Purple Screen of Death!

[Desertfox]

Figured I would post this up here and maybe someone can help me before I have to RMA it :/

For around a week or two now I have been having a weird problem where sometime within 1-30 minutes of playing a game a purple plaid pattern will take over my screen and I have to reboot my computer > last known good settings.

By opening up the side of my case and having a fan blow onto it it seems to DELAY the crash but not prevent it. From what I can tell when im crashing it seems to be at around 70-75C (with the fan blowing) at idle with the side of the case open im running at 54C

My specs are

Intel Quad Core Q9450@ 2.66
4B DDR3 (2x2)
Seagate Barracuda 500GB (7200RPM)
Western Digital Raptor 74GB (10000)
evGA E-GEFORCE GTX280
Sound Blaster X-FI Xtreme Gamer
Vista64
ASUS P45 DDR3
Antec P182
Silverstone Zeus 850W

(not my picture, but its the same purple screen)

[TofuwRice]

Probably overheating gfx card or faulty psu. See if your fan on your graphics card is turned up to 100% on Rivatuner.

[Desertfox]

evga precision is showing it at Min. But its been this way since I got the card yet I am still having the problem. Not to mention it has gone up to 75C before without a problem.

EDIT: Just ran 3d mark vantage and my card got up to 79C without crashing, Yet it crashes around 75C when im playing other games.

[AgentJadeD]

crank the fan up til its irritatingly loud. then turn it down a few percents with rivatuner

[Desertfox]

crank the fan up til its irritatingly loud. then turn it down a few percents with rivatuner

Rivatuner wont isntall, something about an unsigned driver. I can't change the fan speed on evga precision for some reason.

EDIT: Was able to set it to 100 and it didn't crash PR (whereas yesterday it crashed within a minute) Within 2 minutes of setting it to 50 instead of 100, I crashed.

[CareBear]

delete anything to do with eve online, should fix things

[Desertfox]

delete anything to do with eve online, should fix things

!@#!H@U$#Y!@U#H!J!!

Happens with all games

EDIT: Am I known as like the resident eve addict on this site?

[CareBear]

yes

[AgentJadeD]

first off. update your driver to the newest 180.48, then install RivaTuner and install added driver.

[RedAlertSF]

IIRC newest Rivatuner doesn't support 180.48 drivers.

I believe your GPU is faulty.

[AgentJadeD]

i would recommend RMA.

[Desertfox]

yeah im doing the RMA form now

[Desertfox]

Around 7 months later (pretty much the same timeframe give or take a month before it happened when I first bought the card) the problem is back.

Same thing, same colours, same symptons except this time as long as I didn't turn off/restart my computer I was able to play, if I restarted I had to take my videocard out and put it back in It's also a bit worse and the last 2-3 times it has crashed I was just browsing the web. Posting here in hopes someone has some amazing idea so I don't have to rma

Been over the videocard cables, checked its getting enough power, its not overheating, updated drivers, cleaned the card etc, done pretty much everything :/

[Robbi]

nvm - on xfire

[Desertfox]

So I called up tech support and after waiting for a bit then talking to the guy and seeing if it had enough power etc he pulled up the test logs from when the original card was RMA'd, apparently it passed with flying colours so it seems its something on my end. I don't have another computer to test it in so looks like im heading over to a shop nearby and seeing what happens if they put the card into a different computer.

[Desertfox]

So im debating taking it in to bestbuy, I called up asking if I could test my videocard in there system and test it. They said that they only test whole computers, it would be $60 but apparently they will check voltages and everything and find out what component is screwing everything up... is it worth it? I have heard some horror storys about bestbuy geeksquad

[VoXiNaTiOn]

Looks like extreme artifacting to me.

Is the card an OCed version?

If it is open up eVGA Precision and set the clocks back to stock:

Core: 602

Shader: 1296

Memory: 1107



Id say the clocks are producing too much heat, hence why it passed when you RMA'd it, they would have used an open testbench, most likely with quite a few fans too.

[Desertfox]

Epic necro bump, I ran a bunch of tests (folding@home, prime95, memtest) to see if I could pinpoint it further. NONE produced a crash but yet I load up an HD youtube video and 2 seconds later BAM.

Installed speedfan and was looking at my voltages which are displayed as

Vcore: 1.13V
+12v: 11.46V
AVcc: 3.36V

Could it be something with my voltages as I am no computer expert but 11.46 is not 12 :3

This just freaking bothers the hell out of me as everything I test works fine except when I want to play a game its instant crash or HD video is a 2 second delayed crash. I am about to ship it away for the third time and trying to pull another last minute hail mary =(

On the flip side though, the support i have received from evGA is nothing short of awesome.

[boilerrat]

Turn your computer on, and put your noise by the power supply fan.
Smell it.

If you smell something burned, like cables... It could be your power supply.

[Desertfox]

Turn your computer on, and put your noise by the power supply fan.
Smell it.

If you smell something burned, like cables... It could be your power supply.

I don't smell anything out of place.