Windows 7 Geforce 280 GTX Mystery crashes

[Grandson]

[Solved]
I have a good one. I hope someone can figure this out because it has me stumped...

I've been running a Geforce GTX 280 with the latest drivers fine for as long as i've had the card. Recently i've been getting crashes as soon as I boot to desktop that scramble the screen pink and pixalated. The problems seemed to coincide with some windows updates but that just may be coincidence.

I went to safe mode and recovered to a previous date but this only worked briefly. I tried disabling every startup app in msconfig to find a conflict but there was none. Ran 2 full malware sweeps with different reputable programs and found nothing. I've tried various other tricks but nothing would work so i decided to reinstall windows. New windows booted fine until I installed the nividia driver pack and we had the same problem. I rolled back nvidia drivers several times with no joy. I rolled them back as far as oct last year but clearly ANY driver would crash the card.

This would seem to point to faulty hardware but heres the twist; My old hard drive, also with windows 7 and nvidia drivers works fine with no problems whatsoever (this still has the oct. 2010 drivers). So if a clean windows install with no more than the graphics drivers is constantly crashing and it doesn't appear to be a problem with windows, the card or the drivers then what on earth is going on?

Any advice is very welcome.

Regards -Pete

phenom quad 3ghz
4g ddr2
Nvidia Geforce 280 GTX
windows 7 x64 ultimate

 

[kemical]

Hi Pete,

have you tried checking your RAM? A quick and easy test is to run on one stick at a time and see if it errors out on one or the other. A more dedicated test can be employed using Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool

Have you a friend with a similar system? Perhaps you could try running your card in his/her system and see if it produces the same problems..

Lastly you mention that an old drive runs the system fine.. Could your new drive be faulty? Try running chkdsk just to see if everything is ok.

 

[Hippysocks]

The new drive checks out fine and there are no RAM problems. It must be something else and i can't figure out what it is.

 

[kemical]

What about overclocking? Is the card overclocked or has been overclocked? Also it sounds like you have been upgrading so is your PSU still adequate?

 

[Grandson]

I forgot to check the surface when i did chkdsk and i've found the problem now. after all that all i needed to do was check the disk lol. I missed /r so i overlooked it. thanks for your help Kemical o/

 

[kemical]

Great news! Glad your good to go..

 

[rhaina]

I should have searched before posting a new thread! I didn't think anyone would have the exact same problem as I was having. I have the same video card, same problem.. I will run the chkdsk! Thanks!

 

[Grandson]

Rhaina unfortunately all those errors that i found existed despite the problem with the card. These disk errors were not the cause of my problem however when i fixed them i just got a lucky couple of days where the card worked.

As for the fact that i had the card working on one drive and not the other well, i dont know why that drive lasted longer but eventually the card would not run on either. I recently got the chance to get my mate to test it in his machine and he has confirmed that its corrupt memory on the card. Sometimes it works sometimes it does'nt but it is getting worse and the crashes are now happening shortly after the POST.

So it turns out that there was no mystery to my problem in the end. I hope that there is a cheaper answer to your problem Rhaina but for me its a new card. It served me well from 2008 so I'm not toooo annoyed

 

[rhaina]

Thanks Grandson, I still haven't had any luck on mine either.. I bought mine in the summer of 2009, but they are supposed to have a lifetime warranty.. I've never tried to have one fixed before.. and now BFG is not making video cards anymore, so I don't know how well this will turn out for me. I will have to dig through my bins of computer parts and downgrade for a while. *sigh*

 

[kemical]

Rhaina unfortunately all those errors that i found existed despite the problem with the card. These disk errors were not the cause of my problem however when i fixed them i just got a lucky couple of days where the card worked.

As for the fact that i had the card working on one drive and not the other well, i dont know why that drive lasted longer but eventually the card would not run on either. I recently got the chance to get my mate to test it in his machine and he has confirmed that its corrupt memory on the card. Sometimes it works sometimes it does'nt but it is getting worse and the crashes are now happening shortly after the POST.

So it turns out that there was no mystery to my problem in the end. I hope that there is a cheaper answer to your problem Rhaina but for me its a new card. It served me well from 2008 so I'm not toooo annoyed

So it was the card after all.... Bummer!

@ Rhaina
Can you not try the same as Grandson did and try your card in a friends machine?

 

[rhaina]

I have another machine I can try it in over the weekend, but I'm not optimistic that it will work fine in that one either. :/