Bad Ram on GF6800GT?? Advice badly needed!

Hi, I finally got my self some upgrades for the pc. One of these is a Leadtek 6800GT, its a surprisingly big card. Anyway, i have been using it for 2 days now and noticed that in some of my games, if i play long enough, i get error messages which end the game and put me back into windows. This never used to happen with the old card. So i thought that the problem could be the driver so i tried different ones but the problem remained.
I get this problem when playing Prince of Persia, which was delivered with the card, saying that the game had to be "abruptly stopped", or somethin, and with Half Life 2 i get a message like:
" The Instruction ar "Qx241f5a38" Referenced Memory at "Qz00f5facc". The Memory could not be "read". "
In Dawn of War i get a message that just tells me that something whent wrong and that i can send an error report over the net...

The card is gread but im kinda worried that the cards Ram is faulty but im not certain so i was wonderin if anyone here knows a way to test a graphics card ram?? Or if anyone else has experience with this problem??

Thnaks for reading, comments really appreciated.

by the way, 3DMark 05 works great on it.... max score 5246

 

A memory error on the graphic card would normally manifest itself as corruption on the screen. Am I right in believing you don’t get any form of corruption before the game drops back to the windows desktop?

There are a couple of things you can check before returning the card to your supplier.

1. Make sure you have completely removed the drivers for your old card. I would also remove the drivers for this card too and start again from scratch. You can do this by going to “add/remove programs” in “control panel”.

2. Check to power rating for your system. The 6800GT cards are thirsty little buggers and you’ll have to make sure your PSU is up to the task of supplying it with all the juice it needs.

It would be helpful to know the full spec of your PC.

Have a nice day

 

also make sure that your not overclocking anything.

 

I'm with searcher, uninstall the card's drivers and download the newest drivers from the card manufacturer's website (get the drivers first! lol) Also go to the game developer's site and check for patches for the game/operating system. Sometimes the developer's aren't as diligent on testing as they ought to be. Also, just for being on the safe side, reseat your video card, and your system's memory! Probably not the problem, but you never know! Reseating memory fixes alot of ills!

wuf@bark.arf

 

Thanks for all the quick replies!

Searcher:
You are correct, there is no corruption on the screen before the games drop back into windows.
Ive used driver cleaner to make sure that the drivers have been completely removed but will do it all again in just a minute just to be sure!
About the PSU, i bought a new one just for this card, its a paxpower akasa 460W ultra quiet. I think this device is fine.

And here are the rest of my specs

P4 3,2GHz Prescott
2GB PC3200, i bought the second 1GB with the GC
2 x 160GB Samsung HD
MSI PT880 Neo
Samsung DVD-ROM SD-616E
Nec DVD RW ND-2500A
then, there is one of these USB/Firewire PCI cards, and i took out my wireless ethernet card to give the GC some more breathing space (wasnt using it anyways)

by the way, the card idles at 50 C and on load goes up to max 64 C, and i dont overclock it when playing games

im gonna make a clean install now, again, maybe it will help.

 

ok, so i reseated my ram and graphics card.
then installed the newest Nvidia drivers (71,84). Rebooted and, shit!
Pretty much everything was screwed in windows. Icons looked different, with lines crossing out the text underneath it. Basically the screen looked like a mosaic of many colorful squares!
I tried to take a screenshot to post it here but the screenshot was black, so no point in posting it.
Now im even more worried, does this mean that my card is faulty??
I put the older drivers back on (66,93) and all seems to be ok... for now anyways

what is going on with this damn card???

 

They are beta drivers they are only for testing I wouldnt worry about it.
66.93 are the latest tested drivers

 

i also keep getting the BSOD every now and then, and sometimes it identifies win32k.sys (driver) as the cause and other times it is the nv4_disp.dll driver that causes the problem....

does this mean that the cards ram is faulty??

 

It's quite difficul to determine it down to a component level without some testig equipment. So it could be ram on the card or any oher of the many components. Can you put your previous card bak in the unit and test it? If the unit runs with your previous card and not the new then that's a decent indicator that something is wrong with the card, or someting in your system doesn't agree with it.

Regarding your error message

This doesn't specifically relate to the graphics card. It could be a software error in windows regarding a driver or some other piece o hardware that has a conflict. When troubleshooting a problem such as yours I would do these things in order.

1. Remove all extraneous cards to the problem, remove all cards but the video card, test it and see the results.
2. Update your system chipset drivers.
3. Update your video card drivers.
4. reinstall Windows.
If those steps solve he problem then put your other cards back in the unit one at a time and test.
If they do not solve the problem then I would RMA the video card to leadtek.

 

Thanks for the tips! I will try them out. I think i might have some bad ram (but not on the GC) maybe this is why things are not workin right.

 

I'm a hardware noob and ask more questions than offer help but I was in the same situation as you so maybe its the same problem. My system with 512mb pc3200 dual channel was running sweet till I added a third single stick of 512mb. Cpuz said I now had 1gb in dual channel, but I was getting random unexplanined re-boots and hardlocks. No error messages were given, but when I removed that third stick the problems went away. Try removing your new stick for a while and see what happens.

 

Sometimes i get the BSOD with the message that i should update my bios. I tried that but when i reboot it tells me in the bios that the CMOS settings are wrong and i need to set them back to default setup in order to boot xp. Does this mean that im still running the old bios? cause i still get the same BSOD, only in MSI Live Monitor, the msi update utility, it says that my bios version is 1, 90 which is the newest, i think... what can i do?

i have the MSI PT880 Neo motherboard in case anyone else has it...

 

Here are two pics i took off my screen, the first one is when i use the 71.84 drivers, everything in win looks like that. The second is with the 71.22 drivers, games crash after a while leaving this weird image on the screen till i reboot it. All other drivers work for a while, till the games crash or i get a bluescreen tellin me that nv4_disp. dll is the cause.
What can i doooooo?

how do i post the pics?

 

Click the "Go Advanced" button at the bottom of the page, instead of the quick reply.

You'll need to upload the pictures to a webserver. Then link to them with the image button in the advanced post page.

 

i think my problem might be that my mobo is incompatible with the Leadtek 6800gt because it is using a VIA chipset. Is there anyone else out there using the same combination of mobo and graphics card?

mobo: MSI PT880 Neo
GC: Leadtek Geforce 6800GT
cpu: 3,2GHz P4 Prescott

please let me know if u have this setup and urs is working fine or not!

 

Your graphics card is not incompatible with the motherboard. There is a better chance that you have a bad card than it being incompatible with your motherboard.

You'll need another video card to test in your system, or put that video card in another system to actually do some troubleshooting.

 

May not be related, but a friend had probs with his 6800 gt and it was that although he had a 550 PSU it wasn't supply enough power to the card. All worked fine with no dirvers or the old drivers, but then when the new drivers were on it went bad. He got a new PSU and all was well in the world.

 

thanks for the tip, thing is that ive just bought a new psu only for this card. its a 460w akasa pax power one. when i use my old card fx 5200 i dont have any problems at all, so i dont think that there is anything wrong with my system after all. i have tested the card on a friends pc, and it seemed to work fine even tho he only has a 400w psu and 4 hard disks etc.. but we didnt test it for a very long time so im not too sure...anyways, after communicating with leadtek they told me that i should send it back to the shop and thats what i did today, hopefully they will tell me that its broken and send me a new one...