ASUS GTX 770 DirectCU II OC crashes when going to a lower power state

[Animajosser]

I bought a second hand ASUS GTX 770 DirectCU II OC (I denied the OC part first, but I was blind), which had been performing badly due to thermal throttling. The previous owner had even tried to redo the thermal paste, but he didn't remove the old paste. I just reapplied the thermal paste properly and now it can stay at 75C (closed case) max at full usage.

Only recently, I tried to use it for gaming and my computer started to crash at increasing intervals. The times it crashed had one thing in common: A game was displaying a loading screen or was just closed. The obvious way to test this theory is to force the maximum power state all the time. I did this and It doesn't crash anymore, unless I disable the maximum power state. This confirms my suspicion.

I don't understand at all why it crashes when going to a lower power state instead of going to a higher power state. It can run perfectly at a low power state too. Does anyone know what this means and if there is a way to fix it.

 

[psolord]

It could be a vrm problem, a chip problem, capacitors problem or even a bios problem. A weird driver problem wouldn't be out of the question either.

I would start with the easy things. Driver cleaning and reinstalling. Better yet, create a new windows installation on an external usb device, with WintoUSB and do a driver install there, then retest.

If this fails, try a bios update. If any newer bios does not exist, try editing the current one, with a little higher voltage values for the idle(r) states. I believe there are some guides on how to do that.

If that does not work, bake it.

If that does not work, change the capacitors or have a technician do it for you.

You can also use msi afterburner to play with the load frequencies a bit and see if there is some golden setting that will not crash the card when it goes back to idle clocks. Maybe you will want to try this one before trying the baking and capacitor changing stuff! xD

 

[Animajosser]

Thanks psolord for your reaction.

I did already reinstall windows and all the drivers, thinking that that might have been the problem. It didn't fix it however; I forgot to mention that. I did back up the bios and compared it with one downloaded from techpowerup and saw no real differences. Maybe a reflash can rewrite it and improve readability or something, but I judge the chance really slim.

VRMs, Capacitors and Chip might be the problem; although when in the highest power mode it is completely stable and I would expect instability when one of these was to blame.

I think I'll try playing with the voltages and frequencies.

EDIT: When I think about it, it seems as if the card gets unstable when having been in a high power state for a slightly extended period of time. I can't precisely see what triggers it, but maybe if it goes high again after that, it crashes.

 

[Animajosser]

I experienced some new symptoms. Sometimes it doesn't directly crash, but shows a flickering screen with a different color per screen (when 2 screens plugged in) and the color changes per flicker. Sometimes the color is always white too. Another symptom is that it just says: no display. These symptoms can happen on both screens or flickering on one and no signal on the other. I read again what card it was and I realised I misread it and it does say OC.