Why can't I run 3DMARK?

[hat]

I've had hell trying to run 3DMARK recently. The benchmark will run for some period of time, and at some point (not at the same spot every time) something bad will happen. I've seen a black screen, a white screen, and a screen where the benchmark froze, and the FPS counter kept going up and up as the scene stayed static. In all scenarios the computer becomes totally unresponsive to anything I do (ctrl alt del and such) except pushing the reset button.

I have tried reverting my OC to stock settings (though the card is not overclocked at all save by Nvidia GPU Boost), changing to older drivers (was running the most recent, now I am on 327.23), and flashing the video card BIOS (it was the same version, but the update tool flashed it anyway). I have also tried uninstalling the standalone 3DMARK and instead downloading it through Steam.

 

[TheDarkLord]

you might've damaged the car with OC if you adjusted the voltage, did you?

Any after market cooler on the GPU ?

It most probably isn't the drivers, but the card itself

 

[hat]

I didn't change voltage. The only thing I did do is raise the power target, but I was having this issue before. The cooler on the card was never changed.

I'm the second owner of this card, the previous owner had no issues running 3DMARK.

 

[hat]

Any ideas?

 

[vega22]

if it is your system in the postbit it could be many things on an aging system and without swapping out parts for known good ones it would be hard as nails to say, yes it is....

but as a wild stab in the dark i will say overheating northbridge.

 

[natr0n]

There is an option for monitoring somewhere in the options or hidden menu from what I can remember. You need to disable it to get it to run without random freezing.

Last time I ran 3dmark was more than a year ago.

"- SystemInfo and SystemInfo hardware monitoring have known stability issues that, while rare, will often result in a long loop test run to end prematurely. We are painfully aware of these shortcomings and are working to improve the situation but SystemInfo is a complex piece of code..."

 

[Asylum]

What is the temps on the card at load?

Have you tried another slot on your motherboard?

 

[hat]

Temps are fine (card temps anyway not sure about NB but I can't see the NB overheating... don't have issues with anything else... other than fah). Haven't tried another slot, though my 5870 worked fine in here. Didn't run fah on it though, at least not in this machine I don't think. I'll try to find the systeminfo option.

 

[hat]

I've since upgraded, from the q6600 and p35 board, to an i5 2400 and h67 board. I can run 3DMARK (and FAH) fine now. I wonder if it was because the 660 was running in such an old motherboard, supporting an old version of PCI-E