7900 GT + WoW = problems

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
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Anyone else play wow with a 7900 gt? I just setup my pc, everything was working great for awhile, but every once in awhile wow will crash in a bad way. It's just wow, sometimes I can force wow.exe to die and get back into windows, but when i play fullscreen that isn't always possible. Even then, I have to reboot before it'll startup again.

Running XP Pro with all windows updates, latest nforce drivers, asus A8N-E board, 3800+ Athlon 64 X2, etc.

Have no problems in windows. Don't have any other games installed, though I ran 3dmark05 just fine.
 

Megatomic

Lifer
Nov 9, 2000
20,127
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81
Which drivers are you using for your video card? Yesterday NVidia released WHQL certified drivers that fully support the 7900 family of GPUs. Everyone that uses them is reporting good luck with them thus far.
 

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
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first, I was using the drivers from yesterday but they gave the "not whql" warning when i installed them.

Crashed, so I tried the drivers that shipped with the card, which were slightly older.

Now I am "back" to the 84.21 drivers, but this time they installed without giving any whql warning... however I'm under the impression that they are the exact same driver, just with whql certification, so i'll probably still crash. I'll know in a few hours anyway.
 

Megatomic

Lifer
Nov 9, 2000
20,127
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Good luck. I've not had any crashing with either the 84.20s, the non WHQL 84.21s, or the WHQL 84.21s.

Do you happen to know what RTHDRIBL is? If you do and you have it, try your card on it and see how it handles the stress.
 

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
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Just crashed again. Going to change computers back to my old one for now. I'll try the RTHDRIBL demo looping overnight.
 

Madellga

Senior member
Sep 9, 2004
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Cooling? PSU?

Try running Nvidia monitor and log the temperatures. See where they are.

Are you overclocking? Try Prime95 for 6 hours, one for each core.
 

KutterMax

Member
Sep 26, 2004
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World of Warcraft will undercover many different problems on ones system.

About a year ago I was having random crashes playing, but not having crashes with anything else. After going through their tech support, I ended up testing my memory and found I was getting errors. I swapped out my Kingston Hyper-X and put in new Mushkin RAM and the problem went away. Definitely check your memory to make sure there are no issues there.

Recently I did a clean system install, changing over from XP Pro to Media Center Edition. I know get a few weird problems in WoW. When I first start playing, about 5 minutes or so after I am in the game it will freeze up. This usually only lasts for about 30 seconds or so, and then it unlocks and I keep going. It usually only does this once but sometimes can happen more often.

The other problem I notice is I occassionally get weird polygon errors - basically certain textures/polygons get all blocky. To fix, I usually have to exit and restart. I think this could be errors generated from my video card as I've checked the temps at they are hitting into the low 70's Celsius. I think my NV Silencer is due for replacement. For the most part everything is ok, but this does happen from time to time.

Finally, I've tried different drivers and about a week ago put the latest beta drivers. They made no difference.
 

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
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Originally posted by: Madellga
Cooling? PSU?

Try running Nvidia monitor and log the temperatures. See where they are.

Are you overclocking? Try Prime95 for 6 hours, one for each core.

I am not overclocking anything, though the geforce 7900 gt is the xfx one that runs at a 20 mhz overclock by default.


I'm trying opengl mode now, someone suggested it on another forum post, so maybe this will work for now until the driver issues are fixed.

Over on the nvidia forums I see a lot of people are having the same sort of issues.
 

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
9,811
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Latest update:

opengl mode is a joke. FPS in opengl mode is about 1/4 what they are in directx mode. flying on a gryphon looks like crap, can actually see the "edge oif the world", and black areas where the textures haven't loaded yet. The game didn't crash for me while in opengl, but even if it was 100% stable I could acheive the same stability and higher FPS by going back to my old video card, so opengl mode isn't really a useful fix.

Went back to direct3d mode, with write combining disabled. Someone said it might help. Meh. I think the real solution might be to return my 7900 gt and buy a ati video card. I'm going to test an 1800xt and see how wow runs with that when it arrives at work in a few days.
 

nitromullet

Diamond Member
Jan 7, 2004
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What kind of NIC does that motherboard have on it? My Asus motherboard has a Marvel Yukon in addtion to the NV NIC that I was using initially. I was having a lot of crashes in WoW with this rig at first, and I couldn't figure out what it was until someone mentioned that the Yukon NIC make their rig crash in WoW. I disabled that NIC and switched over to the NV NIC, and it has been crash free WoW ever since. I see that your motherboard only has one onboard NIC, if you have another NIC disable the onboard NIC and put in a different on in its place... See if that fixes your issue.
 

Golgatha

Lifer
Jul 18, 2003
12,396
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Originally posted by: Chiropteran
Just crashed again. Going to change computers back to my old one for now. I'll try the RTHDRIBL demo looping overnight.


Ok, I have to ask, WTH is RTHDRIBL!!!!!!!!!
 

DrZoidberg

Member
Jul 10, 2005
171
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what power supply do u have? If its under 22A on 12v rail that may cause crashing.

also did u run driver cleaner in safe mode before installing new drivers?
 

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
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Problem resolved!

Apparently it was just a driver issue.

After I uninstalled the 84.21 drivers, I replaced the card and installed the catalyst 6.3 drivers.

Now it's working perfectly.


/seriously

I'm hoping that nvidia fixes the drivers so I can actually use the card I bought. For now I am borrowing an X1800XL, which is running WoW pretty well but overall is probably not as fast as the 7900 GT.
 

nitromullet

Diamond Member
Jan 7, 2004
9,031
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That doesn't sound like a solved problem IMO. WoW is TWIMTBP game, and it runs fine for thousands of GeForce users, myself included. I'm running the 84.20 "Beta" drivers available at nzone.com. Maybe you want to try those, although it is my understanding that they are the same drivers pre-dating the WHQL label.

I'm going to throw out another bit of info here, just for the sake of putting it out here...

I've gone through a few upgrades/changes over the past year, so it's pretty hard to pin anything down to a single component. Anyway, when I first built this rig, it had an X2 4200+ (Manchester) and a 7800GTX, and everything was cool except for 2 main issues:

The first of which I mentioned previoulsy, and was resolved by using the NV NIC.

The second of which I posted about on nvnews because I didn't think AT video had the maturity to tech the issue without a flamewar... This issue involved a nvidia driver crash whenever I would enable 8x transparent SSAA in WoW and HL2, which limited me to 4x. This problem persisted even after adding another card in SLI and swapping out the cards in different single and dual configs (I also did a step-up with eVGA, so we're talking four unique 7800GTXes here). It persisted with every driver I tried, every BIOS update, setting the affinity, using the AMD driver... You name it, I tried it, and nothing helped. To make matters worse, there were almost no other people experiencing similar issues, so there wasn't much help to be found (kinda like your problem). Well, as the X1800's became available I picked up an X1800XT, and it ran everything fine af whatever AA setting I choose. I sold the GTXes on eBay and pretty much forgot about the issue. ...Looks bad for NV at this point, right..?

Fast forward, while I had the X1800XT, I did a bit of cpu swapping because I found a good deal on an FX-55, which I liked but ended up replacing with an X2 4400+ (Toledo). Well, during the time that I had the X1800XT, I got the opportunity to run dual 7800GT's in my rig for a few days. I was curious about the AA issue, so I popped into the NV control panel and cranked er up to 8xS trSSAA, loaded up WoW with no issue... Hmmm...? How about HL2...? 8xS trSSAA no problem...

Needless to say, I was a bit perplexed at this point... An issue that I couldn't solve by doing any number of driver changes and virtually no one else had just magically fixed itself over a few months. Well, the issue is still fixed on my rig at this point, and my 7900GTX runs everything fine at 8xS trSSAA.

My opinion as to what the root cause of the issue was: The cpu... The rig as it stands now is almost identical as it was when I first built it except it has a different cpu and a 7900GTX instead of a 7800GTX. I think the fault is actually the Manchester core, and that the reason that not many other people are seeing the issue is because not as many people are buying the Manchesters as they are the Toledo/Denmark cores with 1MB cache. Of course I could be wrong on this as my experiences aren't exactly a scientific experiment, the cpu worked fantastic otherwise, and I don't have the X2 4200+ anymore to do a head-to-head comparison. I just wanted to put this out there as a possibility because I noticed that you are running an X2 3800+ with a Manchester core and are also having wierd seemingly NVIDIA issues that no one else is having or can explain. Maybe you have a friend with another socket 939 cpu that you could try out...

Good luck with this, and keep us posted. This in an interesting problem (from a spectator standpoint - I'm sure you could think of different words to describe it), and I'd be curious to know as to how/if this is resolved.
 

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
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Well, all things being equal the game runs GREAT with the ATI 1800XL I am using now, and it ran horrible and crashed quite a bit with the 7900 GT. I could spend weeks troubleshooting the 7900GT, but why bother? I did order a better power supply, just incase it's a power issue, but if the 7900GT still causes wow to crash I'm just going to sell it and buy an ATI card (the one I am using is borrowed).
 

puffpio

Golden Member
Dec 21, 1999
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What vid card did you have before the 7900GT? Maybe the new vid card sucks more power and it is causing instability.. (ie upgrade your PS)
 

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
9,811
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Originally posted by: puffpio
What vid card did you have before the 7900GT? Maybe the new vid card sucks more power and it is causing instability.. (ie upgrade your PS)

You were exactly right. Upgraded from a 380 watt antec to a 550 watt antec and the 7900 gt works great. Funny, it didn't seem like a power problem. Figured the whole computer would reboot at least. Anyway, I'm glad to have the problem truely resolved.