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

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.

Blo*dy d*mn that Technet site. I keep getting a script error relating to Chrome when I'm using Firefox.

Made me loose my post. The only site that does this is the MS 'super' tech site .

Anyway ... (looks like I lost your thread in the shuffle) -

"The main suggestion here is to change the registry so that windows no longer has timeout detection on your graphics card.  I am somewhat skeptical that this will solve my problem because"

I went over TDR a bit before but didn't mention the relationship to graphics lag.

MS set a 2 sec lag before TDR is initiated. While this sounds like a long time I believe  a 2 sec lag may not always manifest as a visual lag on screen for anything like that long a time.

2 sec  may be OK for general use, but it is a big FAIL for gamers. TDR has caused untold gamer angst.

• I reckon the best registry fix is not to disable TDR,  as TDR can still protect the system (theoretically),

but to set a longer time. TDR and BSOD are closely related so while it may not help in this instance,

using a longer time just may help.

I've been using 5 sec for several years (but MS have recommended 8sec in recent times).

I have noticed a time or three when I thought the longer time  has stopped a game having a TDR crash

because I could actually see a brief hang before the game moves on.

Open regedit then -

Navigate to -

H_KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ System \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Graphics Drivers.

Right click on the open field and click on New / DWORD (32bit) Value,

Then name it:  TdrDelay -> double click it -> Set the value to 5.

I've only had a couple of TDR since starting with Win7 and using the 5sec timer.

With those games I found that lowering the games resolution one notch stopped the TDR.

This was with Skyrim and Crysis 2.

With Crysis 2 the gpu use dropped (from memory) from 99% to about 97%.

What exactly do you mean by "Post Beeps"?

Power on self test -

Those are the error beeps that happen if something is wrong when you boot into Windows .

These beeps will come between power on the machine and Windows loading.

There is the normal beep, but there are also error code beeps which include short and long beeps

in combination or just one long beep (memory problem if I remember correctly - I usually have to look

it up when something goes wrong ;D  )

Sometimes Windows will still load, but with the gpu the card will not function properly, if at all,

but you will hear the beep code before Windows loads.

When there is a Post beep error  relating to the gpu it's usually because the card is not fully seated,

or there is a speck of dust in the slot. In this instance the card may function until it is under load.

btw - With Speccy you can post a report to a 'unique' URL that the program creates when you use the

option 'Publish Snapshot'.  You just copy and paste the URL to your post.

• I'd thought Speccy showed +12V as well, but apparently not.

Thanks for the advice.

I just spent about an hour reading through the links you gave me.  The main suggestion here is to change the registry so that windows no longer has timeout detection on your graphics card.  I am somewhat skeptical that this will solve my problem because 1.  I don't understand why this problem would suddenly appear after years of my graphics card working fine, and 2.  Because my problem is not only display drivers not working, but also crashes and bluescreens.  However I will try these solutions when I get back to my desktop in a week (im not at home) and will post here about the results.

If this actually solves the issue after all the trouble this problem has caused me I am going to be very annoyed at microsoft lol.

True, I could contact them and tell them they sent me a faulty replacement graphics card, but being new out of the box, I want to do some more research first.

I am not sure exactly what you mean by separate power feed.  My GTX 650 (and GTS 450) both get power via a specific cable that comes from my computers PSU and plugs into the top left of the graphics card when it sits in its slot.  My computer only has one PSU.

I don't know why the GTS 450 failed but that is an excellent question.  It could help explain what is going wrong with my computer thats causing the new GTX 650 to not work properly.  When I sent in the GTS 450 for a warranty claim they told me they would confirm the card was faulty before they considered replacing it.  I never heard back from them on the cards condition, they just sent me the new GTX 650.