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EVGA GTX660 + ASUS M4N72-E compatibility issues?
Here's the deal. I've had my ASUS M4N72-E mainboard for 3 years now and it's still in good working order. I've been running a GTX460 SLI configuration on it for the last year or so.
When one of my EVGA GTX460s broke down I sent it RMA and after 3 months or problems (mine & EVGA's fault) it was replaced with a GTX660 earlier this week. Since I took the GTX460 from my son's PC to keep SLI running, I dropped the GTX660 in his. There the card is running perfectly.
Today I tested the card in my system to compare performance with the GTX460 SLI configuration. Oddly enough, the moment I dropped the GTX660 in my system, my system kept crashing and hanging itself up. I've updated drivers, removed AVG as virus scanner and cleaned up my registry with PC Tools. Nothing weird found, but still the problem of the GTX660 crashing and hanging up my system remained.
Now I'm back with my GTX460 SLI configuration and it looks like all is stable again...
My system:
ASUS M4N72-E
AMD Phenom X6 1090T BE @3.2Ghz
8Gb memory 800Mhz DDR2 - 2x2Gb Corssair and 2x2Gb ICIDU
Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty Champion
Windows 7 x64 Ultimate
Anyone has an idea what the problem might be with the GTX660 in the above configuration? I really would like to run it in my system because of the much better performance with DX10/DX11 games ;-)
When one of my EVGA GTX460s broke down I sent it RMA and after 3 months or problems (mine & EVGA's fault) it was replaced with a GTX660 earlier this week. Since I took the GTX460 from my son's PC to keep SLI running, I dropped the GTX660 in his. There the card is running perfectly.
Today I tested the card in my system to compare performance with the GTX460 SLI configuration. Oddly enough, the moment I dropped the GTX660 in my system, my system kept crashing and hanging itself up. I've updated drivers, removed AVG as virus scanner and cleaned up my registry with PC Tools. Nothing weird found, but still the problem of the GTX660 crashing and hanging up my system remained.
Now I'm back with my GTX460 SLI configuration and it looks like all is stable again...
My system:
ASUS M4N72-E
AMD Phenom X6 1090T BE @3.2Ghz
8Gb memory 800Mhz DDR2 - 2x2Gb Corssair and 2x2Gb ICIDU
Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty Champion
Windows 7 x64 Ultimate
Anyone has an idea what the problem might be with the GTX660 in the above configuration? I really would like to run it in my system because of the much better performance with DX10/DX11 games ;-)
Comments
Roses are red
Violets are blue
The reviewer has a mishapen head
Which means his opinion is skewed
...Aldous.MF'n.Huxley
Lately me and a couple of my friends also have had issues with Windows 7 becoming corrupt, resulting in freezing every now and then, as well as programs not working at all where as they used to...i reset my windows 7 OS 2 times cause of this and eventually just upgraded to windows 8 (Was running it on my gaming laptop and had nowhere near as many issues throughout the year and a half ive owned it)....id try doing the BIOS thing first but keep in mind as a last resort you can try refreshing windows,before that id like to recommend a program that seemed to work temporarily at pushing the corruption away...http://www.iobit.com/advancedsystemcareper.php its free, run the scan with all options checked, clean your computer out, as well as maybe trying some of the other tools in the toolbox, one of the best programs ive found.
Edit: if you havent done so already, also before trying all of the above make sure the 660 is in the primary slot as its the more powerful card.
10x10x7cm?
PSU is not the problem (720W to answer your question). GTX460 in SLI eats a lot more power than a single GTX660. Heck, even a single GTX660 uses less power than a single GTX460 (1 vs 2 6-pins power plugs on the card).
I think I might have found the problem though. The M4N72-E is a AM3 board with PCIe 2.0 support, while the board in my son's PC is a newer model (M5A74 series) which uses the AMD 760 chipset that does support PCIe 3.0. With the GTX460 being a PCIe 2.0 card and the GTX660 a PCIe 3.0 card I can only assume that there's the source of my problem...
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/367155-33-will-pcie
Apparently the cards are backwards compatible.
I already thought they were, but sadly my mainboard doesn't agree with that. Might the problem be that the board is a SLI board and thus provides x8 to the slots instead of x16?
Anyway, I'll puzzle again a bit coming Monday when my son is at school and I can rip the GTX660 out of his PC again ;-)
On the surface, your PCI 3.0 card should work in your motherboards 2.0 slots, with 16 lanes or 8 lanes or even 1 lane on PCI 1.0 slot really. The motherboard supporting SLI should haven' nothing to do with it either.
Should doesn't necessarily mean will, though.
Make sure you have your latest motherboard drivers (you already checked BIOS), in addition to the latest nVidia drivers. Motherboard drivers often get overlooked.
It's possible when your last video card blew up, it actually damaged the motherboard - make sure you try your 660 in both of your PCI slots.. And it's possible the card and motherboard just don't work together due to some mutual cosmic and karmic dislike of each other.
Good one one the mianboard drivers. I'll jump in to that coming Monday as well. I'm quite certain the mainboard is not damaged. I'm still running GTX460 SLI (I did have 3 of those cards in 2 PCs
) without a problem. Last nigh I did my weekly virus scan and the PC was still operating normally when I came back to the PC this morning (found a trokan and doesn't shutdown then 
)
On a command prompt (administrative)type :sfc /scannow
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929833
Not even sure this will but this is the best bet I know of.nobody expect virus in GPU .and I don't believe there is a way to scan for these yet !they are very bard to detect from what I read online!
GPU virus? That's the 1st time I heard about that... But I doubt it's there since the card works perfectly on my son's PC,. Not to mention, when I unplug the card from any PC, the RAM is cleared, so it can't stay there. Also worth to note that with the GTX460 SLI configuration my system runs fine, so if there's a GPU virus on my system somewhere, it should affect the GTX460 SLI as well...
Well, I don't know of any "Virus" that runs on the GPU, but there were a few programs that were considered detrimental.
Furmark, when it was newer, could cause a GPU to overheat because it pushed them way beyond what they were meant to do. The Starcraft 2 loading screen did the same thing for a while. Both of these got driver patches to prevent it from happening again; AMD instituted PowerTune in all 6900/GCN-based cards that prevent it from happening at a hardware level, and nVidia uses Boost which helps, but can't totally prevent, it from occuring. Neverwinter may have had something similar (http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?221122-GPU-Heat-going-ballistic-with-Neverwinter)
They weren't viruses, per say, but they could unintentionally damage your hardware.
The KB article that Dr.B links to has nothing to do with GPU viruses. It's more meant for finding corrupt windows system files (which could be caused from a virus, but more likely just from random bit flipping or hard crashes).
Roses are red
Violets are blue
The reviewer has a mishapen head
Which means his opinion is skewed
...Aldous.MF'n.Huxley
Had the Neverwinter issue myself, and most likely caused one of my GPUs to break down -> http://www.pagesfromsages.com/?action=showentry&entry=1684. Though the card wasn't extremely how (83C max), after that the card went down hill quickly and within a couple of months it was dead. Good thing the card (EVGA) had 10 year warranty and was replaced with the GTX660 I have now.
On the virus thing - my system is squeeky clean...
@Lugal - PSU is okay. I'm running GTX460 SLI without any problem even at high load for a long time. I calculated needed power for my system, came at around 550W PSU requirement and took a 720W one instead. Heck, the 600W I had should do it, but I dropped that one in my son's PC just to be on the save side ;-)
Mainboard dying..? Not sure. I still CAN run SLI and all other things are working well. It is plausible though because in the past (2010) I had a XFX 8800GT card burn down on this board (in SLI as well). I'm not sure though it the board was damaged 3 years ago, if it could still be working today...
The whole "GPU virus" stuff is probably talking about a power virus, which isn't necessarily malware. A modern GPU has many components: video decode, PCI Express bus, registers, L1 cache, L2 cache, memory controllers, shaders, texture units, color ROPs, Z/Stencil ROPs, tessellator, video encode, monitor outputs, etc. Most programs--including most games--will leave some of those completely idle. Furthermore, even programs that push a GPU pretty hard will generally not need components in the precise ratios that the GPU can offer them, have the ratio of what they need vary wildly from one moment to the next, and have various scheduling inefficiencies. Thus, even some of the components that a program is actively using might only be used at half of their capacity.
So what happens when a program comes along and uses far more of the capability of more components than most programs can make use if? You end up getting much higher than normal power consumption. GPU vendors don't want to have to assume that all components will see 100% use all of the time, as no real programs will come anywhere remotely near that, and you'd have to clock things much lower to allow for that--which would kill performance in the real games that people actually run. So they derisively call programs that push hardware too hard "power viruses" and guess at what the most usage real programs will actually cause is.
But some programs--including some games--push hardware harder than that. The Starcraft II title screen did that to some Nvidia GPUs, as do all of Cryptic's games. Once AMD or Nvidia finds out that a game is pushing hardware too hard, they'll throttle back performance in that particular game through video drivers. But they probably don't find out about it until they get people complaining of fried video cards, so this is imperfect.
CPU and GPU vendors have traditionally tried to deal with this by monitoring temperature, and throttling back performance severely when a chip is overheating. This is certainly better than nothing, but waits until after overheating has happened before doing anything. Furthermore, when it does happen, it completely kills your performance, as the chip gets throttled back to the minimum clock speed that it can handle without crashing.
Recent AMD video cards have "PowerTune", which will monitor power consumption in real time, and if it goes over what AMD thinks is acceptable, it will throttle back the GPU to safe limits. Because it doesn't have to wait until your GPU has overheated, it can prevent overheating in the first place, as once power consumption gets too high, it will throttle back clock speeds within a fraction of a second. Furthermore, it will do the minimum amount of throttling to get into safe limits, often only reducing your GPU clock speed by 10 or 20 MHz or so, so that the game keeps running fine and you never notice the difference.
A "power virus" can kill hardware through overheating and electromigration, but shouldn't make it so that new hardware won't run in the first place. Overheating isn't the only problem: if you push a chip too close to its limits, you slowly damage it through electromigration, regardless of the temperatures.
Once again: all thanks for the replies. I kinda solved the problem and it had nothing to do with hardware/software compatibility or Windows 7 screwing up somehow.
Problem was that the power slot on top of the card (and near the end) that the GTX660 is using was the problem. The power cord I use is very sturdy (modular PSU system) and plugging it in on the GTX660 from the front makes a huge bulb that goes 'outside' my PC case. Closing the PC case caused some pressure on the GTX660 and probably also caused some 'loose connection' with the PCIe slot. Now that I have the power cord plugged in from the 'back' of the GTX660 (like I did with the ASUS GTX460 which also has the power slots on top of the card), the bulb is gone and no pressure on the GPU is made.
This I figured out 36 hours ago and made it work. Ever since the GPU is working normally and no system hang ups and crashes ever since *keeps knocking on wood*
Roses are red
Violets are blue
The reviewer has a mishapen head
Which means his opinion is skewed
...Aldous.MF'n.Huxley
Nice troubleshooting - glad it's working.
I wish.... This morning I had fractals all over my screen. Turning my PC off & on again made them go away. This afternoon I started my PC without any problems. And now tonight I only get fractals, fractals and more fractals. Looks like the RMA card that EVGA sent me was not so well refurbished. That makes 3 in a row that they fucked up with >:(
Good thing I have EU law behind me for this one and I've made a clear demand to them. Either they send me a NEW boxed GTX660 or they return me my payment and I'll grab a card at my local store (won't be EVGA for sure).
Good thing that I still had the old GTX460 and didn't sell it off yet
Exactly what power supply do you have? Give the exact brand name and model, not just the nominal wattage.
Also, have you tried different combinations of 6-pin PCI-E power connectors to power the video card?
It worked fine in your son's machine though...
A 460 broke at one point, you got another 460. Later on the 460 broke again, adn they sent you a 660. Ok, I can see two RMA's here, it's not clear if I have it right, and I don't see a third.
Have you actually been through 3 660's ?!?
I have seen spotty PCI connection issues, mainly where they neglected to screw in the card to the chassis, but I have also seen it with bigger cards bumping against HD cages or power cables pull the card out of alignment or some such - but all very similar to what you describe happened with your PCI-E connector. In an extreme case I could see where it could actually damage the PCI slot on the motherboard or stress the daughterboard of the video card sufficiently to damage it, but I've never seen any permanent damage come from that personally.
I think, before you drop another video card in your computer - as much as it pains you to do so, you should probably revisit the power supply and motherboard. It's entirely likely you could hit video card #4 here, and a ghost in the machine eats it, and maybe the money for the parts that aren't obviously broken is worth the effort and frustration your going through right now chasing the devils out of the details.
Those are classic symptoms of a poor power supply or a marginal motherboard - but then again, a poor power supply and/or marginal motherboard have such a wide variety of rather innoculous symptoms that those problems usually never get diagnosed directly, but are rather solved indirectly by just chucking the entire piece of shit out the window in a fit of rage after you've been through 3 video cards and are sick of dealing with it.
EVGA told me to check my power supply as well as well as my mainboard. I know those 2 are not faulty since I can still run the old GTX460 SLI configuration without problems that I have (as back up during RMAs).
About the RMAs, here's what happened:
Never mind whether you think it's fine. Just say what power supply you have.
If the power it's delivering is slightly out of spec, then maybe one video card will be able to handle it just fine while another will choke. Or maybe you've got multiple +12 V rails and the GTX 660 puts a different relative load on them than the GTX 460s in SLI. Or maybe one of your 6-pin PCI-E power connectors is malfunctioning, and you didn't happen to use that one for the GTX 460s. Or maybe, as someone else mentioned earlier, the problem is the motherboard; a lot of power gets fed through the PCI Express slot, too.
My PSU is fine as is the mainboard. You (and others in this thread) seem to forget that a single GTX660 only draws 130W max and a single GTX460 draws about 175W. That's why the GTX460 has 2 power slots and the GTX660 only 1. Yhough unlikely I did change power cord and even took the power from the other rail, but that still didn't change a thing at all.
My PSU is an OCZ Fatal1ty 750W SLI certified. If I can use it to feed 2x GTX460 (using all 4 power slots on 2 rails it has for the GPUs) then I'm pretty sure it definately should be able feed one GTX660 that uses only 1 power slot on either rails.
I also checked the power on the CPU and mainboard using ASUS PC Probe and all the voltages there are as they should be. This would imply that both PSU and mainboard are okay.
Also worth to note that I learned on the EVGA forums that I'm not the only one having to re-RMA defective RMA cards more than once. Somehow the EVGA RMA department just doesn't do it's check the 'refirbished' (yes, I'm not getting new ones but used ones that were RMAd before) GPUs as good as they should
The power supply and motherboard should be fine if they're not defective. But that's a big if.
You've got a modular power supply, so I'd try using different PCI-E power cables and plugging them into different places on the power supply. Your power supply has four weak +12 V rails, and it's set up so that you could easily put the CPU and video card on the same rail while leaving two rails completely empty.