Drivers or fried card?

C

Cervani

Famous
Joined
Jun 24, 2008
Messages
420
I bought Bad Company 2 yesterday as a change of pace from COD. Everything worked out fine for the few rounds I played and then I went to bed.

I pop on today for a bit of playing, and immediately I start getting black boxes, stretched polys and bloom distortions. Helicopter fun fire would turn into a stream of colored boxes etc etc.

Now to me, this sounded like a driver issue, as I had JUST bought this GTX 570 on Feb 9th. I overclocked it, but I always make sure it's stable and temps don't fry the GPU (I manually set my fan high to compensate). So I used driver sweeper, cleaned the drivers, booted in safe mode and did it again, booted normal and installed new etc etc. Still getting issues.

Ok I say, maybe it IS a heat issue. So I take the overclock off both my CPU and my GPU and try it this way, with the new clean drivers. It's still doing it. At this point a friend of mine says it might be the card itself, but I'm refusing at this point to believe it. The overclock was stable, and up until now it's never really been stressed at all (I usually play EVE Online or City of Heroes or something). There should be now way it's fried in such a short amount of time with maybe half load on it.

Soooo, I uninstall BC2 thinking that may be it. While it's redownloading, I do a test with MW2 and Black OPS JUST to make sure. Immediately MW2 started have polygon troubles as well. I didn't even try black ops, because I'm sure it will turn out the same way. I even did a stress test (using both FurMark and MSI Kombustor). Furmark ran fine, but MSI showed some stretching of polygons and some background parts missing.

I'm experienced with computers, and have been building them for years... but this has me confused. It LOOKS like a driver issue, but at this point I'm beginning to suspect the card itself. It worked fine yesterday with no issues, no polygon screwing up or anything... but today it suddenly does.

Anyone else have some ideas?
 
Did you download new drivers off nvidia's website? if so, try just playing default drivers that came with the card.
Had a similar problem, i would get black boxes randomly on my games, would change each time and cover some of my screen, so i uninstalled catalyst control center drivers that I got from amd.com and reinstalled them, still broken. I uninstalled Catalyst Control Center, which got rid of the drivers from amd.com and everything worked :D
 
What powersupply? Also what are your temps getting to on your gpu? You did a complete uninstall of your old drivers and updated to the newest ones for your card off their site (not the ones on the disk that comes with it) right?
 
Since the card was recently bought, I'd say send it back for a replacement since you have already tried quite a few things. It never hurts to try another one. :)
 
Yeah, it's the card itself. Mainly because I stuck my old GTX 275 in and was playing BC2, and on a whim I fired up MSI AB and took a look at the temps. Since I hadn't made a fan profile, it was running on auto... with the temps capped out at 100C (which is all the program would read to). It might have been higher.

So with the overclock on my other card, and my fan set at 60%, it's possible that the temps went high enough to fry part of the card before I was able to find out what was wrong. Which is funny, because it ONLY happened because I bought/played BC2. Even with my OC and fan profile, it never reached any critical point on any other game. So a $20 game ruined my $370 video card.

Either way I have a RMA number already and the card is still under warranty for both parts and labor... so I'ma just send it back.
 
I would see if it's a driver issue before sending it in for RMA.
Have you gotten any BSODs?
 
Also, I would suggest the Furmark/Kombustor step while you are finding your stable overclock next time. One, so this doesn't happen, but also because you can't be positive about stability unless you do a stress test.
 
lol bc2 gets my pc the hottest out of all my games but mine has never overheated from it oddly
 
Bc2 gets my card up to like 80c but it never seems to over heat
 
Sounds like you have a faulty card. And the issue you are dealing with is called Artifacts.
Sometimes it only starts to show Artifacts after you run a game or something that needs alot of processing. But in the end it will stop working. Some cards you can see that the overall framerate is down a lot more then it was used to and thats a symptom too.

I have had two cards in the 400/700 dollar range that only lasted about 6-12 months and they both died after getting Artifacts. It happends...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Back
Top