Hmm… my new desktop seems to have a new issue now the old SSD one was sorted. Sometimes, and it may be getting more frequent (up to daily), the screen goes blank for a bit. It may happen a few times in short succession before a longer blackout. When it comes back, I get a popup from the driver saying something has stopped responding and it has automatically recovered.
I’m going to try swapping the 560 for my old 450 and see if that helps. At least that could indicate if it’s the gfx or elsewhere.
I used to get it all the time on my 8800GTs they both suffered the same - mind you I was Folding on them and they got hot - the problem only went away when I fitted some after market cooling to them. the lubricant in the fan bearings evaporated and the fans slowed down enough to cause overheating problems , the fans never seized but felt rough or gritty when rotated by hand. temporary fix was applied by removing the decal from over the shaft, cleaning the bearing out with lots of alcohol and lubricating with a light spray/penetrating oil.
Note these blackouts happen on the desktop, with the GPU mostly idle. I say mostly as there are some minor spikes as I use various software. No crunching on it anyway.
PSU I did wonder about, but it is also the hardest to test as I’d need another PSU to swap out ideally. The system has a OCZ Stealth Xstream II 600W PSU. Even under full load, I doubt my system would take more than 400W anyway so there should be enough headroom.
Temps I think unlikely, as mentioned above the gfx was mostly idle and temps were nothing exciting.
It’s too early to say, but it hasn’t reoccurred with the 450 since I put it in. I’d give it at least a week before I say that it was a non-issue though.
560 Draws more then 450 for sure 135 / 109 ish. Ok so not lots put just pushing mouse around will send it into 260 / 201 ish range which would cause some 12 Volt rails to drop below if they are well not 100%. I had a one year old 650 from Antec I think it was and it gave me headaches on video. When I did a swap on new unit from DiabloTek PHD650 it all went smooth from that point.
If the 450 works out well try it under a load for 10 minutes to see if anything falls out it should run up to around 140F or so under load.
And… they’re back. Just had a blank screen driver reset thing with the 560 back in. Assuming I put the 560 in not long after my last post, that’s over two weeks of running without problem. And checking my uptime, my last reboot was 9 says ago as it has been fine for at least that long. Should I just gamble on a different PSU?.. shall decide this once I wake up some more…
I like 100% stability. Even one minor wobbly every two weeks still isn’t 100%…
I did a mass update this morning. There’s been two mobo BIOS revisions since so I put that on. All that seemed to do is mildly overclock my CPU to 3.8 GHz and now I can’t press DEL to enter on bootup. Had to resort to the windows tool to put it back down to 3.5 GHz again knocking 5C off CPU temps from lower voltage.
There was a new gfx driver so put that on too, as well as some other random drivers. Let’s see if that does anything…
I have noticed, since installing the new driver the temps for the card seem to increase faster. Again to clarify, I don’t run the GPU so it’s whatever the OS and apps use on demand. In the past, I’ve noticed when it crashes, often Live Messenger goes down with it. In the most recent one, scrolling in FF did it. So it seems when an app accesses the gfx sometimes that doesn’t go well. But why would it work fine for weeks and now happen more frequently?
Have you installed anything else in recent times? You’re looking for a commonality, so if it happened after a certain time, it might be something you installed. Checked your system restore to chase down a date if you know roughly when it started.
Hardware wise nothing has changed. Apart from routine updates software doesn’t change either. I don’t think it’s a software issue. It never happened with the 450 in either.
Good news bad news. Good news is now I know it isn’t the 560 that’s the problem. The bad news is I just got one with the 450. While I’m not convinced it’s power related (they run fine under load so why not idle?) swapping PSU is easy to do. Only snag is I don’t think I have a spare with enough power so would be a new purchase… guess I should check the old boxes to see exactly what I had in them…
Getting worse… just had a lockup. Thought I’d run a quick stress test and I my system failed at LinX after not very long… so my crunching might be limited until I find and fix the cause of this.
Edit: what’s worse than having a problem? Not being able to reproduce it! 2 hours of memtest were clean. Put LinX back on with same settings as before, again fine for as long as I can be bothered to run it. Crunching back on. If it crashes, it crashes…
New power supply due Friday, not that I believe that’s the issue still but its something to try. Thinking more, the only odd case I had with crashing that is at all vaguely similar to this is when I was watercooling. Turned out the chipset was overheating even though individually the CPU and ram were fine. Might have a look at airflow around mobo later.
450 about to go back in then.