Windows 7 Video Hardware Errors, frequent crashes, screen freezes.

[ Had this ready to go earlier but the site crashed, and this new format... Well it's has mysterious ways.

Just for starters, when you copy/past back it double spaces everything. Ah well... Moving on. ]

So near, yet so far, eh!

..."so I hibernated it. "

(I should edit here, but... ) Are you using this term loosely for shutting down, or do you use Hibernate ?

If so, disable Hibernation and just use a Power Option that puts the machine to sleep after xx  minutes.

Hibernation has always been problematic.

"I logged in to my account, but never reached the desktop, same sort of black screen crash."

• I gather the machine does boot into Windows, and if you switch to the Integrated graphics as you

did earlier, it still works, yes ? (Hmm - Wonder why the Integrated graphics is not in Speccy ?)

• By way of verifying the input on the monitor - Do you use the same monitor input when switching

from integrated to dedicated card ? If not try the card on the input you use for the Integrated graphics.

• When you are using the Integrated graphics is the GTX650  still shown as enabled when you look in

Device Manager ? If not, will it enable - with & without a monitor cable plugged  ?

• It may  be best at this point to upload the Window Logs - System and Application logs  from Event Viewer to Skydrive (make the files public).

Use SkyDrive to upload collected files and post screen shot/picture. (Updated: 1/16/2012)

"By the way, I listened for error messages when booting up... didn't hear anything (not even the normal single beep?).  Maybe its too quiet for me to hear?"

• Or no motherboard speaker ? These days they often use a tiny little piezo speaker that just dangles

off the motherboard, but some cases may still have a small traditional magnetic speaker.

• Or POST Check is disabled in BIOS.
• The temps look good all around, and I don't think there is a problem there, but temps do drop

quickly when quitting a game you get better accuracy with  MSI Afterburner , which I linked

earlier, has it has an option to create a log file.

• Regarding your case on the floor. Not on carpet ? If on carpet is the psu mounted in the

top of the case, or bottom ?

• The Nvidia Control panel has a power option as well. This defaults to 'Adaptive', but sometimes it

is best to use 'Prefer Maximum Performance'.

You can also change this with games individually in the 3D profiles tab, and leave the global setting

at Adaptive to save some power when not playing a game.

btw - Speccy has an option to 'Publish Snapshot'. This will create a 'unique URL' that you can

copy and paste to the forum which allows use to see the report without you having to copy/paste

sections.

Speccy shows a lot more information, including running processes, services, power settings,

Windows updates and other stuff which may be useful.

Curious - Why is your monitor set to 59Hz refresh rate ? Is there a problem using 60Hz ?

I see the specs say 50-75Hz. Will it run @75Hz ?

.

Sorry, what exactly are you trying to ask? Are you saying "What happens when you turn off hibernation?

I have automatic hibernation and sleep off for my computer, so the only way it ever hibernates or sleeps is when I manually tell it to.

What  happens when you turn off hibernation ? Or sleep  ? 

And manually turn it on and off .

Alright, I did some troubleshooting today with no luck.  This is going to be a rather long post, as I tried quite a few different things and have a good amount of data from speccy to display.

To start off, I tried putting my 650 back in the computer, hooking it up, and then once I booted, I entered the registry and followed your instructions for changing TDR.

  By the way, I listened for error messages when booting up... didn't hear anything (not even the normal single beep?).  Maybe its too quiet for me to hear?

A week or so ago I read a big thread regarding video hardware errors with Nvidia GPU's and picked out a couple of things that people suggested.  I honestly didn't think any of them were going to help but I am so desperate at this point that I gave them all a try.

The first suggestion I tried was this:

The second one was:

After doing all of these things, I hadn't crashed yet, so I decided to take some data with speccy showing voltages.  Not sure if any of this will help but the data in these images pertains to my computer after about 20 minutes of running with the GTX 650 in it:

Motherboard voltages:

GPU Voltage:

It occured to me recently that these problems might have something to do with my computer overheating (I keep it on the floor next to my heater... didn't realize until now).  But the temperatures seem fine according to speccy.  To see what my card was like under load I started up Fallout New Vegas and played for about 15 minutes.  I then took these images:

Temperatures during gaming:

GPU temperature during gameplay:

At this point everything seemed fine, I had had the computer on for about 35 minutes so I hibernated it.  Today I turned it back on and was minding my own business on firefox when my screen went black, and it crashed.  Once again the weird phenomenon where I lose input to my monitor but my computer is clearly still running (and the input never comes back).  I tried force shutting it down and booting up again.  Again, I listened for any beeps, nothing.  I logged in to my account, but never reached the desktop, same sort of black screen crash.

Thanks for the continued help, if you need any more speccy data or anything else just let me know.

Thanks for finally getting back to me.  Like I said I will try the TDR fix when I get back to my desktop.

I will also listen to see if there are any error message beeps when I boot up.