Odd GTX780 issue

[Curious Pineapple]

Bit of an odd one here. A while back my bro bought a pair of 780's to try in SLI. He found that the drivers would refuse to install with one of the cards (one specific card). Drivers installed fine with the other card in there and work fine with the dodgy one as a second card, but would cause driver issues if it was in the higher PCI slots. SLI performance wasn't worth the microstutter so he took one out and left it.

 

I've recently had a poke at it as he thought it may have been a power supply or random compatability issue. This is where it gets odd. At the same time I had installed an SSD, so fresh Windows 10 Pro install. First attempt, gets to asking for my Microsoft account details to sign in and PS2 keyboard doesnt respond. I try a USB one, nope, no key input. Try on-screen keyboard, still nothing. Cortana happily blabbing on in the background and mouse working fine but no keyboard would work. A bit stuck I reset it and thats the end of that installation, it just refused to boot again.

 

Take 2, I install Windows again and this time keyboard works, I get to the desktop, and Windows update downloads GPU drivers, mostly installs them, then fails. As Windows is working I take out the GTX and put my 6850 Radeon card in. Drivers install fine, all is good. Except it isn't. Random slow-downs, blue screens and Windows error logs are jammed with errors. Before every blue screen there is a disk read failure in the error logs. At this point we suspect the brand new SSD to be at fault. After many restarts and much head scratching, I re-install Windows again. Leaving the Radeon in everything works fine, Plays SoT fine with no crashes or errors. Remove 6850 and jam in the GTX. Tries and fails to install drivers so back to 6850. Back to the crashes and disk read errors too.

 

Take 3, Fresh install of Windows (yet again), 6850 in, get everything setup and working then run DDU, put GTX in, and yet again, disk read errors. Run DDU again, back to 6850, still borked. We were convinced of a bad SSD so as one last try before returning it I re-installed Windows, left the 780 in the box and just used the machine. That was 2 months ago, SSD still working fine and system running great (even more great now I've gone from an FX6300 to a dual Xeon). Windows and SSD still fine even after such a major hardware change, still plays games fine too.

 

What the hell has happened with that card? We're considering building a machine just to try and reflash the BIOS on it as neither of us want that card in our rigs any more in it;s current state. This is more of a curiosity project now, if we can actually get it working again I'll be using it but otherwise it'll be forever in a box, probably a donor for a fan if ever needed.

[Crunchy Dragon]

That is an interesting thing.

 

I would have to guess it's a problem with the vBIOS, I'm not sure why else it would refuse to install drivers or really work at all...

[Curious Pineapple]

On 3/28/2019 at 1:09 AM, Crunchy Dragon said:

That is an interesting thing.

 

I would have to guess it's a problem with the vBIOS, I'm not sure why else it would refuse to install drivers or really work at all...

I had a go at flashingit last night, nvflasher popped up a PCI subsystem ID mismatch which seemed to be a common thing on the EVGA forum so I went ahead and flashed the card.

 

Powered it off (physical power down) and it spat out an image as it should. Now the fun part, drivers. Go to device manager, search for new drivers and it starts downloading and installing, and sits there for that long, Windows gives up and times out the installation.

 

Attempt 2, I shut it down, remove the 2GB of memory that I put in and pull a stick of 8 from my workstation. Try to download the Nvidia drivers on the machine, nothing will download. Maybe Firefox is broken, maybe the faulty Caviar Green I salvaged from a scrap Tivo box is to blame. It peaks at about 2MB/sec transfer rate with 100% usage reported. Anyway, back to workstation, download drivers and jam them on a flash drive. Let the installer start and it gets past the "checking system configuration" stage which it used to fail at. After about 40 minutes of painfully slow installing it completes. Card is reported in device manager correctly and all seems to be well. GPU-z however reports a graphics card with no memory, no memory bandwidth, no bus width and has a few other missing specs. It does at least report core and memory frequencies which is a good start.

 

When I have got myself a 6 to 8 PCIE power adaptor l will put it in my workstation with a test HDD and start from scratch with a fresh Windows install.

[Crunchy Dragon]

4 hours ago, Curious Pineapple said:

When I have got myself a 6 to 8 PCIE power adaptor l will put it in my workstation with a test HDD and start from scratch with a fresh Windows install.

You need a 6+8 pin connection, an adapter will still only deliver 6 pin power.

 

If you can't get it to work with a fresh install, I would guess the card is just dead.

[Curious Pineapple]

1 hour ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

You need a 6+8 pin connection, an adapter will still only deliver 6 pin power.

 

If you can't get it to work with a fresh install, I would guess the card is just dead.

It's a 10 year old Z800, 6+8 wasn't a thing back then I don't think. The 12v rail on the supply is rated for more than enough current. The PSU on my other machine has 8+8 daisychained from one to the other and only 8 (4*12v and 4*0v) wires back to the supply.

[Crunchy Dragon]

28 minutes ago, Curious Pineapple said:

It's a 10 year old Z800

If it's that old, I wouldn't trust it with a GTX 780.

[Curious Pineapple]

@Crunchy Dragon

 

Card is dead it seems. Windows failed to install drivers and when installing using the Nvidia installer, Windows disables the hardware due to error 43. On the plus side it didn't destry my Windows install this time!

[Crunchy Dragon]

24 minutes ago, Curious Pineapple said:

@Crunchy Dragon

 

Card is dead it seems. Windows failed to install drivers and when installing using the Nvidia installer, Windows disables the hardware due to error 43. On the plus side it didn't destry my Windows install this time!

Yup, sounds like a dead card to me.

 

F

[Curious Pineapple]

On 3/29/2019 at 11:02 PM, Crunchy Dragon said:

Yup, sounds like a dead card to me.

 

F

Confirmed today, put it in bro's machine in place of the other 780 and it was causing all sorts of random issues.