Hey y'all.

Some of you might recall a while back my crusade to find the best low profile gfx card to fit a slimline Dell vostro case. I was successful in said mission, and have a lovely 8600GT from MSI. Before then I had an ATI 2400XT.

Now since I installed the 8600, for the first month or so it was fine, but more recently my pc has suffered with lockups, (both in-game and out). Particularly, after a while of playing, the picture will freeze and then 30 secs or so later it becomes responsive again, until it becomes totally unresponsive.

Twice now through having to forcibly shut it down, I've had to repair windows (Vista) because I got the dreaded flashing cursor after BIOS.

I suspect the issue is down to either Nvidia drivers, or I'm drawing too much power for my PSU (rated at 250w). I can get a 300w PSU to fit my case but that's the highest rated I can find in my form factor (TFX)

So what do people think? Does it sound like I'm running duff drivers (I'm running the very latest NVidia drivers, will be downgrading once I've repaied windows again, I would be happy to take advice on the best / most stable Nvidia driver version)...

or am I asking too much of my PSU?

Any help gratefully recieved.

Cheers, 3F.

This sounds like a bug L4D caused me mate. Since installing L4D i had exactly the same issue plus it affected all other source games that were previously working fine as well. Took me a LOT of trawling google and forums until I found the fix.

Change to forceware 177.92 (pre-physX enabled) or 178.13 (physX enabled) and the problem should go. No other drivers have worked for me, I'm stuck with these or nothing. Im using the 177.92 as I dont have any physX games, I'd recommend you do the same.

To remove your old drivers:

Go to http://www.guru3d.com and download a program called driver cleaner.
In windows remove the Nvidia driver via Add/Remove programs.
remove the Ageia PhysX driver if its installed.
Reboot into safe mode (hold down F5).
Run driver cleaner, tick the box to find nvidia drivers and click "clean".
Once its finished close the program, open it again and run it again as above deleting any extra files. Repeat this until no more files are detected.
Boot into windows and install your new driver.


Hopefully this will sort you mate, if not we'll have to delve a little deeper.

Cheers Pilsy, will do that.

Eh... You. May just have found the reason for all the problems I've been having with system crashes.

I use an 8600GTS and have had nothing but pain with TF2 since it started crashing at least 3 times an hour; forcing me to close and restart TF2 every time.

I'm gonna try this when I get home, might not work, but all the same thanks for pointing this out both of you.

Its really bloody annoying. I literally took my pc to pieces trying to fix it, tried running without sound and allsorts. It never occured to me to check the graphics driver as it worked prior to the L4D install, and every benchmark I tried (3dmark etc) ran fine.

I updated to forceware 180 and the problem got LOTS worse. I was getting 20 second stuttering audio freezes every time a door opened, gun fired, any sort of trigger event. TF2 was behaving really randomly and dropping to desktop, freezing then occaisionally i was getting IRQL blue screens.

This put me onto the track of trying different drivers. Eventually I got 175.13 to work by forcing the 8800GT driver to install (I have a 9800GT). I put up with this for a bit but a bored night got me investigating until I happened upon more forum posts saying this had happened after driver upgrades. It was then a matter of working backwards until I found one that worked. I tried 177.92 first as I was suspecting physX support to be at fault. This worked perfectly. I then upgraded to 178.13 which again worked perfectly. Upgraded to 178.18 and the stuttering came back with freezes every 10 mins or so. The official 179 drivers made the problem worse and 180 drivers are all but unplayable. I then completely removed all nvidia drivers and installed the 177.84 drivers, which were unplayable with stuttering, desktop crashes and eventually an nv4disp.dll BSOD. By that point I was utterly bored and decided on the 177.92 as keepers.

I would definitely advise a full removal of drivers via drivercleaner before you install new drivers when troubleshooting. If upgrading on a working system I simply install over the top and let the Nvidia installer deal with it (so you can "last good configuration" if it all goes wrong).




I should add I get this on BOTH Gainward 8600GTS 256mb and ECS 9800GT but NOT on a Zotac 8600GTS i have here (the other 2 are non-reference design cards, the Zotac is Nvidia reference design).

Just downloading the drivers from guru3d (177.92) and it says beta in the file name, I guess it's the correct version though?

I've changed to 178.13.

Still crashed, but the system seems more stable.

Need to run for a week or so before I can comment on any differences I suppose...

Yeah thats fine 3f. You can get the official whql from the nvidia site, but its no different, just has all the international language packs.

Bedizen - I tested each set of drivers for 30 minutes in game, so its possible that 178.13 could be more stable but not totally stable. 177.92 is good for several hours at a go though!

Remember if you are going to use 177.92 that you will need to uninstall your physx driver before installing it, and obviously you wont have physX support in games.

I used to have a slimline Dell with 250w psu, upgraded to a low profile 8600GT and after a month I got the same instability and crashes you have.

I tried reinstalling XP, then reinstalling Vista, both came up with the same problem. Eventually it stopped booting into Windows.

OK so I followed the instructions, and installed version 177.92, played for around an hour and a quarter and then it started again. first it was a momentary freezing of video (the audio stuttered too), recovered for about 10 secs, then froze again. Managed to click quit but TF2 didn't shut down, just froze and I had to forcibly shut the PC down again.

It's pretty much the same as before I changed the drivers.

Would this sort of thing happen if I were overloading the PSU?