GTX Ti560 OC - Not stable at stock speeds

[connery_007]

I'd like to make Gigabyte aware of an issue with the Ti560 OC:
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3707#ov

I have got two of these cards in SLI.  These cards do not work at the default speeds.

I ran into a number of problems after I first installed these.  Since then, I have added additional fans to my PC, rewired it completely for airflow, and watercooled the CPU.  The cards do not get hotter than 70 degrees under full load, my CPU (i7 920 @ stock) does not get hotter that 65 degrees, so I can safely say that heat is not a possible issue-  further, I have a high end Corsair PSU with ample voltage on the 12 volt rails.  The power supply to the PC or to the cards is not an issue either.

I get white or black screens of death using the 266.66 drivers when trying to play BFBC2.  Using the 270.51 (Beta) drivers, I am able to get the cards running the game stable by using MSI afterburner to drop the clocks down the the Ti560 reference speeds (822Mhz/1900Mhz).  Its quite annoying, having paid for factory OC cards, to have to drop them back to stock AND have additional programs running, just to have the cards work as advertised.  I was previously using Nividia system tools to do the same thing to the clocks but for some reason, the cards flick back to factory speeds after every reboot (and there have been a lot of them!), forcing me to manually change the clocks each time- this is a different issue however and the fact remains that I should'nt have to do this each time I want to use a 3D application.

The Nvidia forum, where I have also posted about the issue, is choc full of people with the same problem.  The majority of people who have posted seem to be using gigabyte cards, although there is a number of people complaining about the same thing on the Ti560's from other manufacturers who have bought factory OC'd cards.

It would be nice to have somebody from gigabyte acknowledge the issue.  To fix this problem for the vast majority of people, I'm 99% sure that a bios tweak, bumping the voltage up slightly would solve the problem.  In addition, I have noticed that using 4x AA/4x AF or higher causes these cards (well, the drivers anyway) to crash.  This may be an NVidia driver issue, rather than a gigabyte problem though.  Note that I have also applied the TDR registry tweak to supposedly fix this issue, but it has not worked.

If anybody else is having similar problems with Gigabyte GTX 5xx cards, or the Ti560 OC cards specifically, please post here to hopefully get some kind of official response for the problem.  For further depressing reading, here is the (13 page and counting) thread about the problem people are having from Nvidia: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=193106&st=0

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.

As you mention there have been instances of this happening but considering the number of cards sold it is still a minute amount. I know that doesn't make it right but it needs to be kept in proportion.

This is a problem with any factory overclock because all chips behave differently and as i'm sure you know overclocking is an art and not a science. Therefore any attemp to ovewrclock on a mass scale will result in a certain amount of failures. Ideally these should be picked up by QA but obviously some slip through.

I would agree that probably a firmware tweak would correct most of them.

Have you reported this to GGTS ?

[connery_007]

Hello and thanks for the quick reply.
I haven't reported it to GGTS, having only just found out about it (from that 460 thread in this forum).  If you think it would help at all, I'll give it a shot, but (having worked in IT for quite some time), I have a feeling that I'll get a stock 'Just RMA the cards' answer, which I don't really think will help solve the issue.

As per my OP, the cards are solid at 822/1900.  I'm still getting various crashes, like when I crank the AA right up, but these crashes appear to be a  driver issue which is (annoying, but) understandable, given its a relatively new card, and I appreciate that there isn't a whole lot Gigabyte can do about Nvidia drivers.

In any case, I'm convinced that the cards are not defective, its the BIOS that simply needs a minute voltage bump.  Can you advise the best way to raise the issue with those at Gigabyte that can actually make this happen?  I'm not sure if that is through you, this forum, or the GGTS you mentioned, but any help and advice would be appreciated.

[Dark Mantis]

Yes I understand what you are saying about the probable response but if you don't report it these things just go on unnoticed in the main. I would advise a post to GGTS and don't be fobbed off. In my experience if you hang in there you get to talk to someone that has a bit more knowledge. It might take a few days to get a reply though.


Just enter your email address and click on the language of choice.
GGTS   http://ggts.gigabyte.com/


Please post back afterwards with an update.

[connery_007]

Heh, I'm still skeptical, but willing to give it a try.  I've logged a ticket with them as per your instructions so will post back in this thread once they've responded.  I appreciate your time.

[Dark Mantis]

No problem, if we all work together something might be achieved.

[Bakkoda]

TRY THE NEWEST DRIVERS! Only a day or two old!

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us

Ive been running a 560 ti SOC for about a month and a half and just recently noticed massive texture corruption in some games (WoW, d2, plants vs zombies) while other games ran perfectly smooth (crysis 1/2, black prophecy). I lowered my memory clock and things seemed to work fine for a while however after a few hours I was forced to drop all my clocks down to roughly a normal 560 ti. Tried the beta nvidia drivers and the most recent drivers, same story.

Newest drivers just released a few days ago have cleared up all my issues and I am back running this card @ 1GHz with the factory voltage.

[Chrono Detector]

Having the same problem except I have the GTX 580, running both in SLI, one card works fine, the other one doesn't. RMA'ing the second card to speak right now, and yes its annoying how games like BC2 will crash such as the white/black screen of death like the OP stated. And running 3dMark11 doesn't work either, it will make my computer hang, or crash.

[connery_007]

TRY THE NEWEST DRIVERS! Only a day or two old!

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us

Ive been running a 560 ti SOC for about a month and a half and just recently noticed massive texture corruption in some games (WoW, d2, plants vs zombies) while other games ran perfectly smooth (crysis 1/2, black prophecy). I lowered my memory clock and things seemed to work fine for a while however after a few hours I was forced to drop all my clocks down to roughly a normal 560 ti. Tried the beta nvidia drivers and the most recent drivers, same story.

Newest drivers just released a few days ago have cleared up all my issues and I am back running this card @ 1GHz with the factory voltage.

Hi, thanks for the info.  When I was tinkering with my cards, the latest drivers were the 270.51 Beta drivers, but I see the new ones you mentioned are an increment above that and WHQL.  I'll give these a shot tonight and report back in case others are still having issues with these cards.

In other news, my system is still stable with 270.51 beta drivers and the clocks dropped, but I'm fickle about having unnecessary rubbish on my PC, so being able to run these at factory speeds and uninstall all the system tools would be good (with two 560's in SLI, overclocking doesn't really matter to me).  I still have a ticket logged with the GGTS that was usggested earlier, they have replied, but only to tell me my message has been forwarded to some random department.  Again, I will report what they come back with in this thread when they do reply for others who might be having the same issue.

[Dark Mantis]

Yes that would be appreciated and even for the rest of us who have been following this thread so we can see if there is a decent outcome.

[connery_007]

Sorry for the long wait, it's taken until now to get a message back from GGTS.

In short, they have told me to RMA the cards.
If it is any help to anybody else having similar issues with their Ti560, they asked me to do a stripped back test on my PC, unplugging all other hard drives, only one memory module, testing one card at a time and for my full system specs (including PSU make, 12v amperage and wattage), and I provided GPUz screenshots as well.  So given the long lead times for messages, it's probably worth gathering all this data before messaging them.  Basically they wanted to ensure that it was the graphics card causing the issue by eliminating all other possibilities, which is pretty straightforward troubleshooting- but a time consuming task with something like graphics cards.

So I guess its back to the shop for my cards, which is painful as they were mail order.  I've still got one of my old 260's lying around which I guess will have to do until something new arrives.  I won't be taking my chances on Ti560's again though, so RMA rates are definitely going to figure into the equation for whatever I do decide to get.

[Dark Mantis]

It is always worth doing some in depth digging before the purchase of any component in my view. Can save a lot of time and heartache not to mention money!

[connery_007]

Heh, I completely agree.  I've always made sure I've bought the best performing card/s in my purchase price bracket, but will look at things like warranty/support in more depth in future.  Thanks for your help.

[connery_007]

An update to the problems I was having with my cards:

I previously could not run my cards stable at the factory overclocked speeds without white screen driver crashes in games. I got them running stable by underclocking them to 822Mhz with MSI afterburner. The 275.27 Beta drivers seemed to have fixed them problem, and I can run at the standard factory overclock (900Mhz) with both cards without any problems.

The problem is now gone completely, which I'm wrapped with as I wasn't able to get them RMA'ed (My fault, not gigabytes)

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

Thanks for getting back to us with that update and I am sure there will be other owners who will read that with interest before trying it.