Logman

Yeah, I'm definitely not opposed to using an AMD card if it's price, performance, power consumption, and heat output can be about what I'd like them to be. I pride myself on not being a fanboy of team green or team red.

Thanks for the quick responses everyone! It's a tough decision for sure. Normally, I'm not one to dwell on "the next big thing" and especially not in the computer inudstry since every other week, something new and wonderful is coming out. I would have upgraded the GPU long ago but since this computer has slowly morphed from the original Dell XPS 8500 that it started as over the years, this is just the order that things have been upgraded in. Since the 660 has lasted so long, I hesitate to just go out and buy a Maxwell based card with Pascal having the potential to be a pretty large upgrade whenever it comes out. However, there are a lot of "ifs" riding on pascal currently that many of you have pointed out and I'm largely in agreeance with you. So we'll see what happens. I think I may play it by year this coming week (with black friday and all) to see if I can't find some good deals floating around. Thanks again everyone!

Im sure that this subject is being beat to death these days but with the holiday season quickly approaching and sales likely to come with it, I'm very much at a loss as to what I should do. Currently, I'm using an intel 4790k @ 4.6GHz in an ASUS Hero VII motherboard, a corsair H100i, 16GB of 2133 RAM, a samsung SSD boot drive, a 1TB 7200rpm HHD, an EVGA P2 850 power supply, a corsair 750D case, and an OEM version GTX 660 that came with the Dell XPS 8500 that initially got me into computers a few years ago. I'd like to upgrade my GPU becuase it has been showing its age recently as the software around it continues to advance. I know that any one of the 900 series GPU's would be a massive upgrade to my 660 (with it's 1.5Gb of VRAM, low CUDA core count, and slow core clock) but it's now been over a year since the 980 and 970 have launched so I expect Pascal to launch within the next 3-9 months. What do I do? Get a 900 series card now or try and milk out as much as I can from the 660 waiting for pascal - however long that may be? Thanks!

Thanks for all of the awesome feedback everyone! I know the post got REALLY long so I do appreciate the time many of you seem to have spent actually reading through it! Hopefully, if I get the chance today, I'm going to be contacting EVGA Customer Support to see what they have to say. I'm very much anticipating being told to send it back to them at this point.

This is likely to be a long one, so bare with me as I feel that it's important that I share as many details as possible to fully describe the specific problem that I've got going on. I've been on a roller coaster ride of problems and solutions and I'm now at my wit's end. If you stick it out and read through to my final analysis, you'll see that after loads of effort, I will likely have to make some hardware swaps/RMA's. So, I'm having problems with my NVIDIA Graphics Driver where at seemingly random times (during times of full load and times of light internet-browsing-type loads) my display driver crashes resulting in the following message "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered." with event ID "4101" in the Windows System Event Viewer. When the crash happens, usually my screen locks up for several seconds (sometimes longer than other times but still just a few seconds usually) where I can still hear what's going on in the background and then it resumes where it was. A couple of times, I have had it where the display never actually recovers but rather just unfreezes leaving me staring at my desktop where I can still see that the application I had open is still running, my mouse moves, I can open other windows, I can hear the music/sound effects my open application, and I can't select (or alt-tab) and open the game back up - keep in mind, this particular result may just be a windows problem after the unexpected crash. So, here's a total background of my PC and what has led me to this point (feel free to skim read as this is very thorough): When I entered college in Fall of 2012 for an engineering degree, I realized after a few months that my four year-old laptop was entirely inadequate. Having grown up in an extremely rural community where outside activities thrived and inside activities (gaming) were seen as being "lazy", my computer knowledge was extremely limited to the point where I would argue today that I literally knew nothing about them. Having learned enough by early March 2013 to at least know about what I was looking for, I settled on a pre-built Dell XPS 8500 Desktop with an OEM version of Windows 8, an Intel i7 3770, an OEM GTX 660, 12GB of RAM, a 500W PSU, and a 1TB 7200RPM HDD. For a decent amount of time (at least a year) this served me very well and I was content with it - my previous experience with computers was mainly through that old laptop which was rocking windows vista, an intel pentium processor, 2GB of ram, and a fragmented hard-drive that was beyond repair so this desktop was like a gift from the heavens. However, over time, I didn't/couldn't stop learning about computer parts and I soon realized that I was very much nearing the status of "Computer Geek" - at least when it came to the hardware. I built my first PC a little over a year ago when one of my roommates entrusted me to assemble his new $1700 gaming rig with the parts that I picked out for him. All went well and he's had zero problems and no complaints. Early this past winter, I built (basically) an entirely new computer for myself. This build included: -Corsair 750D case - cooled by two 140mm front intakes, one 140mm rear exhaust, and two 120mm exhaust "push" radiator fans -Corsair CX750M Power Supply ---> Remember this item for later (single 12V rail, semi-modular, 750W power supply) -Corsair H100i CPU cooler -ASUS Z97 Maximus VII Hero motherboard -Intel i7 4790k CPU -4X4GB G-Skill Ripjaw DDR3 2133MHz system memory -120GB Samsung 840 EVO ssd (this item was actually purchased several months earlier) Notice how out of this parts list, I did not included a new GPU. The main purpose of building this computer was because I wanted to do it (who doesn't enjoy building a new computer) and I really didn't trust the incredibly cheap motherboard that came with the Dell. So, adding a new GPU was simply not in the budget and in all honesty, the OEM version of the GTX 660 was really very impressive in most games given its release date and specs relative to the current era of 900 series cards. I built the computer, reused my old HDD so I didn't have to deal with storage crap (I despise dealing with storage, a.k.a. transferring files and programs from one device to the other). As with my last computer build, all went well and I had zero problems. My CPU overclocked pretty average for a 4790k to a stable 4.6GHz with the H100i cooler. Since that time (early January 2015) I have had zero hardware issues, no crashes, no problems at all. Now, we're finally very near the current date. Right before the release of the mystery product that clearly no one knew was coming (the 980Ti), many of the regular GTX 980's were going on some pretty good sales with rebates and whatnot. By this time (May 2015), my 660 was finally starting to show it's age - as game tech advanced, my fps were dropping. Needless to say, I was very interested in the 980's. I did a pretty reasonable amount of research even though I really didn't need to since I'm so up to date with LinusTechTips, JayzTwoCents, TekSyndicate, etc. with the releases and reviews of new hardware. I was semi set on an EVGA SSC 980 when I noticed that the normally priced $700 EVGA GTX 980 Classified (which I honestly didn't even bother looking at before due to its normal price) was on sale at Amazon for $589, included a $20 rebate towards the card, and buyers also received codes for Witcher 3 and the new Batman. As you might have guessed, I finally bought a new GPU to match my reasonably "upper-tier" PC... the EVGA GTX 980 Classified. It came within a couple of days (gotta love Amazon Prime) on June 1, 2015 and as soon as I could, I tore apart my computer and added my new power hungry dual 8-pin GPU monster - up from a single 6-pin GPU. I booted the computer up and immediately went to NVIDIA's website to download the latest driver and be sure that the old one was uninstalled properly. I selected the most recent driver for the 980 and downloaded it (it happened to be a driver that was less than one day old - Driver Version 353.06). After that, I couldn't help myself but fire up the 3DMark Demo on Steam and see how much I actually gained from this card. I had MSI Afterburner installed and running on my other monitor so that I could monitor various elements as the test ran. To my pleasant surprise, the card naturally boosted to 1430MHz and maintained a relatively low temp during the Firestrike benchmark. *It should be noted that I have two Dell U2312HM (1080p res., 60Hz refresh rate, IPS panel) monitors connected to the GPU via a DVI connection to each monitor* As expected, my Firestrike score greatly increased - what I didn't expect was that it nearly tripled! It wasn't too long until I wanted to see what more I could squeeze out of the card. Without touching any voltages, I maxed out the power limit slider and began gradually adjusting the core and memory speed. It was doing well... doing well... kept going... no artifacting... and then the display crashed. This is when I was first greeted with the error message I listed above "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered." I simply chalked this up as the limit for my OC, backed the speeds down a fair bit, and tried again. It ran just fine. Remember that these crashes I get are pretty random. That evening, I started playing the Witcher 3 for the first time and not long into it, I had another display driver crash. Seeing how it was getting late and I just wanted to relax, I opened up MSI Afterburner and just returned the card to its default settings. After another 20 minutes or so I had yet another display driver crash. This raised the little red flag in my head - I'm now operating at the stock speeds from out of the box and just received another crash. Something is wrong and I don't know what or why. My first reaction was that it was a problem with this very new game - it wasn't long until it crashed again but this time while not in the game. This is where my roller coaster ride that I mentioned at the beginning of this novel began. I began researching, researching, and researching some more (all while I should have been studying for my midterms and doing homework for my summer classes, mind you) to the point where I found countless explanations of my issue, potential fixes, and causes. Thanks to the nature of the internet( ), out of all of the causes/effects that I found, each one was the sole explanation and solution to the problem according to that individual... everyone else was wrong (sarcasm). It took more sifting through forums and google searches than I care to admit to but I finally found a very helpful resource that I feel is actually the legitimate source behind my problem. It can be found here. Upon reading and understanding that article as best I could, I checked on a number of solutions - none of what I have tried has solved my problem as today I am still getting display driver crashes at random times. Here is a list of things I have tried in hopes of solving this issue and that ultimately still led to a crash: -I first uninstalled and then did a clean install of the latest NVIDIA driver -I then did this again, this time leaving out the NVIDIA audio software -I tried rolling back several driver versions -I uninstalled MSI Afterburner and GeForce Experience -I double checked numerous power settings in my mother board's BIOS thinking I might be suffocating the card thanks to some who-knows-what ASUS power saving setting -I Made sure it was in a PCI-eX16 Gen 3 lane -I tried using EVGA Precision-X as my monitoring software -I "underclocked" the core clock speed - essentially removing the EVGA factory overclock -I ran a system memory test - it reported zero problems/errors -I restored my CPU overclock and voltages to their original settings with a motherboard BIOS settings reset -I even backed up my entire computer, formatted my SSD and my HDD, and installed a clean (legitimate) version of Windows 8.1 Pro ----->Then I updated all drivers once again to their newest versions and moved only necessary files back (documents, pictures, etc) leaving behind things I could download from the internet later as needed. -------> to be fair, this was a good idea anyways since I was still using the OEM version of Windows that was still on my original HDD from Dell. This also allowed me to finally move my OS to my SSD. Nothing worked for my driver crashes. An interesting note to consider here is when I was running my monitoring software, whether it was MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision X, my power usage limit for the GPU never once approached 100%. The highest I ever saw it reach was 91% and that was one of the few times it managed to keep from crashing with a moderate overclock while 3DMark Firestrike was running. It normally sits around 80-85% (give or take a little) during heavy, near 100% GPU usage. Maybe I'm reading into this one little point too much but I feel that I should definitely at least be coming close to a power limit of 100% out of the available 125% with an overclock on this card (I even gently ramped up the voltage on the card once in an effort to draw more power but had no changes). At this point, I'm basically concluding that the GPU is in some way or another faulty. When I try overclocking the GPU is definitely when it crashes most frequently which leads me to believe that whatever my issue is, it's a power delivery problem presented either by my Corsair CX750M which up until now has performed perfectly fine (albeit with a much less power hungry GPU) or a fault in EVGA's custom PCB on my specific Classified card. Remember that I never once had an issue when I was still using my GTX 660. The entire point of this post wasn't so much about me asking for answers or solutions (though I certainly do not want to discourage people to list their thoughts/suggestions!) but rather to create a post on the LinusMediaGroup Forums to allow the community to be more aware of this type of problem since it appears to be so common and is so hard to diagnose. Due to the nature of PC building and the extreme customization of hardware and software, its nearly impossible to make everything run perfectly all the time so things like this can happen sometimes, I suppose. It seems (from my research) that most of the time this is a software related issue and troubleshooting should be dealt with first from a software angle before jumping to the conclusion that it's faulty hardware. That's exactly what I tried to do before I send away the GPU for a while to EVGA while I wait on a replacement. If you've read even just 50% of this post, Kudos to you! It kept growing larger and larger each time I read through it so I apologize for that - especially given my lack-luster conclusion to this story. I hope everyone could learn something from my experiences here and I encourage you to please post any similar experience you may have had or have dealt with! Thanks!

Hello! I recently created a Windows 8.1 ISO file onto my 8GB USB thumb-drive so that I could remove my OEM operating system from when I bought an "off the shelf" Dell XPS 8500 a few years ago (my computer knowledge has grown quite substantially since then) and cleanly install Windows to my SSD. Everything there worked out fine - no problems. Now, I recently found out that I will be building a new PC for my younger brother who will be starting college soon (I'm the more computer adept between the two of us so I'm the builder) and was hoping that when he purchases Windows, rather than have to download another file and create another ISO (a very long process the last time I did it), can I use the copy I already have to boot from when his PC is running? He will have a legitimate windows 8.1 key to enter just like I had my own legitimate windows 8.1 key, so unless I don't fully understand what the purpose and capabilities of an ISO file is (very possible), I don't see why this wouldn't work since we each have our own product keys and I just wanted to verify with the community before I get home to build his PC this weekend. To semi-briefly summarize my question: I have a clean ISO file of Windows 8.1 that I used for my own PC with my own Windows 8.1 product key. I will be building my brother's new computer very soon and was wondering/confirming that I can use the same USB drive that contains the same ISO file I recently used and boot from it when his PC is running. He will have his own legitimate windows product key as well. I'm assuming it'll boot fine and then prompt us for his product key - will this work? Thanks!

I would use this to continue to try and improve my stream quality. Also, I tend to upload highlights to youtube and this would give me great options to do that.

Username: Lorglarson Two watched/liked videos on Vessel: https://www.vessel.com/videos/JYZEYDYx0 - hardline tubing build https://www.vessel.com/videos/Yj4PbcgKj - Thrustmaster Warthog A10C