a screen freeze (video displayed) and sometimes an audio loop along with it - forcing a manual reboot. The TDR error is gone with the new video card and the system log shows no event in conjunction with the crash. Happens with several games, many of which are not exactly taxing the GPU (GPU temps continue to read fine), and usually after paying for a bit. Albeit my sample size isn't huge because I've not had a tremendous amount of time to play outside of weekends.

I think this week will have to run memtest to check RAM and maybe reset Windows 10 to start ticking off possible causes. I rolled in the new NVIDIA driver last night (migrated from 362) to see if it helps despite knowing the newer drivers have been troublesome for many.

Just venting frustration at this point :)
 
I'm thinking you may have a power supply issue. 750 seems like it should be enough for that rig but do you have a spare you could swap in?
 
Just wanted to close the loop on this, after over two months of troubleshooting (I'm mostly limited to weekends due to work) it ended up being the damn motherboard. Not sure if it was a hardware conflict driven by the Gigabyte board, or just a bad board, but I've been running on an Asus board now for a few weeks without a single hiccup. I'd swapped out every other part (aside from the processor) before finding the solution. I guess I was due for a problem child after a pretty good run of clean builds!

I really have to give props to Microcenter, they went above-and-beyond letting me trade components past the return policy to help me troubleshoot and ultimately fix the build.
 
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