Troubleshooting Potential Videocard Problem

Baidol

I built myself a PC a while back with an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 780 card and Window 7 64-bit as the OS. The video drivers are up to date There are no problems when playing games like Heroes of the Storm or Ori and the Blind Forest. However, when playing Rebel Galaxy or Assassin's Creed: Syndicate for a few minutes, the monitor remains on, but ceases receiving anything from the computer and the computer ceases to be responsive, although it does not restart or shut down. This can happen even when Syndicate is simply paused. When this occurs, sometimes fans in the case go loud, but sometimes they do not. I cannot get the computer to experience problem on demand, but it does not seem to be a temperature problem unless there is a sudden spike in temperature immediately before the issue occurs. What are some things I can do to try and suss out what is collapsing?

Trace

oh no the dreaded black screen.

RAM voltages was what was wrong on my end. that sudden spike in temp could be a false reading caused by whatever is causing the black screen.

Baidol

Unfortunately, ensuring my RAM settings were correct did not fix the issue. I do not think it is a temperature problem, so now I seem to be stuck on what to investigate.

Trace

I have no honest clue then. These black screen things are incredibly hard to diagnose without having the physical PC right in front of me.

Out of curiosity what sort of PSU are you using and are you sure that the PSU is up to the task of running the GPU?

wunderbar

after you encounter this issue, note the time, reboot, and go into the windows event viewer and look at what is in there at that time. You should get something in there, hopefully with helpful stop errors or codes.

Baidol

Trace wrote: »

I have no honest clue then. These black screen things are incredibly hard to diagnose without having the physical PC right in front of me.

Out of curiosity what sort of PSU are you using and are you sure that the PSU is up to the task of running the GPU?

750W Seasonic power supply, which should be more than enough. The games blackscreening now did not blackscreen several weeks ago, so I do not think it is a power issue.

wunderbar wrote: »

after you encounter this issue, note the time, reboot, and go into the windows event viewer and look at what is in there at that time. You should get something in there, hopefully with helpful stop errors or codes.

I tried this, but I see the kernal power error that comes from restarting the computer.

Right now my goal is to see if I can get the thing to blackscreen on command so I can talk to someone about it.

Edit: Haha! Running the NVidia OC test thingy gets it to blackscreen.

I may have something this time."Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered." oh good so the "something happened with your video card but don't know what" error. I didn't get that error the previous times, though. Hmmmmm

Edit 2: Successfully reproduced blackscreen and did not get the driver error message this time. Getting closer.

LD50

It's either a bad card or an overheating issue. Use something like GPU-z to log the temps. It can log to a file so you can go open it up and look at it after the fact.

Baidol

Temp maxes at 70-75 °C, so not excessive.