DirectX 11 Crashing Issue

[dubb93]

So I seem to have an issue with DirectX 11 games crashing my PC. For a rundown of my build I did last year here is a link to the thread:

New Computer vs. Upgrade Question - Front Office Football Central

Here is the post with had I ended up settling on:

Front Office Football Central - View Single Post - New Computer vs. Upgrade Question

I did end up adding an SSD to the build a little while later. I believe I ended up mentioning this towards the end of the thread.

The problem is that the games minimize automatically, I can hear game audio for about 2-3 seconds then it starts skipping. Eventually I get told that the program is not responding and windows will check for a fix. It then can't find a fix and closes.

This happens on every DirectX 11 game I have ever played on the rig. It is 3 for 3 now with World of Warcraft(works perfect in Directx11), Dues Ex: Human Revolution(turn DirectX 11 off and I haven't had a crash in limited play time), and Battlefield 3(seems I crash in about 1/3 of my multiplayer sessions).

My initial, computer uneducated theory, would point to a voltage issue between my GPU and my PSU. My PSU was plenty of watts, but I was reading through Newegg and saw a review from a guy having issues with my same PSU and he made me lean this way. Here is what he put.

This power supply have 2 rails. This means that the amps are halved compared to other PSU's in this wattage range. Make sure you buy a PSU that has more than enough wattage and more than enough Amps to provide to your system. I made the mistake of trusting the manufactures numbers. Don't make the same mistake.

Is this legit or is this just some random idiot? If he is just some random idiot anyone have any ideas how I can fix this?

[Shepp]

Are you sure your drivers are up to date? You may want to check and make sure your chipset drivers are current as wells as video drivers. If it was your power supply I would expect it to act funky whenever the card was under load and not just on DX11 applications.

[dubb93]

Originally Posted by Shepp

Are you sure your drivers are up to date? You may want to check and make sure your chipset drivers are current as wells as video drivers. If it was your power supply I would expect it to act funky whenever the card was under load and not just on DX11 applications.

My PSU drivers are absolutely up to date. I've tried three different sets of PSU drivers including the last two official sets and the current beta set.

Chipset drivers? I assume you mean my motherboard? No I haven't updated those recently.

[gstelmack]

Power is certainly a possibility, that issue with rails is a correct one (and why you don't want to cheap out on the PSU), but do the games run fine in DX9 mode? That will draw the same amount of power.

Another possibility is heat, although if it's new then you don't likely have dust buildup on the video card fan. If you run with the case off, can you see the fan on the video card spinning?

Otherwise, make sure you are using the correct video card drivers.

[Shepp]

Originally Posted by dubb93

Chipset drivers? I assume you mean my motherboard? No I haven't updated those recently.

Yes, for example I have a Asus P8Z68 and there is a driver for the Intel Chipset. There are five or six more for things like USB, Ethernet, and SATA drivers. You want them all up to date but the chipset driver is the one I would try first.

[dubb93]

Thanks. I did manage to flash my bios. Took me a while b/c the damn Asus site kept auto detecting the P8P67 and I have the P8P67 LE. Took me about an hour of looking and some coffee to figure out what the hell was wrong and fix it. Now downloading the other drivers on there. I think most of those should be up to date. I updated about six months ago. Not sure they have had any of the others updated in that time, but what the hell I'll shoot for it.

My GPU does have dust on it. I will also remove that and clean it. I really have a feeling it could be the damn PSU.

[dubb93]

Originally Posted by dubb93

My PSU drivers are absolutely up to date. I've tried three different sets of PSU drivers including the last two official sets and the current beta set.

Chipset drivers? I assume you mean my motherboard? No I haven't updated those recently.

This seems really stupid unless you realize I meant GPU. Updating my power supply unit drivers would be quite the feat.

[dubb93]

My chipset drivers are actually newer than the latest drivers on their website. Not sure how I managed that.

[dubb93]

It isn't heat. I haven't cleaned the GPU yet, but I did download heat monitors for the GPU and CPU. I had another crash and neither were hot enough at either point in time to cause a crash. Infact that they both were they need to be.

I will still be taking it out and cleaning it.

[dubb93]

My last post for the night. I think I may have fixed it. I think the issue may have been a faulty factory overclock.

I can't say for certain, but I played the same spot four times. Two times with crashes, then again twice without crashes. Both times without the crashes were after I manually adjusted the speeds on my GPU to their factory settings.

I only played for about a half hour without a crash, but this is longer than I have been able to play previously. I was led to this "fix" by a guy on google who said this fixed it for him. I will be able to play longer tomorrow night and see if it actually is a long term fix.

If this does work I will never buy another factory overclocked EVGA card. May be jumping the gun here though.

[gstelmack]

Contact the GPU maker then. They'll probably replace it under warranty.

[weegeebored]

Originally Posted by dubb93

Updating my power supply unit drivers would be quite the feat.

Yeah. Kind of like changing your car's tail light fluid.

What version of Nvidia drivers are you using? If updated recently, did the problem occur after the update? Are you using two 6-pin power connectors? Are they firmly connected? Have you tried reseating the card, blowing potential dustbunnies out of the PCI-E slot?

Some people have reported voltage issues and I believe that there is a firmware update for your card. Others have upped the voltage and that fixes the problem for them.

Is your computer overclocked? Make sure the voltage is set correctly for the PCI-E slot.

[dubb93]

I know I said I was done for the night, but I had to test it out. I put about three crash free DirectX 11 hours on it tonight. Before I was lucky for 15 minutes.

I will continue to test it going forward but I am fairly confident that my problem was and is a crapty factory overclock by EVGA.

I will try to contact them tomorrow, but I suspect they won't be really keen to do anything about it since the card is slightly over a year old at this point.

I do thank everyone who helped me here. It was actually updating my bios and playing that actually finally got me an error code of some sort. It wasn't really an error code so much as a GPU crash that I was able to see that got me doing so google searches that led to my "fix." Before I updated the bios on my motherboard I never saw that the GPU was what was crashing.

[gstelmack]

I missed that this is a year-old build.

Then something could have gone wrong with the card, or your PSU could be going and is not providing quite enough voltage anymore. Or dust has accumulated somewhere if you haven't blown the whole thing out recently. Or a small power surge took something.

[dubb93]

Maybe, but I had the same problems shortly after the build was complete and "fixed" it by swapping WoW to DirectX 9. At the time I thought it was just WoW being buggy. Didn't play another DirectX 11 game until this week.

Edit: Although maybe the PSU doesnt have the amps to power the OC. That could be it I guess.

[weegeebored]

If you registered the card you might still be ok. From the product page:

Product Warranty

This product comes with a Limited Lifetime warranty with registration within 30 days of purchase.
EVGA offers several warranty solutions for our customers to choose from. Please refer to the suffix of the part number and our warranty terms for details.

[dubb93]

Update to this:

I didn't register it within 30 days, but it still has a three year warranty. The replacement card is on the way. Should be here Monday. Their customer service was pretty top notch IMO.

[dubb93]

I got my RMA card today.

I sent in a Superclocked 570 and got a 660ti in return. I'll be honest, I haven't looked into the 600 series. Any thoughts on the swap?

[dubb93]

So far so good with no crashes.

I'm not entirely thrilled with the performance. It obviously kills the rig I upgraded from a year ago, but across the games I tend to play with the same settings as the 570 I'm seeing frame rate drops that I did not see prior. No crashes though! The frame rates never hit an area that makes the game unplayable and I'm sure dropping a few settings a bit will eventually eliminate that altogether.

I did do some research and it seems that this card was basically NVIDIA's replacement for the 570, which I'm fairly confident is not being mass produced any longer. Most forum discussions seem to indicate that this card is "atleast as good or better in most areas," when compared to the 570. And that it uses "less power." I don't like the fact that my replacement card retails for $50 cheaper than the card I sent in though. Had they offered me the option to chip in an extra $50 to go up to the 670 rather than eating $50 to drop down to the 660ti I would have jumped at that chance.

[gstelmack]

660TI is a good card. If you're getting framerate drops, it's something else in the system.

[dubb93]

Originally Posted by gstelmack

660TI is a good card. If you're getting framerate drops, it's something else in the system.

Not sure where else my hangup would be. It's the same setup with the same settings, 8gb high performance RAM, i5 2500k, SSD, motherboard is Asus and is one of their higher performance models.

Like I said I know it is a good card. I'm sure it is going to treat me really well, it just isn't running the games I used to play at quite the same frame rate at the same settings as the Superclocked 570 was. On the plus side, atleast it IS running them without crashing.

The 660ti that I have is the 2gb model rather than the 3gb model and isn't EVGA's Superclocked version. Not sure if any of that would effect things.

EDIT: To be fair we are talking about Directx11 games at 1080p and with max settings. My 570 was at 60 FPS with no drops. My new card is at 60 FPS with drops into the low 40s when crap hits the fan. Not a huge deal here.