I’m experiencing a very strange problem with my new XFX GeForce 6800LE.
When I received the card I also put on an Arctic Cooler, because I heard about opening the pipelines and some overclocking could get you the same sort of performance as a stock 6800GT.
Installation went fine on a fresh Win XP, and I updated the drivers to the latest Nvidia drivers on their website. I then installed Riva Tuner to open the pipelines. Having done that I played around with the clock settings a little bit. I started testing the card’s performance with the bundled game Far Cry. Weird thing was that in autodetect graphics settings everything is set to low. So I put the settings up to full and tried it out anyway. Loads of artefacts appeared on the water, and the walls all appeared really bright, but the FPS was fine. I was also got a few black screen crashes and presumed this was down to the overclocking.
I played around with the settings and found that it would work and look reasonable on full settings on everything except for lighting and water quality. But I was still baffled as to why I had to set these to low. I changed the pipeline settings from 16 to 12 and back to 8 but to no avail. So I tested it out with SWAT 4 to see if the card could handle it at all.
When I ran SWAT 4 it started playing fine, but after 10 seconds it crashed, and the screen flicked to the stand by mode, and the power at the plug had to be turn off and then on again before I could restart the PC. Very strange I thought, so I played around with the in game graphic settings and this didn’t help – the same problem occurred.
Okay, back to the beginning I thought. I reset everything back to defaults (pipelines, memory/clock speed), uninstalled Riva Tuner and set everything in Nvidia Display Manager to default. Still had the same problem, when running SWAT 4. I also installed 3D Mark 05 and tested it with the default settings. The exact same sort of crash happens midway through the third section of the test. I’m almost certain that these crashes aren’t due to overheating. The arctic cooler has that covered. Maybe it’s due to my 400W PSU supply not being powerful enough for the card as the 6800LE requires its own power dangle. Other older games on my PC run fine – Rome Total War, FM2005, PES3, but these are all less graphically demanding, so maybe won’t need as much power from the PSU?
I’ve also read the article on these forums regarding the black screen problems with 6800LEs. I downloaded Ski Alpen 2005 Demo to test for BS, but at first it crashed to the desktop almost as you’ve got to the main menu screen. Further reading of the article suggested turning V-sync on and this helped somewhat. I actually started a race but it crashed about a minute into it. This suggests it is a BS issue.
Please help! Any suggestions as to whats wrong here or what I should do would help. I don’t want to have to buy another card.
Btw, I spoke to XFX about the probs and was told to ensure the power cable was in right. Duh! Unless I'm getting a very large power surge from my power dangle I don't think this is the problem. The power lead is shared with an external fan, but this has never had any probs before so I don't see why it would now.
My System Specs:
Processor
Model : AMD Athlon(tm) XP 3200+
Speed : 2.20GHz
Model Number : 3200 (estimated)
Mainboard
Bus(es) : ISA AGP PCI IMB USB i2c/SMBus
MP Support : No
MP APIC : Yes
System BIOS : American Megatrends Inc. P1.20
System : K7V88
Mainboard : K7V88
Total Memory : 512MB DDR-SDRAM
Chipset 1
Model : ASRock Inc KT880 CPU to PCI Bridge
Front Side Bus Speed : 2x 200MHz (400MHz data rate)
Total Memory : 512MB DDR-SDRAM
Memory Bus Speed : 2x 166MHz (332MHz data rate)
Video System
Monitor/Panel : Targa CM1997FS (19 inch)
Adapter : NVIDIA GeForce 6800 LE (Driver: 78.01)
Physical Storage Devices
Removable Drive : Floppy disk drive
Hard Disk : Maxtor 6Y120L0 (114GB)
Hard Disk : WDC WD800BB-00JHA0 USB Device
CD-ROM/DVD : _NEC DVD_RW ND-2510A (CD 40X Rd, 32X Wr) (DVD 5X Rd, 4X Wr)
CD-ROM/DVD : Generic DVD-ROM SCSI CdRom Device (CD 32X Rd) (DVD 4X Rd)
Logical Storage Devices
1.44MB 3.5" (A

: N/A
Hard Disk (C

: 114GB (12GB, 10% Free Space) (NTFS)
CD-ROM/DVD (D

: N/A
CD-ROM/DVD (E

: N/A
Lacie (H

: 75GB (5.7GB, 8% Free Space) (NTFS)
Operating System(s)
Windows System : Microsoft Windows XP/2002 Professional (Win32 x86) 5.01.2600 (Service Pack 2)
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