Looking around the web, it seems that a fairly widespread problem began to affect many people with 500 series cards a couple of years ago, possibly after a particular driver revision. The problem involves the card crashing at default speeds during intensive use, usually but not always when using DX11. The computer is left frozen, often with green squares visible on-screen. It seems the problem was usually solveable by increasing the GPU voltage from the default value. Do you remember or have any experience of this? Are you still using a 500 series card (especially a 580) - if so, are you affected by this or not? Cheers.
Yeah, I'm currently running Tri-SLI with 3 x 580GTX and have to bump up the voltage from stock by roughly 0.05v for each card. I'm fortunate that I've found a particular part of a game that will always crash the card(s) if there isn't enough voltage. Once it runs that it'll run anything.
Ah great. Have you had yours long, Elf? Have they always needed a voltage bump or was there a time when they were fine at default voltage?
I had this when I had my old GTX 580. I just RMA'd it back to Scan and got a replacement which was fine, was a right pain in the backside since it would only happen 0.1% of the times when I wasn't trying to prove it was a real problem. Had I known this, it would have saved me a lot of trouble since the original 580 came pre-installed with an Arctic Accelero Xtreme 3 which I wasn't allowed to keep
I'm not 100% sure but it might have been after the 258.96 drivers when they needed the voltage increase. It took me quite a while to figure it out because I was sold a faulty used 580 that kept crashing in SLI every now and then at random. Once that had been binned and replaced it was easier to track it down.
That's interesting. The reason I ask is because I recently bought a used 580 and installed it yesterday. It's working fine but when I launched Afterburner I noticed the GPU core voltage is 1.075v. Initially I assumed the previous owner had flashed a modified BIOS for overclocking purposes, that is until I reduced the voltage to the default 1v and Unigine Valley crashed part way through (with green squares everywhere). A quick search of "GTX 580 green squares" revealed Google is littered with posts about the problem. It seems stable at 1.075v though (it survived a 1.5hr session of BF3) but I suppose overclocking it is out of the question. Hmmmm. Slightly annoying.
It should still overclock and you can flash the BIOS to increase the voltage to around 1.2v if you have decent cooling. One of mine will do 1000MHz on 1.23v (ish) but all of mine are watercooled
Yea, I'm tempted to cool my next PC with water. For now I'm all air cooled and although the Windforce 3 cooler on this 580 is pretty decent, I'm not sure how much more GPU voltage it can comfortably manage. At 1.075v the GPU temp reached about 70C (may have been just over) during that BF3 session. I'm pretty sure anything approaching 1.23v would turn it into a steaming puddle on the floor of my case.
