I am having some major issues with my PC, please bare with me whilst I recount my tale. I got Far Cry 3 on saturday, installed, updated etc and was playing happily for several hours. I came back after lunch and noticed a new Nvidia beta driver had been released which included a SLI profile for far cry. I downloaded and installed this as usual and resumed playing. I noticed that I was getting around 10fps less in game than prior to the update (I had enabled sli too) but I reasoned I would sort it later. After about 45 mins the game froze with looping audio and unresponsive mouse/keyboard. I restarted the pc and jumped back in. this time after 15-20 mins the same thing happened only when I restarted the computer went through the normal start up, however after the windows 8 loading screen I had the 'no signal' error on both monitors. I restarted a few more times, only to get the same error. I popped in the win 8 install disc and attempted a 'refresh' with no luck. I had meant to do a clean install for a while so I went ahead an re-installed win 7 then upgraded to 8. Now as soon as I install any Nvidia drivers (both beta and WHQL I tried 5-6 different versions, I stayed up all of saturday night doing this) and restart my PC is incredibly slow ( I mean 10 minutes to load desktop from start screen slow) when I attempt to enable SLI through the control panel the pc hangs and eventually I get a BSOD. When I get home from work I plan to remove one card at a time and try booting with that. if that doesn't work I have another mobo I could try (although I don't think it has the bios for ivybridge support on it) and being watercooled this will be no small task. Any ideas? I've run driver sweeper in case it is a driver conflict but that didn't help, could it be RAM or CPU related?
Did you completely delete all the partitions and reformat the drive? I had a few problems with installing win 8 until I did that, Also I wouldn't have done a upgrade from win7 if you're using a win 8 disk you can do a custom install and it will activate fine without any previous OS being installed that way you start with a nice clean install
It was actually a brand new SSD I installed it on so that was clean at least. I did try doing a clean install of just win 8 but it said that my key was invalid when trying to activate it I should mention that the slow down and crashing still occurred in win 7
Did you check your temperatures? Run FurMark in a window, and have a HWMonitor showing your GPU and CPU temperature next to it. Is your computer OC at the moment? How about putting it to default settings, to rule that out. Also, if you use an older version of teh Nvidia drivers, is your problem solved?
I can't really run anything as the damn thing freezes or takes 15 mins to open anything with the drivers installed. however at idle both gpus are at 30c & 31c whilst the cpu is 28-31c. Everything is currently running at stock, no OC I've gone back 5 versions of the drivers and the problem still persists I can try going back further still, what was the first drivers to support SLI? I can try them
In safe mode you can uninstall the Nvidia drivers. Once removed, does the problem still persists? If not, then when you install the Nvidia drivers, click on Advance, remove Nvidia 3D stuff, and check the box: Perform clean install. This will wipe clean anything now related to the graphic drivers, and install fresh.
I thought I might as well update you guys as to what has happened so far. I've narrowed the problem down to the second gpu, when run by itself connected to a single monitor. The bios and windows 8 loading screens display correctly then it blue screens on me. The other card functions fine by itself so that is somewhat of a blessing. How can a driver crash cause all of this? I suppose I should return the card to EVGA for a RMA.
More like the broken GPU caused the driver crash That, or Nvidia put a timer on their GPU, and when it feels its time for you to update your GPU, it goes "Wellllll... you have two... so ok, this one is broken now. Times up! Buy new Nvidia GPU". It's all part of a big conspiracy.