GPU doing some very odd things - should I be worried?

**DrDeanDarko** · July 29th, 2012, 12:32 AM

Hi guys,

A few months ago I got a nvidia 560 TI, an upgrade from my ATI Radeon HD 4850. It was running very smoothly until recently.

Last month or so, I tried playing a game and it ran unimaginably slow. It was a fairly GPU-intensive game, so I tried something lighter and older; still slow. This was odd considering I've run both games at near perfect framerates. It did not appear to be caused by an external program, and temperatures for my entire system were normal. To fix this slowdown, I had to restart my PC. It has never happened midway through a game, only if I am launching a new one, and it has happened several times since then. This doesn't happen often, and hasn't happened since roughly 2 weeks ago.

However, now my GPU has apparently stopped with the game slowdown and has instead insisted on shutting off my GPU completely. This has happened about 4 times in the last 2 weeks. My monitor turns off and I get a "Signal not detected" message on my monitor, obviously from not getting anything from the GPU. Restarting the PC usually fixes this. Two of the times it has happened was when my PC went to sleep when I was away from it. This has happened only once during a game, but the GPU quickly restarted itself and the game gave me a message about not having enough VRAM to continue.

I run my system fairly hard. It is on most of the day, and I am usually playing fairly hardware-trying games through most of it or playing around with Autodesk 3DS Max (3D modeling program, newer versions are moderately GPU and CPU intensive).

Is there anything I can do? Has anybody else had similar problems? Could it possibly be to blame on the latest nvidia drivers? (I've never thought of it until now, but I don't think I've had these problems since I got the latest drivers, but I don't really think they really have the power to do these things.)

Thanks for reading.

Here's the Speccy report on my system.

Operating System
MS Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
CPU
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.00GHz 46 °C
Wolfdale 45nm Technology
RAM
4.00 GB Single-Channel DDR2 @ 533MHz (5-5-5-15)
Motherboard
ASUSTeK Computer INC. P5Q (LGA 775) 41 °C
Graphics
BenQ G2420HD (1920x1080@59Hz)
1023MB GeForce GTX 560 Ti (EVGA) 45 °C
Hard Drives
977GB Western Digital WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1 ATA Device (SATA) 48 °C
195GB Seagate ST3200822AS ATA Device (SATA) 51 °C
Optical Drives
HL-DT-ST DVD-RAM GH22LP20 ATA Device
HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GP08LU30 USB Device
Audio
Realtek High Definition Audio

with a 600W power supply.

EDIT:

Apparently it was caused by a specific version of an nVidia driver and I believe the one after it. 301.23.

**JLK03F150** · July 29th, 2012, 01:33 PM

What is the make and model # of your 600W PSU? You'll need to open the case to get that info.

It could corrupted driver issue. You could try uninstalling the current driver, then installing either the same or a different version for testing purposes.

**bigBonehead** · July 29th, 2012, 04:07 PM

Have you tried re-seating the GPU?

**DrDeanDarko** · July 29th, 2012, 08:02 PM

Thanks for replying, guys. It's a CoolerMaster eXtreme Power Plus 600W (RS-600-PCAR-E3) and my GPU is specifically an EVGA superclocked 560 TI.

I have tried re-seating it, although it appears to be seated correctly. The PSU also seems to be seated correctly.

I'll try reverting/upgrading the drivers.

**DrDeanDarko** · July 31st, 2012, 07:38 PM

I've upgraded my drivers to the latest, but it appears to have not worked. It was fine the last 2 days or so, but right now at this moment any 3D applications are slowing down to a crawl.

It looks like something's chugging down my physical memory. It's consistently at 50%, even at the desktop, and appears to slowly be increasing as I type. Very strange.

Then I try closing the majority of the processes and I get the usage down to about 35%, but that doesn't have any impact on getting rid of the slow crawl of the games.

I suppose I'll restart my system for now for the temporary fix.

Edit: I guess it's not the RAM, restarting my PC shows that it's always around 40% even when games running smoothly.

**JLK03F150** · July 31st, 2012, 08:58 PM

Post a screenshot of the processes tab. Maybe we can see a single big memory user. You could have something with a memory leak too. BTW, 95 processes is a bit much. I haven't optimized my Vista notebook & it's running 59 processes.

**DrDeanDarko** · July 31st, 2012, 10:08 PM

Chrome adds a lot of processes with some of the addons, plugins and tabs I have which explains why it's down to 75 processes.

I hardly see how that could be causing my games to slug down to 3 frames per second, though.

I have also launched games without Steam on and it has had no effect on fixing the slowdown.

**JLK03F150** · August 1st, 2012, 07:02 PM

Look at the complete list (check Show processes from all users). It's possible for Windows Update to cause really bad slow downs until it is done. If you see a svchost.exe at 100MB+ it is probably Windows Update. Also Steam can cause all sorts of problems if it is updating and downloading all your games. I only have a few Steam games & after it finished doing its thing on startup it's only using 6MB of RAM.

You might want to run msconfig & clean up the startup list. A lot of that stuff will start when you need it, but doesn't need to be in the background all the time.