Seasonic 500W PSU + GTX 560 Ti

[tdawg]

Hi,

I'm having issues with Battlefield 3 locking up and I want to rule out my power supply being too weak. I haven't had any issues with Arkham Asylum, Portal, Portal 2, or Metro 2033 so far, so I don't think it's a lack of power, but I'm no expert.

As it says in the title, I'm running a Seasonic M12 500W modular PSU, a GTX 560 Ti, and a Q6600 + 3 total HDDs. A lack of power shouldn't be a problem, right? The PSU should have plenty of Amps on the 12v rail (38amps across 4 rails, according to Seasonic: http://www.seasonicusa.com/m12.htm).

Thanks in advance,
Trevor

 

[TemjinGold]

I highly doubt it's a lack of power.

 

[vshah]

you could run some prime95 or furmark stress tests just to be sure that the problem is with battlefield and not anything else in your setup

 

[Termie]

It's not your PSU.

What kind of lockups have you had? Is it a bluescreen, a CTD, an unexplained system freeze that does not resolve itself, a system freeze that clears after a few minutes, etc.?

You might want to take this question to the BF3 thread in the PC Gaming forum. There are a number of people reporting lockups there:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2141077&page=204

The biggest instability I've had in this game is running out of both VRAM and system ram, two problems that I believe are related to each other, as I don't have a lack of system ram generally (8GB). As a starting point, I'd back off of ultra settings (if you're trying to use them, which wouldn't get you far on a 560Ti anyway), and make sure you have a page file enabled in windows. 4GB is the absolute minimum you'd need to run this game, and more memory helps tremendously.

Also, note that if your q6600 isn't overclocked, it's probably holding back that 560Ti pretty badly.

 

[tdawg]

It's not your PSU.

What kind of lockups have you had? Is it a bluescreen, a CTD, an unexplained system freeze that does not resolve itself, a system freeze that clears after a few minutes, etc.?

You might want to take this question to the BF3 thread in the PC Gaming forum. There are a number of people reporting lockups there:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2141077&page=204

The biggest instability I've had in this game is running out of both VRAM and system ram, two problems that I believe are related to each other, as I don't have a lack of system ram generally (8GB). As a starting point, I'd back off of ultra settings (if you're trying to use them, which wouldn't get you far on a 560Ti anyway), and make sure you have a page file enabled in windows. 4GB is the absolute minimum you'd need to run this game, and more memory helps tremendously.

Also, note that if your q6600 isn't overclocked, it's probably holding back that 560Ti pretty badly.

Thanks for your response.

My lockups have all been localized to the game itself; my machine never locks or resets, I just have to manually kill the game. Basically, I've experienced the game not giving me the Deploy menu after being killed and I'm just stuck looking over a portion of the map that runs in the background of the deploy screen, and I've had the game lock up between rounds when it tries to load the next round. The screen just stays black or goes all white.

In all these instances, I can alt-tab to the open web browser, or my desktop and I can open the task manager to kill the application and then restart it. I'm guessing if it was a power issue, my system would actually restart, correct?

I just replaced my 9600GT with the 560 Ti knowing that the Q6600 would be a limiting factor (it's not OC'd), but I don't want to put any money into components for this machine that I would just have to discard when I finally have the cash to upgrade to a Core i5 or i7. It helps my monitor is only 1680x1050 and the graphics settings are in the mid-range.

 

[Termie]

Thanks for your response.

My lockups have all been localized to the game itself; my machine never locks or resets, I just have to manually kill the game. Basically, I've experienced the game not giving me the Deploy menu after being killed and I'm just stuck looking over a portion of the map that runs in the background of the deploy screen, and I've had the game lock up between rounds when it tries to load the next round. The screen just stays black or goes all white.

In all these instances, I can alt-tab to the open web browser, or my desktop and I can open the task manager to kill the application and then restart it. I'm guessing if it was a power issue, my system would actually restart, correct?

I just replaced my 9600GT with the 560 Ti knowing that the Q6600 would be a limiting factor (it's not OC'd), but I don't want to put any money into components for this machine that I would just have to discard when I finally have the cash to upgrade to a Core i5 or i7. It helps my monitor is only 1680x1050 and the graphics settings are in the mid-range.

These sound like software issues - the lockups are all occurring at the same time, and ironically when less is going on that would tax the system.

Hopefully a patch to the game or an update to the drivers will help solve the problem.

 

[tdawg]

So, last night, in the middle of a round, my computer seemed to quickly go to sleep and come back on, a sort of soft reset without actually resetting the system. My monitor went to sleep mode and then came back awake, and my computer was unresponsive for a short amount of time while it sounded like the system was recovering.

Does this sound like an as-of-yet unidentified hardware issue, or is anybody else experiencing anything like this with Battlefield 3?

Thanks,
Trevor

 

[Termie]

So, last night, in the middle of a round, my computer seemed to quickly go to sleep and come back on, a sort of soft reset without actually resetting the system. My monitor went to sleep mode and then came back awake, and my computer was unresponsive for a short amount of time while it sounded like the system was recovering.

Does this sound like an as-of-yet unidentified hardware issue, or is anybody else experiencing anything like this with Battlefield 3?

Thanks,
Trevor

I haven't heard of that particular issue in BF3, but it sounds suspiciously like a video driver crash. Are you sure the system went to sleep (i.e. did you hear the drives and fans spin down)? If not, the monitor going off could simply be the result of the graphics card resetting. That could be a driver issue, although it could potentially be a hardware problem in the video card as well.

What brand of GTX560 do you have? You may want to at least look into what the RMA process is for it, although if you truly haven't had any issues in any other game, I'm going to assume this is simply a driver issue that will get sorted out by nVidia.

What settings are you running at in BF3, by the way?

 

[tdawg]

I haven't heard of that particular issue in BF3, but it sounds suspiciously like a video driver crash. Are you sure the system went to sleep (i.e. did you hear the drives and fans spin down)? If not, the monitor going off could simply be the result of the graphics card resetting. That could be a driver issue, although it could potentially be a hardware problem in the video card as well.

What brand of GTX560 do you have? You may want to at least look into what the RMA process is for it, although if you truly haven't had any issues in any other game, I'm going to assume this is simply a driver issue that will get sorted out by nVidia.

What settings are you running at in BF3, by the way?

The system didn't spin down, but it does sound like the graphics card resetting is a good bet. I may still have the beta drivers that came out with the BF3 beta; I'll definitely check that straight away when I get home.

My GTX560 is made by Gigabyte. Not sure exactly what settings I'm running in the game at the moment.

Thanks for the idea on the driver; for some reason I hadn't even thought about that. It's been a while since I've worried about a graphics card in my desktop.