Is my 590 defective?

Hi everyone,

Noobie here, hoping to learn and become a little bit more knowledgeable about computer hardware.

In November, I purchased a EVGA GTX 590 in order to play battlefield 3. Since purchasing this card, I've had quite a few issues with it.

On ultra settings, at 1920x 1080p in bf3, I am avging 55-75 fps and the game runs smoothly...However the game would occasionally crash on me, and when it does, there were these green dots all over my monitors (I have 2 monitors).

Now at the time, this only happened for bf3. My other games such as skyrim and swtor run perfectly and have never crashed on me. I contacted EVGA support and they replied with the fact that BF3 is still new and there are some technical kinks that needed to be worked out. Since I was having no problems with any other games, I believed them and just continued to play as normal with the occasional "green dot" crashing happening here and there. I did a stress test with the OC scanner for about 50 mins or so and received no artifacts so I assumed everything was ok.

Fast forward to last night where I installed crysis 2. I have it set on ultra settings, dx 11 tessellation package and high res texture package. During multiplayer, the same exact crash occurred.

Crysis 2 and BF3 puts my gpu usage to 97-99% according to the EVGA Precision tool, and I am starting to think that once the 590 is being put to full load, thats when the crashes start to occur.

Is this normal GPU behavior? Is the 590 simply incapable of handling the max settings? Do I have a defective GPU?

I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts.

Thats not normal no. Have you tried different drivers?

Yes, I have tried numerous drivers and beta drivers in hopes of fixing the issue, but no luck so far.

What's worse is that once I get the Green dot crash, the next time i try to open the game, the entire screen goes black. I cannot alt tab or ctrl alt del out of it. From what I can tell, it requires a reboot.

Turn the fans up manually and does it still happen?

What PSU do you have? Please list complete system specs so we know what you are working with.

Mobo: ASUS rampage IV Extreme LGA 2011 Intel X79
Ram: G.skill rijaws Z series 16 gig (4x4gb) DDR3 2400
CPU: Intel Core i7 – 3930k SB-E 3.2 ghz
SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 240gig
HD: Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache
GPU: EVGA Geforce GTX 590 Classified 3072 mb
PSU: Corsair Professional Gold Series 1200 w


I haven't tried the fan thing yet. I will give it a shot tonight after work. Nothing is overclocked and all have factory defaults in currently.

EVGA support tells me to monitor my 12v readings in BIOS to see if the PSU is the issue. I am not 100% sure what this is suppose to do but I will check this out as well. Do you have any ideas on what I should be looking out for?

So I tried manually upping my fan speed at various settings and this did not do anything. Crysis 2 still kept crashing.

I submitted my RMA ticket at EVGA in today

pjj5001 said:

EVGA support tells me to monitor my 12v readings in BIOS to see if the PSU is the issue. I am not 100% sure what this is suppose to do but I will check this out as well. Do you have any ideas on what I should be looking out for?

Click to expand...

They are trying to see if your PSU is out of whack.

You will look in PC health or monitoring to find the 12v reading. It should be within 5% of 12v to be in spec.

I stared at the 12v portion for about 15 mins and it stayed at 12.096 the entire time.

I don't know if I was suppose to monitor it for longer than that.

Thats spot on... RMA that troublesome thing.

Have you looked for a graphics card bios update in the EVGA forums?

I had crashing problems with Crysis 2 on my EVGA GTX 570's (2 in SLI). The game was fine until they came out with the DX11 and High Res Textures pack. I run 3 monitors while gaming for games that support it, so needless to say high res Crysis 2 at 5760x1080 hit my cards extremely hard. Would run them both around 95-99%......crash, crash, crash. I went to the EVGA forums and downloaded a bios update for my cards which increased the voltage ever so slightly and that was my problem.

I don't have BF3 yet, but basically the voltages on the cards weren't quite high enough on the Superclocked editions (Classy's are factory OC'ed as well, but even more so) for really hard hitting games. It wasn't until Crysis 2 that the issue showed up because nothing to that point had hit hard enough.

I'm sure if you've been on the phone with EVGA they would have recommended that if it could be an issue, but thought it was worth a try.

I never had the green dot issue though, just crashing.

EarthDog said:

Thats spot on... RMA that troublesome thing.

Click to expand...

Done. Thanks for your help.

thebski said:

Have you looked for a graphics card bios update in the EVGA forums?

I had crashing problems with Crysis 2 on my EVGA GTX 570's (2 in SLI). The game was fine until they came out with the DX11 and High Res Textures pack. I run 3 monitors while gaming for games that support it, so needless to say high res Crysis 2 at 5760x1080 hit my cards extremely hard. Would run them both around 95-99%......crash, crash, crash. I went to the EVGA forums and downloaded a bios update for my cards which increased the voltage ever so slightly and that was my problem.

I don't have BF3 yet, but basically the voltages on the cards weren't quite high enough on the Superclocked editions (Classy's are factory OC'ed as well, but even more so) for really hard hitting games. It wasn't until Crysis 2 that the issue showed up because nothing to that point had hit hard enough.

I'm sure if you've been on the phone with EVGA they would have recommended that if it could be an issue, but thought it was worth a try.

I never had the green dot issue though, just crashing.

Click to expand...

Hmm that is interesting.

I will give this a shot tonight while my RMA ticket is being approved.

Its still worth a try to add a bit of voltage to it before you ship it off.... Its free and takes no time at all to test.

Just thought it might be applicable because it sounds like it only happens in games that run your card at full load.

Sounds like a max load stability issue to me. Like I said, those green dots are odd, but that could be part of the instability.

According to some EVGA forum people, they're saying that if the dots are geometric it might mean that my memory is clocked too fast and I should try downclocking it.

They also suggested the voltage increase.

I've never overclocked graphics cards myself so I don't really know their symptoms when certain things are pushed too far or not enough. When I get GTX780 Hydrocoppers in my watercooled system I will definitely be cranking on them a bit , but for now I don't have much experience testing cards and their symptoms. I've done a fair bit of CPU overclocking, but not GPU.

That's all certainly worth a try. The worst that is going to happen is you're going to RMA it anyways. RMA'ing is no fun with companies that don't do cross shipments because you're going to be down for at least 10 days, so you want to for sure eliminate all other possibilities first.

Yea the last thing I wanted to do was RMA it.

Sad day

I know the feeling man. Just purchased a ton of parts for a brand new water cooled rig and had to RMA my Asus Maximus IV Extreme. That was a real bummer because I bought the ROG motherboard thinking it would be the best of the best. I think it probably is, but stuff happens.

Then, I found out yesterday I'm going to have to RMA my water pump, but luckily Swiftech is cross shipping it to me so I shouldn't have any down time.

This will be the 5th computer I've built and I've never had to send a single part back, so I suppose my luck has run out. It is definitely not a fun thing to do when you have brand spanking new hardware you can't wait to use.

Keep us updated on the issue. I'd like to know the cause for future diagnosing purposes.

Is this the bios update you were talking about?

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?high=&m=1034790&mpage=1#1034790

Yep that's the one. I obviously did the one for my 570 and you'll want to do the 590 one. You may check to see if your current version is that version, but it still may not hurt to flash the bios.

Any time you're having stability issues that's probably not a bad starting point. Any updates happen for a reason, so updating the card and updating the game via patches is a good place to start. If you're running Steam games, they should be updated, but it may not hurt to check the integrity of the file to make sure it has the latest version. I actually just had that problem with Skyrim a couple nights ago. Would keep crashing, I checked the integrity of the game and it had to redownload 2.X GB worth of the game and now it works fine.

Where you're experiencing the issue with multiple games I doubt it's a game issue, but for future reference it's something to keep in mind.

Quick question, is this the same as reflashing the bios?

Will this void my warranty?