my card is performance capped, help please

[schnarphoo]

basically randomly the other night my card starts performingg terribly. i searched forums for answers. from what i can see its capped by the power.

thats the gpu-z info but i cant make to much of it. it still displays and everything just its obviously unplayable. ive done the basic things like re seat it, clean it, reinstalled drivers, and virus scanned and such but to no avail.

 

my specs are

 

i7 3770k processor

 

gigabyte z77 d3h mother board

 

gtx 660 graphics card

 

corsair tx 650 power supply

 

any help would be appreciated even if you just say its buggered.

[_CrisisRogue]

I mean it says the card is consuming 205.4W. Did you overclock it?

[schnarphoo]

nope lol

that ranges aswell goes slightly higher

 

[mariushm]

GPU-Z says your card is consuming 205 watts , 68 % more than the TDP, and the fan speed is at 73% while your GPU chip temperature is actually only 33 degrees Celsius and runs at 300 Mhz (maybe an attempt of video card's bios to lower power consumption).

 

So ask yourself where is all that power going, all those 200 watts, if the gpu chip is staying at 33 degrees Celsius.

 

Either the VRM controller chip (the dc-dc converter) that converts 12v to whatever voltage the video card needs (0.8870 in you case, see VDDC at the bottom in your picture) went bonkers and is just reporting bad information to the computer, or most likely one component has died shorted, meaning it died in a way that continues to suck a lot of energy. Could be a mosfet (a component that's part of the DC-DC converter circuit) or it could be a RAM chip or something else on the video card.

 

If this is the case, it's something you can't fix by yourself and you should remove the card from your computer as soon as possible.

If it's out of warranty, you can try taking off the heatsink and fan(s) to look on the circuit board and see if there's some chip that's visibly bad (smells bad or the circuit board around it looks burnt or damaged or smoked)

 

[schnarphoo]

okay that i will do now

[schnarphoo]

i mean i doesnt smoke or anything crazy, is there any possibility this could be virus related?

 

[mariushm]

The majority of the chips that could have died this way are basically connected to the heatsink on your card, so all the heat they'd produce when shorted heats up your heatsink, and as the actual gpu chip runs at very low frequency, it's not producing heat.

The fans spin at 70% moving air over the heatsink keeping it cool... you can try touching the heatsink, the metal bits, to see if it's very hot - if so, then obviously something is wrong because both your gpu and your ram are running at very low frequency doing almost nothing according to gpu-z.

 

A mosfet (part of the dc-dc converter) is designed to function at up to 150 degrees Celsius and they're "glued" to the board using solder that melts at 217 degrees Celsius... it's quite possible that a shorted mosfet or a group of mosfets dissipates a lot of energy and the heatsink with the help of the fan keeps the overall temperatures below 150 degrees or so.

So you may not see smoke, because the whole card works to keep things cool, heatsink spreads heat all over, fan spins fast to transfer heat from metal to air and outside the case and so on..

 

If this is the case, you can't keep it up, eventually something gives up, the circuit board may start to burn up or other bad things could happen, if your video card is actually consuming so much power.

 

Just for your piece of mind, you should remove it from the system and visually inspect it at the very least (if it's no longer under warranty)

[schnarphoo]

i did manually turn fans up with afterburner sorry i didnt mention this befor

 

[schnarphoo]

they were running at like 10% before i did this

i am a bit of a noob with this sort of stuff im not even sure why i did it lol, i just wanna play some poe after work

 

[schnarphoo]

oh and i took the card out, not hot at all, im going to open him up

[_CrisisRogue]

Just now, schnarphoo said:

they were running at like 10% before i did this

i am a bit of a noob with this sort of stuff im not even sure why i did it lol, i just wanna play some poe after work

 

I would remove the card, clean it and put it back in tbh. Like, thermal paste change and a bit of dusting