BSOD on a 9800gx2 and win7 x64

[Bigdogbmx]

Some of you may have seen I bought a possibly faulty 9800gx2 off ebay in the hope the BSOD the guy was getting with it was a problem with his PC, well i don't think it is lol. But anyway I get this BSOD about nvlddmkm.sys, which i spotted the thread about in this forum. It was ok with no drivers, and as soon as I install them and reboot, it usually bluescreens with that error. I really dont know what else to try other than a clean install of windows just in case. So any ideas would be welcome.
I thought it may be overheating so I took the casing off and blew out the heatsink, but it didnt last a run of 3dmark06. It just froze about 2 minutes in, then when i rebooted it did the error again.

[Stilletto]

It sounds to me like the memory on the card is bad.
But you could always try the oven trick before you throw it away...

[Bigdogbmx]

Yeah I saw that thread but Im not sure it will work on the GX2, seeing as the boards ar at opposite angles, I dunno if the fact that one faces downwards will mean the mem on will go downwards with gravity away from the board instead of towards it. Im going to try a fresh install with the replaced nvlddmkm.sys and see if it makes a difference.

[MarkS]

Stupid question, but what drivers were you trying to install?

[Bigdogbmx]

haha its ok to ask stupid questions if Im too stupid to put the answer in already myself ;)

The drivers I just got off the nvidia site, I think it was 185 point something, whatever the latest stable release is for win7 x64. I did try the betas out as well but the same thing happened. Im gonna try installing Linux now and do a stress test on that if possible, so I can hopefully find out if its a real hardware issue or just something to do with the windows drivers.

[xtkxhom3r]

that sucks man looks like it is faulty get rid of it!

[MarkS]

haha its ok to ask stupid questions if Im too stupid to put the answer in already myself ;)

The drivers I just got off the nvidia site, I think it was 185 point something, whatever the latest stable release is for win7 x64. I did try the betas out as well but the same thing happened. Im gonna try installing Linux now and do a stress test on that if possible, so I can hopefully find out if its a real hardware issue or just something to do with the windows drivers.

That's what I wanted to make sure of. I could see you installing the drivers off of the CD and it not working.

Probably a bad card.

[Bigdogbmx]

Well Im not sure its faulty yet, I installed Linux and the drivers for the card, and so far its been stable. Im having a few issues testing stability since I cant get any decent 3d games to run in WINE. It did run HL2 for a bit with no graphical errors but it was so skippy and buggy I gave up and tried CoD4 instead, which wont start due to more WINE bugs.

[Bigdogbmx]

Ok, update, I just played Half Life 2 under WINE in Linux for about an hour on 1920x1080 res flawlessly :cool:
Im pretty much convinced this is some driver issue with windows 7 and vista now. I read up on a method of replacing the nvldkkm.sys during the install, so Im going to give that a shot when I can be bothered to back up the files and then do the install process. This thing runs hotter than a british man in summer by the way, i touched the sink while it was running and it hurt enough that I thought I was burned.

[Stilletto]

Just for the record I have had had absolutely no issues with the gx2 under windows 7 at all...I am still suspect of the card:(

[Bigdogbmx]

Hmm, thanks for the input Stilletto, I guess since you have 6GB RAM youre runnng x64 as well. I suppose Ill try a fresh install anyway, just to see what happens.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Signs of a bad video card to look for first, would be BIOS screen corruption or Windows desktop corruption. Especially squares on the BIOS screen and checkerboarding!

[Bigdogbmx]

Yeah thats one of the reasons I dont think its broken. If its running Linux totally flawlessley, how can the card be physically defective? Full 3D running for a good hour or so with no errors or fps drops seems like a fairly decent test. Now if only they made 3dmark for linux :bang head

[jason4207]

Yeah I saw that thread but Im not sure it will work on the GX2, seeing as the boards ar at opposite angles, I dunno if the fact that one faces downwards will mean the mem on will go downwards with gravity away from the board instead of towards it. Im going to try a fresh install with the replaced nvlddmkm.sys and see if it makes a difference.

If you do decide to do the oven trick you should first dismantle the card, remove the HS, and open up the PCBs so that the components on both PCBs face up.

You might want to try flashing the card's BIOS w/ one from mvktech. You never know what the original owner may have messed with.

[Bigdogbmx]

Jason good idea about separating the PCBs so they face the right way, its obvious but makes sense, I really should have thought about it :P I just reinstalled win7 with the right drivers on a new mobo, and even doing the trick where you replace the driver during install it still BSODs when you finish the install. Im pretty confused since it works a treat in Linux. Surely it uses the same resources on the card, GPU and mem, so why it doesnt work is beyond me. Oh well, Ill try flashing the BIOS and see how it goes.

[RJARRRPCGP]

that sucks man looks like it is faulty get rid of it!

May be the GPU. Also, I know that OC'ing the GPU too much can cause a hard lock with 3D Mark, it may look good, then it suddenly freezes without warning.