Is my 970m failing?

Hello I have a p170sm-a that has been a bit of a nightmare to own this last year. Just out of warranty my under clocked undervolted 880m died prompting me to buy a 970m. Which worked great out of the box. I tried a texture mod for a game called Elite Dangerous and the nvidia display driver crashed. I now get reduced performance in everything. I tried a fresh install of windows 8 but I can't seem to install any display drivers for the 970m like I had before. Going back to hdd with windows 7 it does work just not full steam. Max performance preferred nvidia processor, etc.

At this point with 2 dead/dying gpu's in a year, what should I do? I would like to get a system that lasts me a few trouble free years. These gpu's are adding up.

 

Got SLI 970m's in my rig. I've been unable to install NVIDIA's latest driver on any operating system. I think that's an issue with the driver - I originally thought I had a gpu problem too. Try installing 359.XX. I didn't have a problem installing those. Also use driver sweeper to completely remove the old display drivers in safe mode.

Once the driver is installed, make sure you set power management mode to "Prefer Maximum Performance" in the NVIDIA Control Center. If that's set to anything else, I get horrible stuttering and general low performance. It's possible that got reset/changed when the display driver crashed.

 

I can't seem to install the driver from my cd nor 359.00 from a download. . It will load up and say installation failed from the download. It will tell me to enable an nvidia device to install from my driver cd. I can then switch hard drives and it will be there on my windows 7 setup. And will work just poorly.

 

What status is the GPU under device manager?

 

In windows 7 it is telling me it is working properly. On a fresh install of 8.1 it tells me that it is a Microsoft basic display adapter. With 2 status messages.

The device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device. (code 31)

And the driver trying to start is not the same as the driver for the POSTed display adapter.

I would be ok with it running on 7. I was trying to load up 3dmark on a fresh install and see if I can get back to normal scores. But I cannot load an nvidia driver on the clean install.

 

That's usually an indication of one of two things:

1. The drivers are not being installed in the correct order (chipset, Intel graphics driver (in Optimus systems), then NVidia graphics driver)
- or -
2. A failing card.

From what you've relayed, it's not sounding very good.

 

Yes I made sure to follow the correct order. Are there places that could diagnose the issue of this computer? I don't want to keep putting gpus in and having them burn out. Like I said I under clocked my 880m and it still died. Only to have the replacement 970m stock clocks and vbios die as well in 7 months. I watch my temps like a hawk the 970m has never seen 75C.

 

If the GPU operates normally in 7 then it's unlikely the GPU itself is damaged.

 

That's just it, it doesnt. I fire strike 6600. From my usual 7200. Elite dangerous is unplayable at the settings I have had for months. I have had horizons and have landed on planets it's all very gpu dependent. Now I struggle to get a playable framerate. GTAV now when I go downtown my frames fall in areas I have never had issues. It is noticeably weaker. I was hoping it was a software issue until I couldn't get the driver's installed on the fresh install. I'll try 7 on that spare drive and see where that gets me. I will just use it as is until it dies I suppose. I held on to the 880m and I know the laptop will boot with it just has a bad ram module and faults out when loaded. I'm very hesitant to put another sacrificial card in not knowing if this machine is inadvertantly killing cards.

 

What BIOs are you currently running?

 

Stock

Derp I am on. Prema v2 bios. I had the stock vbios on the gpu.

 

Tried flashing with Premamod? Perhaps the stock BIOs doesn't like 900 series cards.

 

Can you post up GPU/CPU activity logs during game play from the likes of MSI afterburner and intel XTU?

 

Here I hope it has the correct graphs.