560 TI Video card causes system to crash?

[Ken429]

I have been running the Extreme6/4790K system for several weeks using the onboard video controller. I have not encountered any problems and have run several benchmark/stress test programs with zero issues. I got greedy and "cheap" and decided to try one of my old MSI GTX 560 Ti video cards instead of the onboard graphics controller. I changed the BIOS under Chipset Configuration>Primary Graphics Adapter from "Onboard" to "PCI Express" and changed the video cable from the MB to the 560 Ti card. After a few strange messages when booting W8.1 Update 1 the system seemed OK. I thought the strange messages and the Event Log errors were caused by the fact that I did not have any Nvidia drivers until after W8 booted and I installed the latest Nvidia drivers (340.52).

I then ran the RealBench V2.2 benchmarking program and it promply crashed with a WHEA error after a few minutes. My questions are:

Did I miss something in the BIOS that needs to be changed to use a PCI Express video card?
Is the 560 TI "old iron" and won't work on the latest MB's with a PCI Express 3.0 slot?
Since I have the system OC'd at 4.6GHz could I be on the ragged CPU Voltage edge and the video card is putting more stress on the CPU?

I thought this would be a no brainer but....Help appreciated.

[parsec]

Re: 560 TI Video card causes system to crash?

Your 560' is not that old. You can try setting the speed of the PCIe x16 slot to Gen2 (PCIe 2.0) in the BIOS, Northbridge Configuration screen, but that is the only other option in the BIOS for video cards.

A quick search I did on your MSI 560 card results in a lot of complaints about the "driver crashing", at least that seems to be the main complaint. One suggested fix was, in the Nvida control panel, set the 3D power management to maximum performance & in physics configuration set it to GPU.

Try a different, earlier driver version, new does not always mean better.

The card's specs show DirectX version 11, and OpenGL 4.1. If newer versions are not backwards compatible, that might cause problems.

Did you monitor GPU and CPU temps when you run RealBench V2.2? If the card only fails during benchmark runs, IMO that is not a total failure.

You can try clearing the BIOS, always a good idea when adding new hardware. The 1.33 BIOS version for your board has been removed by ASRock, so it's probably a good idea to flash to 1.30.

[Ken429]

Re: 560 TI Video card causes system to crash?

parsec,

Thanks for the information. I tried all the stuff you suggested and still RealBench v2.2 would crash - usually the second time I would run it! So...I increased the "Vcore Additional Voltage Offset" from -.020 to -.005 and the crashes went away. That resulted in a max cpu voltage under load of 1.234V and an increase in core temps of about 1C. Although the increase in core temps might have been greater but I installed the Apogee XL to replace the Apogee Drive II. It would appear that using a video card instead of the onboard controller causes the system to need a touch more juice?!

After all this the RealBench score did not change! I saw something on the ROG site that said Nvidia uses PhyX instead of OpenCL and that's why the OpenCL score does not react to the video card in RealBench? Asus must have an interest in AMD.

I did not go back to BIOS v1.30. I'm lazy and still have not run into what is wrong with v1.33.