Intermittent freezing with GTX670

[kashwashwa]

I have an i5-2500k, 8GB of RAM and a Gigabyte GTX 670 video card.

For the last week or so I've been getting intermittent freezing in 3d games, where the framerate will be good and all of a sudden the screen will freeze for about 4 or 5 seconds, then go back to regular gameplay for 10 seconds. And it goes back and forth like that without end.

I've tried three different video drivers, I believe I'm on the latest beta ones right now.

I've tried running memtest 86+ for 10 passes (it said my memory was fine).

I'm now running my video card and cpu at all factory speeds, no overclocking.

I've tried changing ingame settings - I thought vsync may have been doing something weird -this made no difference.


The wierdest bit is that I'd say 20% of the time, this never happens at all. If I reset my computer, there's about a 1 in 5 chance that the framerate will stay consistent, and this issue will seem like it's no more. Then I will have to reset or something and it's back again.

Any ideas of what to do?

 

[BD231]

Check your cpu/gpu clock speeds when that happens to rule out any downclocking issues.

 

[tweakboy]

Your having a DPC Latency issue.

Could be motherboard and drivers. What audio driver you using onboard or sound card ? I think its something else causing the freezes. Get back,, gl

 

[kashwashwa]

It's onboard sound, here's my dxdiag:

http://imgur.com/B5ppu

 

[kashwashwa]

I've tried monitoring the DPC latency using this: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

So far it's never come out of the green, even during a short freeze.
I've installed the latest sound card driver from Realtek.
Also, the CPU and GPU clock speeds are rock solid.

Edit:

I've updated my motherboard BIOS to the latest revision, updated motherboard chipset and lan drivers.

Still same issue.

 

[-Slacker-]

Drop the beta drivers if you're having issues. I'd say try a few more versions, and then rma it if that doesn't work, because it sounds defective.

 

[toyota]

Drop the beta drivers if you're having issues. I'd say try a few more versions, and then rma it if that doesn't work, because it sounds defective.

he clearly mentioned he has tried 3 different driver versions though.

 

[tweakboy]

I want you to disable your onboard sound and test it. Youll have no sound but well know if its coming from the Realtek or its drivers.. gl

 

[tviceman]

Does it happen in ANY game or with just certain games? If you use afterburner to monitor GPU usage, observe what afterburner's graphs show when it starts stuttering like you described. If the GPU clocks do not recover back to whatever speed they were running at before the stutter, it sounds like a voltage or overheating problem and your GPU might be bad. It could potentially be the sound, like tweak is saying (amazingly) but you need to run more tests.

Also, if you can reproduce the issue in just about any game, try downclocking your GPU. If it runs OK downclocked, that could also be a sign that it's a bad video card.

 

[kashwashwa]

Thanks for all of the responses.

Ok, so I've completely disabled my onboard sound, and it didn't make a difference.

I've taken a screenshot of the GPU activity while playing Hitman Absolution:

The green arrows are pointing at the time when the game was completely frozen. It's showing there was no Memory Controller Load during the frozen gameplay, and the GPU Load & power consumption also shows about half normal.

Through all of that though, the memory clock, and core clock remained steady.

 

[skipsneeky2]

Wondering if there's a issue with the memory controller on these cards.

I had replaced my msi tf3 7850 with a Evga gtx670 ftw and kept having non stop stuttering issues with vsync off,nothing but a frame rate cap could fix it for the most part but had very sharp fps dips at times with that and the problem annoyed me enough that i went back to using my 7850.

The stuttering only happened in BF3 and as its my most demanding game vram usage wise,sometimes even disabling msaa stopped the stuttering then sometimes it didn't either but for the most part it stuttered more then didn't with it disabled.

 

[kashwashwa]

I tried lower the settings in Absolution to "low" and turned off anti-aliasing. This ended up using around 700 mb of video memory, and it still seemed to do the same thing.

I just tried running Heaven Benchmark with settings that resulted in around 800 mb of video memory. It's a bit weirder than what I've been experiencing so far. It's extremely jerky all the time and fluctuates between 15 and 60 fps constantly...

 

[tviceman]

I would just RMA the card. If the new one exhibits the same problems, then it is likely something other than the graphics card.

 

[kashwashwa]

Alright, just a follow up. I got my hands on another system with an ATI 6570 video card. I put it in mine and everything worked fine...

Then I put my GTX 670 in this new system and it seemed to work fine as well.

I decided to completely reformat and reinstall Windows 7 and (*drumroll) everything appears to be working perfectly...

I don't know what the problem was in the end. Maybe something driver related. I suppose I could have done a driver sweep and tried other versions.

Either way, thanks for the help.

 

[tviceman]

Glad to see you go the problem fixed. Probably half of the problems people are having with their hardware end up being software related.