Carosel43

small update. I removed all the inductors from the vrm, cleaned, and replaced them. As with my GTX960 repair this got rid of the power problem (VRel VOp now only perfcap reason) but the card still crashes under heavy load. Downclocking the card about 75mhz on the core (it runs at 1270mhz now vs 1253 official boost clock) seems to keep it running. Anything near 1300mhz causes a crash. Investigations continue..

I was wondering if the power was reporting incorrectly. The card does get very hot though so that power is going somewhere. Core temps report in the mid 60's -70'c, but the backplate is good for cooking bacon. One thing i forgot to mention is the physical damage to the card. Its been abused a bit, probably dropped? the fins on the heatsink were very bent and the whole pcb is both bent and twisted. I wonder if this physical twisting has cracked a solder joint somewhere. I would give it the heatgun reflow but that is a bit of a last resort bodge job.

brilliant thanks. This card has been a rollercoaster. I got it knowing it to be faulty, crashing after a few minutes in games. Crispy thermal paste and overheating i thought to myself. Sure enough, the thermal paste was crispy, so i cleaned it and thought it was all good. Nope, crashes as described. Fiddling around i wondered to myself if the bios had been messed about with. Found the right bios, flashed it...oops, nvflash took a dump and soft bricked the card. nothing would fix it, no dos -F, no autoexec, nothing. It was dead and after 5 hours trying i gave up. Ordered one of those USB programmer clip things to program the chip directly, managed to get the original bios back on it and its alive again but still with the original issues. The saga continues...

I have a ASUS gtx 970 strix, Is anyone running one of these? ii am trying to repair the one i have and it seems to be sucking down the juice big time. In GPUZ it lists the perfcap reason as mainly power, the the graph also lists VRel and VOp jumping around all together as the frequency bounces like crazy and frametimes suck. There is also loads of coil whine pulsing with the hitches in frametime. It eventually hard crashes needing a reboot. every other nvidia card i have (760, 960, 1070) all list VRel as their perfcap reason and they all sit solidly showing VRel as the perfcap reason and clocks etc are stable. If i crank the power limit in afterburner pwr disappears as the limit and VRel and VOp fight it out...until the card crashes. The 960 i have was broken (listing power as the limiting factor) and i was able to repair it by removing all of the inductors from the VRM and soldering them back on. It now lists VRel as the only limiting factor so im looking at power delivery. The card seems happiest when VDDC hits 1.2v, but gets quite upset when this drops. It holds 1.2v when i crank the power, but it then draws 195w! this seems excessive, if anyone has one of these cards, or any 970 i suppose, can you post some shots of your gpuz monitoring while the card is under load? I just want to see where i am at and where to look for problems. thanks

Just for info i have been able to fix the card. I decided to whip out my soldering iron and re-flow the solder round the squealing inductors. This fixed the problem for the most part although the card was still unstable and would sometimes crash when a load was applied. So, i decided to remove the inductors to check the spec and perhaps get more. With no part numbers apparent on the casings i just cleaned the legs and refitted them. The card now seems to run perfectly. All i need now is to find some screws to hold the whole thing together as its previous owner lost most of them.

Bit of an update I was poking around trying to find out where there coil whine was coming from. It has quietened down significantly but the card still holds 6-700mhz. Anyway while poking i noticed that the 3 inductors were different temperatures. The top one was hot, the middle one barely warm and the bottom one roasting hot. I then noticed that poking the bottom one gave me a change in the tone of the coil whine and i can feel very slight movement in the casing. Poking the cold one brought back the shrieking coil whine and gave me a boost in power to 65w and 900mhz. I think its clear where the fault is, i just dont know what parts to get and how to fix it.

For fun i have been buying up faulty graphics cards on ebay and trying to fix them. Its mostly just for the learning experience and a bit of fun playing with hardware. So far a 7850 and 2 gtx 760's have been restored. Mostly just with a clean and new paste. However, i have a GTX960 2gb that needs more. Someone has mangled it at some point, half the screws are missing and some stickers are shriveled suggesting an attempted reflow? Who knows, but after a clean and repaste it worked with green artifacts and code 43. After a few reboots it repaired itself apparently, drivers install and no green snow. The issue now is in 3d applications the card screams (so loud it scared me the first time) with coil whine for a short time and then quiets down. Looking at afterburner/gpuz the card hits normal clocks then throttles to about 600-700mhz drawing about 50-53w at 100% load and reporting about 40% TDP. gpuz reports power as the limiting factor. Crank the power limit in afterburner and you get another scream of coil whine, 85w peak at normal 1100mhz clocks for a brief second and then it falls back down to 53w, 600mhz etc. Sometimes it will crash when the load is applied, sometimes it just screams at me a then throttles. Clearly a power delivery problem, im thinking an inductor has snuffed it? can i test that? could i have a crack at replacing it?

I have checked the board as thoroughly as i can. I found damage on the last pin of the interface on the back side of the card. Its a long story, but the pcix slot on his old board damaged it. I spotted this before i left and basically i have said 'it wasnt damaged when i dropped it off, if you busted it i cant do much'. He seemed to accept this and i took it away to try and fix it. I didnt refund him. Anyway i looked it up and its a ground pin. Checking with my multimeter it still has continuity when plugged into the board so in theory it should be ok??? I cant see any surface mount parts missing but i will have another look

I have an MSI GTX760-itx and have a really strange issue. I recently sold the card and the guy who got it reported doa. sigh. I tested it before i dropped it off to him so he has busted something but i cant work out what. The card powers up, fans spin, no output. Boot into windows with onboard graphics and nothing in device manager. I have tried 2 UEFI intel sandybridge era boards (including my original test board) and no joy. As a punt, i slapped it into an old core 2 duo board with a non uefi bios and it booted it right away. Into windows no problems, drivers, fine, benchmarks, yep runs them although performance is down. GPUZ tells me the card reports it is capable of pcie x16 1.1 but its only running at x1 1.1. I then put another gtx 760 i have lying around on the same system and it reported the same x16 1.1 capability but was actually running at the same. Performance on this card was as it should be. I updated the bios on the disobedient card, no joy. So, what could be causing the card to only run at pcie gen 1.1 at 1x speed even under load and only work on an ancient core 2 motherboard? I am most perplexed.

well i had a good 5 hours playing this evening and my gut feeling is that the game would rather the clock speed that the extra threads. im not too worried, i can keep swapping them around and see how i get on

I have been running my system with a 4.5ghz overclocked i5 4690k for many years and it works fine. Recently i acquired a job lot of computer parts and one of the parts included was an i7 4770 non k. So, which will be better for gaming? my testing so far shows the 4770 wins in cinebench, but my 3d mark score has dropped especially in the combined test. I plan to give it a go in some real world gaming this evening but was curious what everyone else thought

if the hdmi cable is plugged into the motherboard/integrated graphics then that is very likely your problem

It should be a decent upgrade and will give you access to freesync if you are into that

Thanks for the input guys. I have run disk cleanup, got rid of temps, old windows installations, downloads is clean, theres no photos... I will double check I got all the appdata temps though. Literally its just windows and acrobat as it refuses to install anywhere but C: I had the same trouble with my Lenovo 110s that I just have kicking around on the floor (I don't like tablets so use that) but I was, after 3 days, able to coax it into doing the update. Its now got about 9 gig free so if I can just get the blasted update installed it will be fine. And Radium_Angel I hear what you are saying but the systems were both sold with windows 10 installed. In my view, 32gb is not fit for purpose if the supplied OS wont fit. Anyway if all else fails I will clone to the mechanical drive. If the 110s gives trouble I will slap an m2 SSD in there as its got a spare slot. Its annoying though as I only use it for odd things and wanted really cheap. Adding £35 for a 120 gig ssd isn't ideal, I would rather have paid £15 more and got 64gig of mmc from the start.

Hi Guys My Girlfriend has a small asus laptop with 32gb of on board mmc storage and she just uses it for note taking in classes at uni. I fitted a 500gb mechanical hard drive to it to contain all her stuff and just leave the ssd for booting. There is nothing other than windows and a few small programs that refuse to install elsewhere on the C drive. The problem is windows has grown so fat it now has not got enough space left to update itself and even after a thorough disk cleaning we dont have enough space for the 1706 (i think its 1706) windows feature update. I cant seem to find a way of downloading the update to another location and running it from there. So, can i download and install from another location, is there another way round, or shall i just give up and clone the drive onto the 500gig hard drive?

It all looks reasonable to me. I would save a bit on the case and perhaps get a faster graphics card but i am not too worried about the cosmetic side of my systems. Its personal choice how pretty you want it to be. The 1050ti and R3 are not hot running so 2 fans should be ok, especially in that case. If not, add another fan later. As for the PSU its overkill on the watts but not really excessive. Its a good PSU and thats more important anyway.

Its been a good psu to me other than the noise. In my old system it didnt show as the non rpm adjustable case fans and the howling stock AMD fan on my Phenom 955 totally masked it. Upgrading in 2015 to an i5 with a decent cooler and PWM fans really showed off its weaknesses and recently i upgraded to a case with better airflow and even lower fan rpms. At this point i cant pretend not to hear it so i will be getting a replacement soon.

excellent thank you. I just did a very basic test using the sound meter on my phone. With the system running unigine heaven as a load it ran at about 30db until the power supply fan kicked in. It then rose to 45 as a peak then dropped off as the fan throttled back. For some reason the fan wont run at low rpm all the time. Instead it kicks in, howls like a banshee and slowly runs down until it stops. Then a minute of silence for another ramp. I would rather it just stayed on at lower speed. My PSU is a GS700 by the way. Anyway, the corsair offering looks good from what I have read so far. It might be the one.

Thanks for that, I had not really looked at it but its the same price as the EVGA supernova g2 550 I was looking at. I will read up on the 550x as well

Looking to update my PSU as my current corsair 700w jobby is like a jet engine once the fan kicks in. Having the fan stop at low load is great but the noise it makes when its running is just ridiculous. The octopus of excess cables is also annoying so modular or semi modular is going to be on the cards. Anyway I have a i5 4690k @ 4.5ghz, gtx 1070 armor at 2ghz, an SSD and that's about it. Don't need shed loads of power, even 550w would be more than enough I am sure. Has anyone got any suggestions? I have been looking at EVGA and seasonic offerings around £60-80 mark but cant work out which is likely to be the best all rounder.

To revive this old saga I never did cure the problem so have bought a new SSD and cloned the OS across. Everything looks good and things that weren't working before now are. I will see how long it lasts. if it fails now then its either the OS or the motherboard.

quick update. As my CAD program scans all of the drives in the system before starting it was taking 5 minutes to open because the mechanical drive in the system was so slow. I decided to uninstall the drive using windows, I rebooted and we are back to full speed on all drives.

That more or less sums it up other than it ran perfectly in its current configuration for a few months before the issue reared its head. As I don't have access to a Linux boot drive I cant do anything with that. I wouldn't know where to start anyway with Linux and would need to run it for weeks to get any results. The same is true for taking the system somewhere. I cant be without it for the many weeks they would need to look into the issue and, frankly, it would be cheaper to buy a new board/hard drive etc. The other thing is that the drive speeds have stabilised at the levels in the above screen shot. While not ideal, they don't impact my daily use of the machine so I'm beginning to think I might just ignore it until such time that I can be bothered to reinstall windows. One thing I did forget was that when I was trying to do a backup clone of the drive I had a nightmare trying to get windows to see the drives I was connecting to the system. THe bios showed them, but windows rarely found them and it took ages to get it sorted out. I gave up doing the 2nd backup I intended to do as it was just too much like hard work.

Ok I finally got round to doing a CMOS clear and the situation has not improved. I think this is a windows issue but goodness knows how. I'm working on the SMART info

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