Troubleshooting video card issues

[jlazzaro]

Specs in signature...system is older but has served me well for years.

Nothing has changed but over the past few months I've been getting random Nvidia driver crashes, system reboots, and unresponsive black screens. Reset the system back to stock clocks but the issues continued. After trying 5 different Nvidia driver versions (using DDU after each attempt), I suspected a video card hardware issue so I swapped in a spare GTX 260 and all the issues went away.

I RMA'd the GTX 670 with Gigabyte however after "exhaustive testing" the card passed and showed no apparent issues. I re-installed the card after receiving it back from Gigabyte and the same issues arose immediately. Tried the video card in another system (i7 930, MSI X58M) and the issues definitely follows the video card.

Where do I go from here? Fight with Gigabyte, buy another card, etc? This card has plenty of horsepower for the games I play, so I really hate to unnecessarily upgrade.

Thanks in advanced.

 

[Ketchup]

The only other thing it could be is the power supply, since a lower-end card works.

Once you rule that out, see if you can fight with Gigabyte some more if you don't want to pay for a new card (as I wouldn't).

OK, thought of one more thing: ran a temp monitor, and see what the max temps for the card are in windowed mode. You may just need to clean the card, or re-apply thermal material.

 

[jlazzaro]

Card runs cool, 30 degrees idle / 60 degrees max.

I have a few spare PSU's but none of them have enough pinouts for 2x PCIe power, and I don't have any LP4 to PCIe adapters.

Tbh I'm wary to blame the PSU. I can run furmark and game on this card for hours without issues. As soon as I stop the stress test or exit the game, Windows artifacts and goes to a black screen. Again this was tested against different CPUs, MBs, RAM, Windows 7 installs, etc...same behavior. No idea whats going on here but its frustrating.

Also, from a specifications standpoint GTX 260 is just as power hungry, if not more than the GTX 670. The older cards were inefficient.

 

[Ketchup]

Can't see your sig from my phone, but do you have more than one pci-express slot?

And if so, have you tried putting the card in the other one?