New Graphics card

[joinerjohn]

Just purchased an EVGA GT610 graphics card (2gb of gddr memory onboard) Installed it and allowed Win7 to find the drivers for it. Ran for about an hour before the screen pixellated badly and my computer froze. (forcing me to do a hard shutdown. Advice from the suppliers was to download the latest drivers from Nvidia and re-install the card. I've done this today and everything was fine for about 4 hrs before the exact same thing happened. I know ( I know) it's a cheap graphics card (about £35, but can't really afford much more) Any advice from you computer experts out there?? ( I did upgrade the PSU from 250w to 500w before looking at dedicated graphics cards too , as GPU's can be a power hungry resource)
Yeah, really wanted the GTX780 ( but that's worth more than my bloody car)

Any help appreciated as I'm just getting back into my favourite game ,, Eve Online,, (graphics with the card are great, nice n smooth, whereas graphics with just the onboard graphics chip are more jerky than a porn junkie on Youporn.)

[DIY_Johnny]

Yeah, really wanted the GTX780 ( but that's worth more than my bloody car)

that's what I have, well 770 (its huge! and power hungry, Fan goes mental on Crysis at HD settings ).

a 500w should be more than enough of that one, would only take about 30W

Could be many things, MB not updated, components not compatible, driver error etc what were you doing at the time?

(And don't lie to use, if you were browsing p#rn, )

[DIY_Johnny]

Your best bet is Tomshardware. They're are some real knowledgeable nerds on that forum

I have an issue with an old Graphics card for years. Tried everything, was intermittent faulty. Turned out it wasn't inserted properly into the API slot, as the whole chasis of my case was bent.

[kellys_eye]

Have you checked the obvious such as a clear path for cooling? No adjacent boards blocking it? Ribbon cables in the way?

It's a warm time of year therefore ambient temperatures could also have an influence. Run the PC with the case sides off (and even aim a cooling fan at it - i.e blow heater with the heat off).

If this proves overheating is an issue then check the seating of the heatsink on the GPU. If you're up to it, remove and reseat the heatsink using appropriate thermal compound.

[joinerjohn]

Update, got in touch with the company I bought the graphics card off. Chap on the phone told me to download 3D Mark software and run a benchmark test with the card installed. Downloaded the software and installed it, then replaced the graphics card in my computer. Booted up through the bios screen then,, shutdown and restarted with a warning that "Windows cannot start." Gave me the option of running tests (which I did) Windows still won't bloody start. So took the card out, and plugged into the onboard graphics,, Windows started perfectly, so the card is going back to them for repair or (hopefully) a working replacement. For the time being, I have another computer with a ATI Radeon card in, might take that out and try it in mine (although I'm getting a bit fed up now of putting cards in and plugging everything back in) Should have gone with my original idea of re-mortgaging the council house and buying an GTX780 (and a nice new gaming machine to go with it)

[DIY_Johnny]

you will get a good graphics card second hand on ebay. Loads of computer nerds are constantly updating and these things sell for very cheap. just check the bench mark scores to compare

[Dr Daniel Howard]

On the issue of temperatures get SpeedFan.
http://download.cnet.com/SpeedFan/3000- ... 67444.html
For example, last I built my own machine (back in the dying days when Maplins sold mother boards and Taiwanese cases with huge fans, etc) I noticed that as soon as I ran Need For Speed PC version for my son, the temperature was shooting up. It was using all 4 quad AMD processors and I remember having temperature troubles delaying everything and sending me to reboot. There are many issues with the integration of components from various sources - combinatorics. Understanding temperatures and behaviours of fans is a good idea.

Just digressing:
If you should study carefully how game makers made powerful graphics games until they moved most stuff to the tablets, they had a lot of issues exploiting processor parallelism either in quad processors, IBM cell (Nintendo), or GPU (essentially a SIMD architercture). So for example, the artists and then the modellers liked to think in terms of C++ objects - frames in computer science - but the guys in the team that implemented only thought of efficiency and power. They had to break the design into "shopping lists" instead of objects: send a shopping list to the supermarket and avoid numerous trips, so by analogy send code pieces and data pieces to the processors avoiding communications back and forth. They programmed all this in Assembler and would not even use the chip system utilities as they wrote for the latest chip. In general the games work on any platform but I would not be surprised if mismatches should occur on different architectures and graphics cards. The temperature monitoring helps sometimes understand how demands are made by PC games.

[joinerjohn]

Thanks for that Dr Howard. Do you think if I kept my computer in the fridge or the freezer, any overheating problems could be avoided totally? (mind you it would mean moving the fridge/freezer into the living room)

[DIY_Johnny]

A card like yours shouldn't overheat. GPU overheating is not really an issue as the onboard fans cope well, UNLESS the case is poor for airflow.

Keeping my case cool is my biggest concern. I have an inwin 901. Its a great looking minITX, and I run quad core i7-4770k overclocked and GTX770.

No choice except to use a water cooler and it struggles when games are running.

[DIY_Johnny]

Meant to add: actually what makes a difference is cleaning out the card and then. I had a old direct flow graphics card and would get clogged with dust. A hoover out helped temps greatly. Was surprised!

[joinerjohn]

Final update on this. Company I bought it off had it back and tested,,,, U/S. Replacement received today and now running perfectly ( at the moment, touch wood, fingers crossed etc, etc)

[Razor]

What are you going to be playing on it???

[joinerjohn]

Probably Eve Online and WGT (world golf tour) when the missus is in.

[Razor]

That'll be fine for Eve it's not a really graphics intensive game