8600M GT, artifacts, crashing, overheating, freezing... could this be the end?

I've had this Asus F8 since Feb 7 2008 (almost 2 years), according to my receipt. I'm running Windows Vista 32 bit, and just yesterday updated my drivers to the latest, 195.62 from Nvidia's website.

About a month ago I noticed Counter Strike: Source would crash after an hour or so of gaming, which prompted me to clean out dust from my one exhaust vent for the first time, and this solved that problem. The Steam holiday sale prompted me to buy World In Conflict, and I decided in preparation that I would undervolt my CPU for the first time (currently running stable on most higher multipliers, lower multipliers untouched, I haven't finished yet).

WiC recommends medium settings, which runs fine save for a few fps slowdowns during intense battles, and the odd delayed audio during in game cut scenes. The problem is during intense moments, problems (like missing textures) and artifacts will start to appear, just a few at first, then it will spiral out of control, causing me to either close the program, and restart or simply crashing my computer.

I opened up HWMonitor (the program found in the undervolting guide) and my GPU only reached a maximum of 75 degrees Celsius (I thought this would have been safe enough?). I figured out I can keep playing if I alt tab out of WiC as soon as I see the first sign of trouble, then let my GPU cool down to 65 degrees or less. Not ideal, but it works. Counter Strike Source still runs fine though.

This error also appears with the artifacts (not every time though)


If anyone has any advice, I would love to hear it. My laptop sits on my desk when I game, kept free of clutter. I've tried lowering the graphics down to "Low" but it hasn't seemed to help. The most recent artifact was a snowing effect on the screen, which lasted even after I closed the program, forcing me to restart my laptop. I would have thought 75 degrees C would be a reasonable temperature. My 2 year warranty is up in less than a month, so I'm hoping I really don't get bent over. Thanks in advance, I know this was a long post.

EDIT: RMA'd. Will keep posted. Here's the post with the RMA and some pics.

 

oh yeah. dying for sure.

eventually you will get crashes from just the desktop, and then *bam* dead.

changing the graphics settings isn't going to change the temperature or how hard your graphics card is working. 75C is a reasonable temperature, but the 8600m gt is a ticking time bomb.

call asus and ask for them to repair it.

 

I had the exact same problem, black screen freez folowed by that message, also rainbow sparks, and so on. I bought a laptopcooler and my problems during cod4 disapeared. It's definitly the heat, my card went trough 92 celcius temperatures during the summer but now it can hardly cope with 75 celcius.

So, get a good laptopcooler (cryo, zalman) and try again. I bought a bad logitech cooler with 1 fan and still solved the problem, although i'm not sure it wll be sufficient for the next summer. If your laptop dies you can still use the cooler for your next laptop (the current hp envy, the dell xps 13/16, and the asus g5* g6* g7* series all tend to become really hot because of the hot gaming hardware).

 

Have other people had luck calling Asus and having them repair it? Is it as easy as just giving them a ring and telling them I'm starting to see artifacts and my GPU is dieing?

So you're still using that same laptop with a cooler? How long have you had your laptop? And can you recommend a good model for a cooler?

 

I've got the same message when I'm playing Heroes of Newerth.
Even with my cooler on, it gives me the same crash. The game freezes for about 10 seconds, then it gets blank screen and back to Windows desktop saying that the driver crashed.
Nowadays, my card died, it doesn't show anything on the display so I think about swapping the 8600m gt for a hd3650.

PD: And yes, my laptop almost has 3 years. I'm using A.C. Ryan Hush-Rush cooler.

 

If the warranty is up in less than a month then just constantly run a GPU stress test until if fully dies, honestly, just leave a stress test on the GPU for a couple days 24 hours a day, then when it's fully failed they'll have to repair it.

 

Might be dying but not dead yet....

 

when you send in it make photos of artifacts with your camera and give them the photos too

 

This is another thing that happens to me. I can't replace my GPU though....

I hope this doesn't happen. I'm going to call them tomorrow once I get my camera back.

Lol, I've thought of this, but I'd rather not resort to it.... What's a good program to do this?

I'm definitely going to do this. I don't have a camera until tomorrow though.

I will try to update this thread, to let people know what's going on. Also, hopefully anyone else with an 8xxxM from Asus can benefit from it.

EDIT: Do you guys think I should remove RM Clock before sending it in, seeing as they might say something about me messing with the voltages, etc, even though I've done everything properly?

 

Its an Asus, it suffers the same problem as mine, shoddy and poorly constructed. My vid card seems to be hitting the bucket as well. With Asus you have to go high end or nothing, otherwise there low to mid end products don't last.

A reason why I switched to Gigabyte and Intel for my motherboards and such.

 

Hmmm, try this program, some say that if this program doesn't heat the GPU to max, nothing else will.

 

Definitely call and see if you can ship it in for the warranty! Asus has a good reputation for their warranty support, and there's probably a reason for that. Regardless of whether the GPU is going to die soon, it shouldn't be doing what it's doing. You paid for a fully-functioning product, and you're guaranteed to have a fully-functioning product as long as it's under warranty.

You can't judge a company based on a failing 8600m. The 8600m's were a catastrophe for nVidia, and for all companies that used them in their laptops. A failed video card says nothing about the company's build quality, motherboards, screens, etc.

 

Damn that's shameful for Lenovo to be on the farther spectrum of the failure rates... Especially since they control the way ThinkPads will be, shameful. I'll guarantee you that failure rates for ThinkPads were way lower when it was owned by IBM.

 

Ok, so I finally had some spare time to get some pics of the artifacts. I called ASUS and got an RMA #, faxed them my receipt and awaiting what was supposed to be an "immediate" email with instructions for shipping.

I don't think I actually mentioned that the overheating only happens with gaming. I hope that's not a problem.
They said they would perform "diagnostic" tests on my computer to find the problem, and asked me if they could do a factory reset if they had to (I asked them what good that would do, and she admitted, "nothing", but they might anyway) .

I'll be sending a couple pictures with the notebook, maybe a CD with pictures and a video or two as well.

Here's a couple pictures, for your browsing pleasure
deskop
in-game
more, worse desktop
in game video

Wish me luck guys!

 

It would be nice if you just had to send them the card and they could send you a new one.

When my hard drive went bad under warranty dell sent me a new one right away and let me keep the bad one for a week after getting the new one before sending it back so I could back everything up.

P.S. It looks like it's snowing in World in Conflict.

 

Weee Want Mxm, We Want Mxm, We Want Mxm, We Want Mxm!!! Lol

 

75 degrees lol
I have had my acer 5920g for 2.5 years and on the last day of 2009 the 8600m gt card blew. After 2.5 years of gaming at 90+ degrees Celsius, it died painlessly.

 

The most I can get the 8600M GT up to in my laptop is 70C. CPU ...

The card is replaceable, no? Upgrade time!

 

2 years, 3 months, and still running ^^ (although with ocassional purple spikes...the laptopcooler fixed the rainbow sparks and black screenfreezes though).

 

Called them to confirm my RMA after faxing my invoice last night, they had the wrong name and email address on file. They also had my location as Ontario Ohio, instead of Ontario Canada. Oh well, all is good, they are picking it up tomorrow. One thing I disliked is they don't provide an obvious way to negotiate a pickup time, the RMA just runs through their system and straight to the courier, then an email is sent to me. Fortunately someone (not me) will be home between the 6 hour time span they indicated, so I don't have to leave my laptop out in the cold, for anyone to steal.

One thing I did appreciate was their customer support was very friendly and helpful, and rather fluent in English.

Not sure why so many people have suggested I replace the GPU, I never realized MXM was that common that everyone just assumes

That's quite respectable of Dell. I'm not that bothered though, Asus' 2 year warranty is standard, and they are providing free pick-up and return at my house (might I add in very quick time, pickup is tomorrow after calling in yesterday). I'm just keeping my fingers crossed, that, along with much more life out of my laptop, my laptop doesn't get damaged in shipping. The short notice hasn't left me much time to buy bubble wrap, lol.

@Miller... your first sentence doesn't make a lot of sense, you said you can get an 8600M GT to 70, but then you say CPU.

And yeah, playing World in Conflict in constant snow was fun while trying to get my pictures (but not actually). What is pretty cool, which I never realized, is that when you pause the game with Esc, you can still look around the battlefield, so you can see time-frozen explosions, artillery shots, smoke from landing shells, etc, from different angles.

Quite lucky, I suppose? Lol.

Maybe you are one of the lucky ones that has escaped the 8xxx curse

 

Haha, well since my Quadro FX 570M derived from the 8600M GT runs at a max of high 70's-83C, and i live in a place where it is in the high -20's right now, maybe i'll play GTA 4 outside one day and report back on the temps, could achieve a world record for lowest gaming temps!

 

I guess thats why the laptops with 8600m's are normally pretty cheap on ebay. they're guaranteed to die.

Man, thats what i get for wanting to save money. luckily my toshiba's 2 years old now and i've had it for about 3 weeks and haven't had death threatening problems yet. Although I have had it slow down during a game pretty bad once.

I'm definitely gonna get me a cooler and hope for the best.

Whats a good quality cooler that'd fit under a 17' lappy?

 

The end is definitely nigh!

Supplementary materials regarding the long-documented faulty nVidia G-84/ 86 mobile card series:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1028703/nvidia-g84-g86-bad
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1004378/why-nvidia-chips-defective
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1013947/nvidia-should-defective-chips
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1036374/nv-should
http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/31/figuring-out-which-nvidia-gpus-are-defective-its-a-lot/
http://news.softpedia.com/news/HP-Spotted-Defective-Nvidia-Chips-Last-November-90960.shtml

 

Meant to say that while I have a hard time getting the GPU up there I have had the CPU at 100C once or twice.

 

Not guaranteed to fail, some people will game on them till they're outdated, with no failures or signs of failure. My T61p is 2.5 years old and it's 570M (which is the GDDR3 8600M GT) has shown zero signs of failure, GTA IV runs fine on it, needs more RAM to completely fix stuttering though.