GV-N560OC-1GI: GTX 560 TI Crash

[Styxoric]

Hey,

I bought a completely new PC about a week ago with this card included, and everything ran fine until i started playing some games (Team Fortress 2 in particular).

Basically, after a random amount of playtime the screen freezes with a distorted sound and in the background there's a "Graphic Driver NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, version xxx.xx stopped responding and has been recovered" message to greet me.

The reason i x'd out the version number is because it has happened on every driver i have tried thus far, old and new.

I've gotten the crash/message about 20+ times now in a week's time and i'm seriously pissed off at it.

I've done pretty much everything i can to prevent this from happening, to no avail.

Temperatures seems to be fine (mid 50's to low 60's) at the time of the crash and it doesn't seem to happen in all games (though i have been too busy trying to fix the ones that do crash to try them all)

I stress-tested the card in furmark for 30-35 minutes and the temperatures got as high as 68C, but it ran perfectly with no artifacts or anything.

I've read up on countless threads regarding the "kernel mode driver stopped responding" issue, and the ones that report to have "fixed" it are saying they had to up the voltage/downclock the card in order for it to go away. But i don't know.

The card is factory overclocked, it sits at 900 Core, 1800 Shader, 2000 Memory.

I'm clueless here.

Oh and one more thing, the crash never occurs outside of games.

Specs:

Windows 7 64 bit
8gb DDR3 Corsair @ 1600mhz
Intel Core i7 2600k @ stock clocks (3.4)
Gigabyte Z68AP-D3
PSU: Corsair TX-650W

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome.

You seem to have a good understanding of the problem already from your investigations on the internet. The normal cause of the problem is a little bit  in need of some extra voltage. Most seem to find stability that way or by returning the card to the standard settings. Sometimes it can help to update the firmware (card's BIOS). You could of course RMA the graphics card back to the retailer but that will take time.

[Styxoric]

Yeah but the thing is, the voltage seems locked on this card? i tried upping it by a tiny, tiny bit in MSI afterburner but as soon as i hit apply it just goes back to the default setting (which is 1.0000V according to GPU-Z at full load).

As for updating BIOS on the card... i have no idea how to pull that off.

Thanks for the fast reply.

*update*

Alright, so i downclocked the card from 900 core and 1800 shader to 850 core and 1700 shader. As a result, it runs flawlessly.

But it's quite the bittersweet victory, i shouldn't have to downclock a card i just purchased... which brings me to the locked voltage, is there any way to unlock it so i can increase the volt slightly to keep the stock clocks?.

[Styxoric]

I have now completely fixed the problem as i managed to increase the voltage on the card from its default 1.0000V to 1.0120V.

It turns out that the voltage wasn't locked as i first thought, i just had to increase it further in MSI Afterburner for it to stick.

The card is still unstable in it's default form, but as long as MSI Afterburner changes the voltage on pc startup, everything is running fine.

[Dark Mantis]

Yes that is usually the case and I think it would be a good idea if Gigabyte tweaked this setting before selling the cards to the retailers. It is not a big problem but it shouldn't be left to the ennd user to sort out.