Ye ole Display Driver Problem -- please help

[krakenfiend]

Hi everyone...first time post on this forum and I hope that this is the correct place to post this...unfortunately I have a problem wherein my system continuously drops (crashes) and recovers its display driver...I have read that many people have had this problem...but it seems that there is no clear cut solution or at least people are not very forthcoming about the answer(s). This started as a new build system specs as follows:

Motherboard: ASUS Rampage iV Extreme
RAM: G. Skill F3-17000CL9Q2-32GBZH 2133Mhz
CPU: i7-3930K
GPU: 2x VisionTek 6970 2GB
PSU: Seasonic X-1250
SSD: 240GB Corsair Force GT
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

I installed all the parts and the system booted fine recognized all the RAM and the OS installed no problem...the problems started to arise after installing/trying to install the GPU drivers. I could barely make it through the install and the system BSOD'd a couple of times during the install. Finally getting the drivers to stick the system artifacted and crashed :mad:...the system started crashing telling me it lost communication to the display driver and has recovered...it does this continuously as of now.

Now...there are several things that I think could be the problem. I've read that the power to the PCIe slot may need to be increased by raising that voltage in bios...also it could be a RAM malfunction...I'm not good with tweaking RAM (Yet)...if its a RAM issue...I'm lost on how to go about trouble shooting it. Currently the RAM is in Default settings (that I don't have right now as I'm at work)...I know it is down clocked to 1600Mhz. I doubt the problem is with the cards -- at least I don't think it is. The problem persisted with both cards. I tried each card in the Primary slot and then tried each card in the secondary slot with no change... I could see one card being bad but both?...makes me lean to the problem being something else....also I don't have the latest bios for the board (yet) as my internet connection is awful lately. So thats it...I'm not sure how to really go about figuring this problem out and could really use some help/advice -- please.

krakenfiend

[HiVizMan]

Not sure where many people have had this problem I certainly have not heard of it, and there would be heaps of posts about it here if there were.

But that is not important, lets see if we can fix your issue yes?

Have you set your PCIe lanes to Gen2?

[krakenfiend]

I haven't messed with anything and the defaults are loaded in the board so...if Gen2 is not a default then no...I haven't done that...I'm not even sure how to do that....I'll check that when I get home from work in a few hours.

krakenfiend

[HiVizMan]

No problem. I will be on line today for about another 10 hours so we should get this thing sorted today. 🙂

[krakenfiend]

Hey HiVis, I'm home...I've got the computer booted up into bios...I don't see anything about the PCIe slots being set up for gen2...what do I need to do to set them up?

krakenfiend

[HiVizMan]

PCIe Link speed in the Advance tab

[krakenfiend]

all slots currently set to Gen 3

[HiVizMan]

Correct that is the default, set to gen2 and see if your problem is sorted.

[krakenfiend]

Well...I adjusted that and set the RAM to the XMP profile...it seems to have fixed the system instability....I ran the hardware self test profile in windows and it gives everything in the system a 7.9 except 3d graphics = 2.0. Do you know a good program that I can test the graphics of the two cards out? Thank you btw...big help!

[HiVizMan]

Yip sure do

FurMark http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/fur/