Hi all.
During the Black Friday sales, I bought a new Gigabyte Geforce GTX 550 Ti, model GV-N550OC-1GI from TigerDirect for about $70 (I felt it was a good deal at about 1/2 off MSRP) for my now rather old desktop computer. It replaced my dual XFX Geforce 7950 GT Xtreme cards in SLI mode. I was a little nervous using something above PCI-Express 1.0 with my PCI-Express 1.0 based motherboard, but all the research I did said the newer formats (2.0 and 2.1) should be backwards compatible, and that the bottleneck would still probably be my CPU... not the video bus.
It runs games at much higher frame rates and with settings just as high (if not higher) than my previous SLI set up, but I have problems in almost every game I've played (old and new). The most common symptoms are screen going black for 2 to 5 seconds with sound stutter and eventual return of the game picture, or an "alt-tab" effect where the image just goes away completely, or just flat out crashing after the stutter. I've also had a desktop warning once pop up saying the NVIDIA driver has stopped working, but has been successfully restored. Red Faction Guerrilla will crash out quickly in the first level if run full screen (black screen, music keeps playing). If ran windowed, major artifacting occurs on the character's clothing (the parts of his cloak that wiggle in the wind randomly drawing infinitely to the horizon). Oblivion will just flat out crash. Portal 2 will do the blackscreen with sound stuttering for a few seconds, but sometimes run smoothly for hours at a time. I've had one or two bluescreens with an nvidia DLL listed as the culprit. Tonight when first trying Skyrim, for a fraction of a second and from a central point on the screen with all lines radiating outward, there was just purple and green lines. The radiating lines occurred maybe a 1/10th of a second, and were noticeable maybe two or three times.
Yes, I did a "clean install" using the latest driver from NVIDIA's website. I grounded myself with a static wrist strap when installing the card.
This is a factory overclocked card and I recently had my Antec p180b's top case fan fail (still have two 120 mm fans, one pull one push). However, considering that my two 7950s were passive heat sinks only and the system ran solidly, I can't help but wonder if there's something else going on here. From my experience, I'd guess a heat, voltage, and/or driver issue (leaning towards driver issue or problems relating to the factory overclock). Other possibilities I can't yet rule out: some weirdness with Steam, some random garbage lurking in RAM / hard drive after closing down utorrent or BOINC (highly doubtful on the later two)?
Strangely, I've had the card run fine for a fair length of time as well (sometimes hours at a time with no issue... Dungeon Defenders being noteworthy for both displaying the black screen and sound chop as well as running stable for extended periods).
I've no real personal experience with the newer cards, so I figured I'd get input on best possible courses of action... or if the card may just be defective. I contacted Gigabyte over a week ago about these issues, but have yet to receive a response. I am connecting to my display via DVI and run everything at 1920x1200.
Relevant components:
case: Antec P180b with two 120mm fans
Monitor: Dell 24" 2405FPW
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 x2 dual core 4600+
mobo: Asus A8n32-SLI Deluxe
card: Gigabyte Geforce GTX 550 Ti OC
PSU: Enermax Modu82+ 800 watt
RAM: 4G Corsair RAM
Sound: Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro
O/S: Win 7 Pro 64-bit
two optical drives
SATA Hard Drive with three partitions, Win 7 partition having well over 50GB free
During the Black Friday sales, I bought a new Gigabyte Geforce GTX 550 Ti, model GV-N550OC-1GI from TigerDirect for about $70 (I felt it was a good deal at about 1/2 off MSRP) for my now rather old desktop computer. It replaced my dual XFX Geforce 7950 GT Xtreme cards in SLI mode. I was a little nervous using something above PCI-Express 1.0 with my PCI-Express 1.0 based motherboard, but all the research I did said the newer formats (2.0 and 2.1) should be backwards compatible, and that the bottleneck would still probably be my CPU... not the video bus.
It runs games at much higher frame rates and with settings just as high (if not higher) than my previous SLI set up, but I have problems in almost every game I've played (old and new). The most common symptoms are screen going black for 2 to 5 seconds with sound stutter and eventual return of the game picture, or an "alt-tab" effect where the image just goes away completely, or just flat out crashing after the stutter. I've also had a desktop warning once pop up saying the NVIDIA driver has stopped working, but has been successfully restored. Red Faction Guerrilla will crash out quickly in the first level if run full screen (black screen, music keeps playing). If ran windowed, major artifacting occurs on the character's clothing (the parts of his cloak that wiggle in the wind randomly drawing infinitely to the horizon). Oblivion will just flat out crash. Portal 2 will do the blackscreen with sound stuttering for a few seconds, but sometimes run smoothly for hours at a time. I've had one or two bluescreens with an nvidia DLL listed as the culprit. Tonight when first trying Skyrim, for a fraction of a second and from a central point on the screen with all lines radiating outward, there was just purple and green lines. The radiating lines occurred maybe a 1/10th of a second, and were noticeable maybe two or three times.
Yes, I did a "clean install" using the latest driver from NVIDIA's website. I grounded myself with a static wrist strap when installing the card.
This is a factory overclocked card and I recently had my Antec p180b's top case fan fail (still have two 120 mm fans, one pull one push). However, considering that my two 7950s were passive heat sinks only and the system ran solidly, I can't help but wonder if there's something else going on here. From my experience, I'd guess a heat, voltage, and/or driver issue (leaning towards driver issue or problems relating to the factory overclock). Other possibilities I can't yet rule out: some weirdness with Steam, some random garbage lurking in RAM / hard drive after closing down utorrent or BOINC (highly doubtful on the later two)?
Strangely, I've had the card run fine for a fair length of time as well (sometimes hours at a time with no issue... Dungeon Defenders being noteworthy for both displaying the black screen and sound chop as well as running stable for extended periods).
I've no real personal experience with the newer cards, so I figured I'd get input on best possible courses of action... or if the card may just be defective. I contacted Gigabyte over a week ago about these issues, but have yet to receive a response. I am connecting to my display via DVI and run everything at 1920x1200.
Relevant components:
case: Antec P180b with two 120mm fans
Monitor: Dell 24" 2405FPW
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 x2 dual core 4600+
mobo: Asus A8n32-SLI Deluxe
card: Gigabyte Geforce GTX 550 Ti OC
PSU: Enermax Modu82+ 800 watt
RAM: 4G Corsair RAM
Sound: Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro
O/S: Win 7 Pro 64-bit
two optical drives
SATA Hard Drive with three partitions, Win 7 partition having well over 50GB free
Last edited:
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