[Carbon]

Oops, sorry.

Could also be a PSU problem..would explain everything else dying too.

If you can manage without it for a week or so I'd send it back to Dell, troubleshooting might be a waste of time.

[thingie2]

Originally Posted by Carbon

If you can manage without it for a week or so I'd send it back to Dell, troubleshooting might be a waste of time.

Yea, about the only thing that makes pre-built systems worth getting.

[polakstanek]

So the computer survived overnight, and i decided to actually test the card out, I ran just a random game (chose DMC4) on full settings, and a few minutes in and the game crashed with the nvlddmkm message..

so now I just need advice basically, what do i do?
-the computer is clean of dust
-tried rolling back a driver as well as updating to most recent
-tested for artifacts yet no errors
-checked if RAM was ok in extended tests

so basically im guessing that my graphics card (or just the VRAM) is no good and I need to replace it? because if the nvlddmkm message popped up again, that means nothing was fixed (note that DMC4 worked fine weeks ago on full settings, and only recently nvlddmkm started popping up)

advice would be greatly appreciated

[Carbon]

When you installed the new driver, did you uninstall the old one? I would uninstall the driver you have now, completely sweep the HD of everything nVidia, then reinstall that driver again.

I really don't want to say 'send it back', so might as well try everything before that point. Otherwise it's about 50/50 VRAM:PSU.

[polakstanek]

I swept the hardrive of the nvidia drivers, and reinstalled a fresh copy, except i got the same problem, as well as the problems in the BIOS. Im guessing its not a driver problem because if theres something showing up in the BIOS it cant be driver related because the drivers havent been loaded yet?

im not entirely sure but thats my guess. About the PSU, what would cause it to act up now all of a sudden? it was working fine for a year, and also i cleaned out the computer of dust, even the PSU fans so I'm not sure if that's what would cause the problem. A friend suggested that maybe the card was overheated and may have caused some problems? or overheating is still causing problems, because the computer would usually shut down and get the nvlddmkm message when I played a game or watched a full screen video.

So in any case my guess is an actual defect in the card because of overheating or the VRAM...yet I'm not the expert here, I', just throwing out suggestions here.

Please let me know your input on this as soon as possible, thank you.

[thingie2]

Have you tried running some temperature monitors and keeping any eye on them to see what the temp are when the system comes up with an error?

[polakstanek]

I'm not sure how to do that actually, but I don't know if theres a correlation there because the graphics card would even fail at desktop sometimes when no major program would be running, so basically it's at random, or almost definate failure when running a game or a video

[Carbon]

At this point even if you had it narrowed down you'd likely have to send the whole thing off, Dell's not going to ask you to repair it yourself.

I'd just do that and let them sort it out.

[polakstanek]

Turns out my warranty ended a few days before all these problems started happening

During the game i took a performance test and my fps has dropped dramatically, being only between 8-12 when it used to be 40 or over I believe

And I did take a temperature reading, left the temperature program (nvidia monitor) and the temperature went above 60 degrees celsius, Id say to about high 60's, maybe even in the 70's and a friend told me that it really shouldnt go above 55-60 degrees celsius

So Im guessing because of the warranty, I need to get my self a new card, and also is there a point restarting the computer from scratch? will that fix anything or most likely not, and I shuoldnt go through with it..?

Let me know as soon as possible.

[thingie2]

Well those temperatures for a graphics card are fine, some graphics cards can reach 80+ quite easily, and still be fine, you only rearly need to worry about those sort of temperatures if thats your CPU temp.