7811 - Intermittent Graphical Slideshow

Im not sure where else to turn but hopefully someon will be able to help me.

I purchased the machien in August of 2008 when I first learned of it abd it has reached my expectaions and then some so far. About 4 Months ago however I began to have this problem that I cant quite seem to figure out. Everytime I play a game I get spells of time while playing that my system just kinda becomes slideshow esque..This is only while i game though like i said, and the FPS will drop from say 60 to 30 for about 30 seconds or so, before going back to 60 for about 5 minutes before the process repeats.

I was using the DOX Series of drivers and first thought that was the issue. So I uninstalled, and installed the base Windows 7 RC driver found in windows update. The driver worked fine for a a few hours, then I looked on nVidia's web and got the latest 185, and the problem has since been persisting.

Some notes for those who skim.

- Problem only occurs in game
- Problem drops FPS then picks back up...
- Problem is not drver specific as it has been found on a number of different versions.
- Antares neeeds help!

I havent found this error on anyone elses box yet and have seen nothing else like it on the internet. It is almost as though the GPU is being throttled, then it picks back up again. I am running on a laptop cooler, I have had the card overclocked and returned to stock, the problem is on both clock settings...etc.

Please help me with this and I thank you for your time...

Antares

 

Have you checked temperatures to see if the card is downclocking due to high heat?

If you're on Vista/7 is your power profile set to High Performance?

Is Nvidia powermizer disabled or have you not changed anything relating to that?

Did you ever have this problem with the 7 driver from Windows Update?

What game(s) are you playing? How are you viewing your FPS? What resolution are you playing in? How do you have the graphics settings setup? Is your Nvidia profile set to Performance, Balanced, Quality or not setup at all?

I know its a lot of questions but that's troubleshooting.

I don't like the "vanilla" (regular) nvidia drivers, and I don't like using any NEW drivers, especially any beta drivers. I had a bad experience with Dox 185.20, but am now using Dox 182.46 and they are working flawlessly.

 

Thanks for the reply, I was beginning to worry if this thread was just going to die off.

Anyways to answer your questions....

Windows 7 - High Performance : Yes
nVidia Powermizer : Not Sure what this is or how to disable
Windows 7 , Windows Update Driver : Tried it out, worked good for a little while.. found the 185 driver on nvidia website...installed it, problem came back, tried to back to windows update driver and problem stuck around.
Games : Any / All Games, Anything with true 3D, FPS..RTS...RPG..Measuring FPS visually not with monitor, it is a noticable drop nothing nothing progressive. Resolution ranges from lowest to 1900 x 1200, problem persists on all resolution ranges. Graphics set to performance, switched to quality same thing...

 

Do you clean the vents with compressed air? If not be sure they are clean as being dirty reduces the heat transfer ability. One way to tell if heat is the issue is if the GPU fan is running hard durring the down. This cooling the GPU till with the lower clock it gets to a point where it can upclock again.

 

You can disable powermizer through the registry, I think it fixed some problems for people even though its only supposed to affect you when on battery.

Definitely check temps and alt+tab to it when the FPS slows down to see if temps are high and the card is downclocking.

It even does this in 800x600?

Are you doing a clean install of the video drivers? Uninstalling them through add/remove programs and then using driver sweeper, followed by a reboot and THEN installing the new drivers?

You should also open task manager to the peformance tab and leave it in the background while you play your game(s). Just like the temps, alt+tab to it when the game slows down to check for high CPU/RAM usage. You should also find the command for the game(s) so you can see the actual # of fps, it can definitely be helpful when troubleshooting a slowdown like you're describing.

 

Ok so here is the new list of what has been done.

- Fresh Application of AS5 to GPU & CPU
- Thorough Blow Out of Cooling System
- Powermizer Disabled
- Driver Sweep & Reinstallation of Latest DOX

What im finding now though is that it may not be a GPU problem, finally got around to getting EVEREST installed so that I can view TEMPS and what im seeing is about 60* Stable. I kept the Performance tab on task manager open as you had said and I alt tabbed everytime it got slow, I found that at the moment I got back to my desktop the processor was spiking at 100%. Im not really sure why the CPU is doing this because I dont have any other things going with the exception of the OS. To verify this I went back in game waitied till things were smooth and then alt tabbed once more, seeing the CPU at only 40-50%...Waited once more till slow...Alt Tabbed...100% Usage.


So I guess this rules out the GPU... Ideas? And thank you so much eveyrone for helping out thus far, the system of elimination is working!!! .... SCIENCE! =D

 

I've had this problem in all my games since I purchased this laptop last year. It's been an ongoing problems between multiple os's, and driver sets.

I think it has something to do with my HDD. I get the same random dips in FPS that you explained and whenever it does so, my I can feel/hear my hard drive spinning beneath my palm.

It's got nothing to do with the graphical hardware not being up to snuff because I've had this problem is games as old as Quake 3.

 

When you alt+tab to it is it JUST showing a spike to 100% CPU? The spike MAY be caused by the alt+tab command to go to task manager, but if you look at the graph you can see the history while you were in-game. If the 100% spike on the graph has any kind of flat part (Like a plateau) and not just a short up/down spike then that may be your problem. Next thing to do is check which process is stressing the CPU so much. Do the same thing (Leave task manager running while you game), but this time have it on the processes tab, and click the CPU title button so it arranges the processes by CPU usage. Obviously you will want the highest CPU usage on top and the lowest (0) on the bottom. If you alt+tab to it and it shows taskmgr.exe taking up all the CPU and then jumping back down, that's just from alt+tabbing to task manager.

Do you have any kind of 24-7 anti-virus protection running in the backgroud?
At the bottom of Task Manager it says Processes: (How many do you have?)

 

What type of cooler are you using? and does the palm rest to your gateway feel very warm to the touch when you game?

 

Well the alt+tab is only spiking when the game slows, when it smooth I alt tab just to make sure and usage is at about 40-50%. the antivirus I use is Nod 32 4, x64. Which runs auto update in the background as anyones does, and I think the problem came before I had that installed.

To answer the next question, the of is hot to the touch on the side of the touch pad. The Cooler im using btw is the NZXT Cryo LX, With 3x 120mm Fans =D

 

Ok so I think we have it narrowed down to either the disk that is going bad or the processor. Does anyone know of any good "HARDWARE" error checking progs that they can direct me to to test either peices of hardware and then post results here post test?

 

Yes but when it is at 100%, is the spike caused by taskmgr or what processes are taking up 100% of your CPU (May be a couple combined). Sustained 100% CPU usage is never good and will cause drastic slowdowns.

If you do not know what I mean by the difference between a spike (Graph will go up, hit the top, and instantly come back down, with no flat parts at the top of the graph) and a consistent 100% (Graph will go up to the top, stay flat, and then come back down) I can post screenshots to help you out.

The important part is finding the CPU intensive processes when it is at 100% CPU usage, anything that's not 00 should be listed.

 

The spike is happening after task manager has already been opened. I open it up before the game and then when game gets ty i check back and the usage of the game itself is over 1GB usually, the next highest is svhost at 130mb, and then from there on its everything @ 24mb or below. Keep in mind though that the spike is indeed intermittent... good performance for 5-10 minutes...then slows.....then goes back to good....repeat.

 

You're looking at the memory usage. You need to look at CPU, not memory (If its CPU that's showing high usage in the graphs on the performance tab). If you're using Vista 64 you've got 4 GB of 1066MHz DDR3 which should be plenty for basic Vista 64 and most games.

 

Im looking at the CPU it bounces from 40% to 100% and then back down again. Memory Usage is around 1.75GB

 

I've to my dismay, not been able to fix this problem either.

 

The stuttering was getting ridiculous today when I was trying to play Quake. Instead of getting these dips every 10-20 minutes I was getting them every 3 minutes. I uninstalled the nvidia 185.25 drivers and installed the 186.08.

I also updated my bios from 9.05 or whatever the stock bios was to 9.12 or whatever. I just finished playing about an hour of Quake and about an hour of Fear 2 and I didn't detect any of the symptoms of the slow down in either game. I believe I fixed it but I'll have to test it out over the course of the next week or so.

 

Global and I have been working to get the primary problem resolved and what you add simply adds to it and you have my thanks for that. The next hurdle for my system is to solve the mystery crash with an unknown cause. I cant pull a windows event log because its a total crash and I have to hard boot so windows doesnt see it as an improper shutdown.

Usually though (not everytime) when in a game my computer will crash for no apparrent reason, the screen goes black and audio repeats with no response to any keyboard input whatsoever.

When this same crash appears on normal usage ( for example while browsing the netz ) the screen will fill with a pink checkerboard like overlay and do the same, total freeze, audio repeat, and no keyboard response.

Encounter and solve anything like this yet?

 

It really sounds like your harddrives are heating up greatly.... can you check the temps and post them so we can confirm?..... also there are a few settings in device manager which you can use to maybe boost the performance a little for the harddrive........ if it really is a heating issue.... I drilled a bunch of even holes into the removable bezel to help with heat dissipation for my RAID-0.... which heats up frequently

 

We enabled write-back cache and advanced performance already.

Hard drive temps are a possibility but if the newer nvidia drivers still didn't change anything it's probably time to send it in for a board replacement. Ive never seen a hard drive cause a pink checkerboard across the display . Have you seen the pink checkerboard with different drivers?

Pretty sure you answered this already but it had all the same symptoms with Vista right?

 

well actually i set write back cache to default again because i was experiencing painfully long load times, so i defaulted and I was back in business.

 

Here is the cpu graph for reference, wish we had a fps graph