Confirmed bad gpu in my c90

I got a replacement 8600gt 512mb today and being tight on time (have a party to host later and the kids running around) I have done just very limited testing.

As many may know already I had very high temps with my gpu stock it was over 100c load and high 80s idle. I did several mods along the way to lower temps to reasonable levels but still I knew something was wrong.

After all my mods I got down to a max of 85c load during a 3dmark06 loop.

So the new card. I just tossed it in, without replacing the cheap TIM inside the heatspreader with AS5 yet, and I am out of AS5 so I had to reuse the crapped up AS5 on the heatsink thus a pretty poor install if I must say so myself.

I have just run 2 3dmark06 runs one in normal mode and one in overclock mode and I show 10c lower temps! 75c load!

This is great news and now to move onto some overclocking testing..

Stay tuned as soon I will be trying the GDDR3 card to compare.

 

Did a quick jump from 450 core 400 memory to 500 core 500 memory and temps went up to what they used to be 85max load.

I was just shy of 4000 3dmark.

I tried the famous 500/550 that some other forum users have and it crashed upon loading so its too high for the new card.


Now here is the intresting part!

I tossed in the 256mb GDDR3 card and running stock clocks of 450/700 I got just over 4000 points in 3dmark and temps were... 85c!

This means pretty much that the performance per tempature between the 512mb ddr2 card and the 256mb ddr3 card are equal.

So the cards are equal in performance granted you have a card that can overclock to about 500/500 or so with the ddr2 version.

The GDDR3 card may have alot left in it since I have not tried to overclock it yet but if its already at 85c load (with my mod and cooling pad) you will definitly NEED advanced cooling to try it.

Im off to see how performance is in Vista with new drivers and see if I suffer the performance hit everybody else has if they use new drivers.

I will be constantly cracking down more detials between the two cards and the performance. I have to re-download hellgate london demo and do a fraps test because its a insanly high memory hog and in that circumstance I want to see if the 512mb card can actully out preform the 256mb card.

 

^ Yeah pretty much same results. I was at 3981 or something with 500/500, cpu overclocked. A max overclocked ddr3 card should run crysis nicely at a lower res setting with everything on high.

 

Here is some cool info.

Know how everybody even Ken has said the problem with the GDDR3 card is that unless you use the stock drivers performance dies?

Well I was running test on XP because I have the stock asus drivers on there and they allow overclocking.

The GDDR3 card shot out just over 4000 points stock, then I booted over to Vista where I have new 163.75 drivers.

Sure enough ran 3dmark06 and with the new drivers I got just over 2000 points like I expected.

Here is the kicker tho. The 8600gt with 512mb DDR2 gave me a Vista Score of 4.4, I just ran the Vista test with the 256mb GDDR3 even with the 163.75 drivers in place it bumped my score up to 5.6

I wont say this counts for anything as Vistas performance test is not really a real benchmark but this means possibly that the performance is not going down with new drivers but rather 3dmark is just not as optimised or reading things wrong.

What we need now is several in game test between the new card and old card with the same new drivers and see what that shows.

its alot of work so I will try to do it in small pieces.

Still tho I need all the help I can get in tracking down the reason the performance loss is there and how to fix it. I dont think I can commit to the new GDDR3 card unless I can update drivers on it.

 

Wow 10C less? I feel (another) RMA for my VGA is coming up this week.....

 

I tried a few different drivers with my GDDR3 card and it not only gave bad 3dmark performance, but gaming performance as well. I tried the 169.01 drivers hoping they'd be good but nope, was getting like 20-30fps in Portal ( quick to load, quick to test ) when I usually got 60+.

If there are other drivers you had in mind that you'd want to test I can have a go at them.

 

No I expected as much, I could tell that 3dmark was running slower I was just hoping that it was isolated.

Still tho that means we need to figure out why.... and how to fix it.

 

Do you get cooler temps with the 169.01 drivers? Mine dropped 7-10 centigrade immediately. Have you tried overclocking with Riva Tuner with those drivers? I'm going to see what I come up with.

@viscious....glad to hear you've confirmed the gpu was bad, explains a lot.

EDIT: My experience with newer drivers vs. stock drivers gddr3 card: Going back to stock drivers in 3dmark is like the beast wakes up, rubbs it's eyes, gets mad and starts kicking @ss It's that dramatic. I think viscious is on to something in trying to find out what that 'it' is.

 

Yeah It was a bad gpu for sure. However I dont want to start a paranoia and have everybody with high temps start trying to RMA there card sounds like JCMS wants too.

I am at work now in a nice cool hotel room and the ambient is lower so I am running a solid 65c idle with the GDDR3 card (163.75 drivers in vista) temps are lower in xp for obvious reasons because there is no aero.

 

Mine's idling at 88

The new vista patch + 169.01 makes it idle at 168/100 like XP BTW:


Now I'm playing GW at 90C with the core at 118mhz

 

Yeah idle at 88 sounds high, make sure you try the obvious stuff first before you send it back tho like a good self install with AS5, a poor install is all it takes to make the temps much higher. My idle is only as low as it is because I have both my vent mod and a cooling pad tho. Without them I would be at the same temp actually.

 

RMA it would cost me less than buying some AS5 lol.

Even then, the stock thermal paste is supposed to be okay, not very good but okay.

The 3.5g is retailing or like $25 in Quebec City

 

Idle on my GDDR3 card sitting on cooling pad (but turned off) I get roughly 75 degrees idle at the 486/702 speeds. With the cooling pad turned on I get 10+ degrees drop. Mind you I'm running with a ported(modded) belly panel.

 

84C idle right now at 168/100. I booted 10 minutes ago

 

With my cpu set to standard as opposed to gaming I can overclock my gpu alot more.

 

Hmm intresting, I run overclock because the cpu runs hotter and thus better chance for the fans to come on. If I run normal the cpu is so cool the fans wont come on, also I want the ram to be running faster.

The GDDR3 card I have not found the limit on the memory yet, its still stable at 830mhz but the core wont go further than 500mhz, wich is a shame because without the core going higher it wotn take much advantage of the faster memory speed. Thus why I get just over 47003dmark with the memory at 750mhz or at 830mhz. My core is the cap. So I will try normal/gaming mode to see if it helps.