Flaky Asus 8800GTS 640 or is it me?

[Gabber359]

So this is the deal. I bought a new ASUS 8800GTS 640 on Saturday and was chuffed to bits. Hell I even cleaned up my whole room, washed the windows (my windows). The works. The 8800 wasn't going in till every bit of dust and untidiness was removed

Anyhow, I did the usual. Uninstalled old drivers. Reboot. Installed new drivers. 158.22

So after playing WoW for a few hours, system slows down. Goes kinda weird. Then hangs. Wtf? Power off, power on. Things seem normal. Temps are fine (low low 30C's full load. Card has never gone beyond 60C. 5x 80mm case fans, good airflow), power is stable, memory has been tested with Memtest, No loose wires, bios settings ok. Hmm. A few hours later it happens again, except this time when I alt-tab back into wow over 50% of the sprites were gone (imagine falling through the earth in WoW. If you play it, you know what I mean. That's the view I had)
I CTRL+ALT+DEL and try to shut things down, then the system freezes completely. Once I've powered on again, I get this:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=293078

This is a system that has been 100% stable for the past 2.5 years and it makes me want to put my 6600GT's back in
I'm going to test it further, ie different games, settings and see if it goes nuts again. I'd rather test it fully and explore my options before going back to the store (Hell it's only 20seconds away).

Btw, my settings on WoW were only:
1024x768 P), 24bit 1x AA
Weather OFF
Textures LOW
Pretty much everything else high
Deaths off, Shadows off etc etc. I don't like putting on too much crap anyhow. Too many details is distracting, especially when PvPing!
I tried 1280x1024 24bit colour/depth 8x AA and I got 1FPS when I moved. That was fun. Yeah..

Oh, one thing I did change today, I removed the EZ plug (oops). Would that cause the GPU to go nuts after a few hours? I forgot about it, because I had a SLI setup previous. Removed it now. If anyone has any suggestions, that'd be awesome. Meanwhile I'll go test some more...

ps: On a more positive note, I went from 2200 points to 7000 in 3DMark06

 

[einstein2]

that 3D mark score is a good start, thats pretty decent score, I actually reformatted my system completely when i installed my quad core, reason being i had alot of rubbish on it, plus it wasnt working right. now its working perfectly . That error you got i havent seen before, which is strange. I'd say either driver issue or system conflict somewhere within windows itself., but i know for sure the 158.22's work fine. On my DS3 i have no ez plug. On my old board i did, but that was always for SLI. When you uninstalled the drivers did you go into safe mode? Thats how i always do it, uninstall the drivers in safe mode, go back into normal windows and install the new ones, never had any problems with doing it that way. 30C, thats pretty good, i get around mid 40C idle and 58C load. Dont throw it away, its a monster of a card might not like this suggestion but is to reformat. Clears any rubbish conflicting with that error message.

 

[dudleycpa]

I wonder if you put your 6600 back in if it would run fine? If it does then it might be a power supply problem.

Just a thought - I'm most likely way off.

G/L

 

[AsusLover]

you might wanna use drivercleaner to do a fresh install on the drivers....me thinks you still got bits of the old ones hanging around.

 

[Gabber359]

Update

CoH ran fine@Ultra settings, then it hung when I tried to alt tab. Guess it didn't like that.
WoW froze after a few hours, but no errors or warning. System locked too. Funny thing is, is that my music (Winamp) keeps playing in the background without a problem.

Also booted up today, I got s BSOD. 0x0000008E srescan.sys

Apparantly it had to do with Zonealarm. Coincidently, I've been noticing that everytime I shutdown my PC, ZA seems to crash and I get a choice to ' End now'. It lasts for a few seconds then continues to shutdown normally.

Anyhow, I decided to format and reinstall from scratch, because I need to know whether the card is good or bad. So right now I just completed the reinstall and doing the basics (drivers, anti-virus, adaware, updates, etc). So we'll see how it goes.

 

[rainless]

I'm currently running 10LARGE in 3D06. Couple of questions:

What does "chuffed" mean?
What the hell is an EZ plug?

I've played Oblivion on highest detail settings for up to six hours at a time (with 8xAA) and my system never hung while playing. Sometimes I get errors when EXITING... but I could care less since it works fine while I'm actually playing.

Either it's the drivers or a defective card. If it's the latter I feel bad for you (shoulda got EVGA!), but since you just bought it you should be able to take it back to the store where you got it.

 

[Gabber359]

Haha yeah, I should have gotten an Evga, I made the same comment to my colleague at work. The software package of the Asus is what tempted me. That and my motherboard is an Asus

Anyhow, 'chuffed' is a typical British expression for 'happy, pleased'
An EZ plug is basically a slot on the motherboard (right above the first PCI-E 16x slot) for a molex power plug to support a SLI setup.

And I just scored 7126 in 3DMark06, which is a 120 point improvement over my previous install, heh..

 

[AzAzEl656]

I heard that a slow CPU can bottleneck a fast GPU. You sure thats not your problem?

EDIT: One more thing... ZA (Zone Alarm) is evil. Just a though. Use it... Don't use it....

 

[Gabber359]

Aye, I've heard comments on how X2 3800's are bottlenecks for something like my asus card, but I'm upgrading end of July, so it's all good.

If not ZA, what other decent and free Firewalls are there ? Blackice?

 

[AzAzEl656]

I'm using Comodo at the moment. It's free and it doesn't delete my programs like ZA did. I ran the ZA anti-virus. Not a good thing.

 

[Mathersalan]

I use AVG for antivirus that comes with its very own firewall.. works great but I disable firewall before playing any multiplayer games

 

[AzAzEl656]

I use AVG for antivirus that comes with its very own firewall.. works great but I disable firewall before playing any multiplayer games

whut?! The free version or the one that you actually have to spend money on? I use AVG Free Antivirus and Comodo firewall. At the same time.

 

[Gabber359]

Found the problem !

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=106737473&sid=1

Glad it's not my card, go me