GV-N4600C-1GI Poor Performance

[AndyS]

Recently upgraded my GTX260 in favour of a GTX460 and no matter what drivers I try I cannot get useable framerates. I'm not talking about just gaming but windows performance too. Something as simple as opening 'my computer' and dragging the window around the screen you can see the 'lag' and it playing catchup, or right clicking on an icon and waiting for the menu to show. Windows loading times have also tripled, taking nearly 4 minutes (!) to fully boot. Even programs like photoshop are almost unuseable.

I've installed both the drivers that came with the card (258.56) and the more recent beta 260.63, multiple times, each time using Driver Cleaner to remove all remnents, yet it still runs like a MX400 card for single and multiplayer games. Needless to say it is sat in its box on the shelf as I've spent near on 6 hours trying to get it to work.

I'm now thinking it's either an incompatibility with my motherboard (see specs below) or I've got a dodgy card. Either way it's put me off buying Gigabyte again, which is a real shame as I've always held their motherboards in high regard.

I also see there's a bios update for the card, does anyone have any idea on how I apply this? The auto update app seems to want a gigabyte motherboard in order to work as it can't see the 460 when I run it. SIGH!

Specs:

XFX X58i Motherboard (bios v1.2)
12GB OCZ Obsidian 1600 Ram
OCZ 600w PSU
Hitachi 500gb SATA HDD
Windows 7 Home Premium x64

Appreciate any advice as to how I can update the bios or get some perfomance out of this thing.
 

[Dark Mantis]

Hello Andy and welcome to the Gigabyte forum.

 It could be a choice between two things causing your problems.

Firstly it could be just down to GPU drivers as there has been some issues with them lately. Some people report tha falling back to an older driver helps so that might be one option for now.
 
Secondly it could be down to system latency. The best way to check this is to download and run:

DPC Latency Checker    http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

If when you are running it there are any red bars displayed then you have a latency problem. We can discuss the options for getting rid of it if that happens.

[AndyS]

Thank you for the welcome DM and the advice, I'll make sure I follow that through.

I have put some time into this again today, before reading your follow up and it's still not good.  Here's what I did.

Put the 460 into an older machine, worked flawlessly, even managed to run the bios utility where it recognised the card and flash to the latest version (F3). Specs were:
core2 duo e750
asus P5 KPL motherboard
cheap 400w casecom psu
2gb DDR2 800
500gb hitachi sata hdd
Windows 7 home premium x64

Transferred the 460 back to my main rig (i7) swapped out the HDD (hitachi 1tb sata) for a fresh install of Win7 x64. No drivers other than what Windows installed and the latest Nvidia drivers (260.63) and I'm back to where I was.......laggy, poor framerate, unusable for the simplest of tasks.

I think, at this time, I can assume the Gigabyte card is just NOT compatible with the x58 chipset.

[Dark Mantis]

I am not sure about your deduction about the compatibility as there are thousands of them working out there, but lets reserve judgement for now.
It could still well be a latency problem. So do the testing and then post back and let me see the results. Post a screenshot so we can have a good look.

[absic]

Hi there,

Don't know much about XFX motherboards but are you running the latest BIOS on it?

[AndyS]

Appreciate the fast replies guys, thank you.

@Absic. Have checked with XFX and I'm on the latest bios available.

Here's a DPC screengrab:

[Dark Mantis]

Looks fine there although you haven't had it running long so I would give it a proper time to see as it depends on what programs are running, resources, etc, etc.

[AndyS]

You're right, I didn't run it for too long so I left it for 15 minutes. I had around a dozen peaks at ~8000 with an absolute maximum of ~149000. Doesn't mean that much to me but I'm guessing red bars aren't a good thing? There was also lots of yellow.

This got me thinking. As disabling any or all possibilities in device manager had no effect, maybe it was the nvidia card causing these peaks...

Sure enough, I'm now back on my old GTX260 and after running for another 10 minutes DPC reports this:



Same GFX drivers, old card. Does this add any credibility to my incompatibility comment?

[Dark Mantis]

Possibly. It does sound strange but there have been a lot of (different) problems with this card recently.

[AndyS]

Well, I think I have to admit defeat at this point as I don't have any other answer. Looks like the kids will be fighting over an upgrade to one of their machines. It's not like I can RMA the card or return it as it does function properly, albeit not in my main machine.

Thanks again for the time you've given me today, anyone else running an XFX i7 board be aware! 

[Dark Mantis]

Yes I too am at a loss over what to suggest other than what you have said. It may well be that a new driver will kill the latency problem so make sure that the kids know it's only lent for now