GTX480 SOC frustration

[george_greece]

Hi,

After great anticipation, I recently bought the 480 soc. Problems arose though from day #1 when trying to benchmark with Heaven Unigine. It freezed with a screen full of colored polygons and a buzz through my speakers. Only thing to do was cold reboot (mouse/keyboad dead). Then I tried the OCCT stress tool. 48000 errors in the first 20sec of the test. Then I loaded Crysis 2 and no matter how intsense the moment was, the game freezed with colored polygons and artifacts.

Tried to downclock the card to 750Mhz and run OCCT again. Same results. Tried with 650Mhz. The same. Even tried with 550, same again. Idle temp is 60oC (dual monitor setup) and in-game max temp is about 75oC.

Funny thing: moments before this message, I tested MSI Afterburner instead of OC Guru. Don't know what I did but I passed all OCCT tests from 700Mhz up to 820Mhz. Crysis 2 did not freeze so I thought I magically solved the problem. Rebooted, fired up Crysis 2 again and... freezed.

So, what can I do?

Thanks.

System: i5/2500k, ga-p67a-ud4-b3, corsair ax850 gold, 8gb ram 1866Mhz.

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.

There is nothing that seems an obvious problem there. I take it that you have installed the latest drivers for the card ? Did you clean out the old drivers before installation of the new ones ?

Might be worth trying a clean install of Windows to make sure that there are no traces of the old drivers left.

[george_greece]

Hi and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.

There is nothing that seems an obvious problem there. I take it that you have installed the latest drivers for the card ? Did you clean out the old drivers before installation of the new ones ?

Might be worth trying a clean install of Windows to make sure that there are no traces of the old drivers left.

Latest drivers installed (270.61) and clean installation of Windows 7. No change. My card produces errors in OCCT and freezes in games (Crysis 2) whatever its Core Frequency... Could be a bad batch?

[Dark Mantis]

It would sound like a faulty card and I think you should RMA it to be certain. Contact your retailer to get the details.

[george_greece]

It would sound like a faulty card and I think you should RMA it to be certain. Contact your retailer to get the details.

Ok, so I RMA'ed and got a replacement GTX480 SOC. After installing the card, I was unfortunate enought to see that I still get errors (thousands of them) in stress/burn tests and freezes/crashes/artifacts in gaming. Checked stock voltage and it was 1.035v. Thought to increase  a bit, by 0.020v at a time, until I reached the 1.088v which strangely... solved all my problems. No errors or artifacting whatsoever @ 1.088v. Obviously, this card is not properly volted coming out the factory.

Question: how safe am I by using 1.088v 24/7?. I didn't overclock, just overvolted to make it stable.

[Dark Mantis]

Well it would seem that you have found the cure. I think you will need to ask GGTS about the highest safe voltage for the card but I would imagine that it is alright at that voltage.