The New Hotness

Literally.  It's like 66C up in there.

With dialog bubble.  Because G+ Creative Kit.

Sound card straddled by two GTX 570s.  HOT.  Literally.

But the crashing is gone with the replacement card.  And performance is much better with dual GTX 570s.  Now, I can move on.

Driving a Wedge

In an earlier post, I wrote about the sound card which was hitting the video card fan since it was so close together.  I gave the on-board audio a try but found it lacking.  So what to do?  I decided that some sort of wedge was needed to keep the card apart.  I found a red rubber washer in my toolbox and electrical taped it to the back of the sound card.

Not only does this keep the cards apart but also gives a bit of room for airflow.

New GTX 570 = No More Skyrim Issues

Well at least the whole system reboot/black screen of death thing.

I got a new GTX 570 in the mail today, installed it and also tidied up the cables in the system.  So far so good.  Still a little nervous, half expecting the system to crash, but nothing like that so far!  Skyrim had a few issues, but nothing I couldn't recover from.  Which brings me to an interesting observation.  With the previous video card, I never saw Skyrim (the program) fail.  I would only see the whole system crash.  Now, I see the crash to desktop (rare) and the occasional video driver crashed thing (also rare).

One scary thing - about an hour into play, I heard a loud grinding.  Turns out the sound card was touching the fans on the GTX 570.  I couldn't do much more to separate them, so I ended up removing the sound card and switched to onboard audio.

See how close the sound card (top) is with the video card?  Yikes.

When I get the 2nd GTX 570 in, it will be really crowded in there with the sound card.  I'm thinking of gerry rigging some kind of wedge between the sound card and the video card, but in the meantime, I'll give the onboard audio a try.

It's been almost a week and so far so good.  Now if only the 2nd GTX 570 gets here soon...

Amazing Skyrim Story Engine

Don't want to reveal any spoilers, but when talking with a friend about Skyrim and he shared that at one point in the game, if you kill a main character in an abandoned shack, it will spawn a whole new set of quests.  When I was at that point in the game, it never even occurred to me to do that.  It's amazing that the Skyrim developers programmed that alternate storyline in.

Apparatus Update

Couple of quick notes:

• System has been behaving as intended (no black screen/sound loop crashes) since I replaced the GTX 570 video card with a GT 8800.  Hopefully, when CyberpowerPC sends back a new GTX 570, the problem will not return.  At this point, I am extremely leaning (99.999999999999%) towards a video card hardware problem causing my Skyrim issues.
• I'm using 12 Skyrim mods now (can't remember them off hand, but mostly graphics related) and it's working awesomely.  The only thing that would make it more awesome is if I could use the GTX 570 that I paid for. :-)  So, yes, anxiously awaiting for the RMA process.
• I'd love to use Skyrim UI since the inventory menus are so badly designed, but I don't want to deal with the hassle of continually updating SKSE.
• Eagerly waiting for the first Skyrim DLC
• Still looking for a good Bokeh mod that can be installed from the Steam Workshop.  I could use the Nexus ones, but I don't want the hassle, similar to maintaining SKSE.  Is that asking too much?

Bokeh

Liking CyberpowerPC

I'm really liking CyberpowerPC.  They consistently respond to my emails with quality customer service response, even if the answer is not positive (i.e. they don't do advance RMAs).  That, along with great support while purchasing and quick, quality shipping, will make me buy my next system from them.  After that I got this response to an email inquiring about the RMA process:

As we do not repair the video cards here at Cyberpower we will be replacing the video card all together. Once we receive your video card for replacement you will be notified by email.

Nice!  This should fit right in with validating if the problem is the video card or not.  In the meantime, I have a 8800GT 512MB video card and I'll be testing that to no end to see if it produces the same crash in Skyrim.

More On Video Card

After several more hours of testing and researching, I had a few more observations:

• Skyrim utilizes DirectX 9 and possibly some DirectX 10.
• Grid utilizes DirectX9 and possibly some DirectX 10.
• Battlefield 3 utilizes DirectX 11
• Batman: Arkham City utilizes DirectX 11

So far I've only experienced problems with Skyrim and Grid (the latter only in the past two days).  The crashes are the same: video feed goes out, sound loops, system unrecoverable.  This can happen after several hours or after just a minute (or even straight from power off, boot, game load, crash).  The usual suspects are out:

• Heat (measured over and over, max GPU is like 72C and max CPU is 68C.  This was extreme testing.  Normal operations is about 35C CPU and 42C GPU lower.
• Overclocking - the crashes are seen without overclocking, with overclocking and with underclocking.  It ain't the overclocking, okay?  I tested it.
• Malware - no malware on the system.
• System errors - NO ERRORS IN THE OS EVENT LOGS.
• Power Supply - replaced 750W power supply with a Silverstone 1000W power supply

Now, the fact that no issues are seen in Battlefield 3 and Batman and only the games NOT using DX11 led me to this article which describes how installing an older DirectX 9 game can muck up your DirectX 10 but leave DirectX 11 intact.  Weird, that sounds like my issue!

Quote from article:

Obviously, something is wrong with the DirectX 9 redistributable package. However, I don't think Microsoft can do anything about this since the DirectX 9 redistributable is everywhere and has been in use for ages. We just want to warn you about this problem so you won't need to scratch your head if your DirectX 10 game does not work. It could be because you just installed a DirectX 9 game. Try reinstalling the DirectX 10 redistributable.

Well, I tried the fix (install DirectX 10 runtime manually), but to no avail.  I still get the crashes in Skyrim and (now) Grid.  YARH (Yet Another Red Herring)?  Likely.

Frustrated and unable to get away from the observations:

* Crashes in DX9/10 games (Skyrim & Grid)

* Does not crash (yet) in DX11 games

* Just started crashing in Grid a few days ago

* No errors found using OCCT, Furmark, Heaven, etc, etc, etc

* No OS errors (this means the OS does not even catch the error, indicating it is likely NOT the video driver).

* Was able to change the crash slightly by disabling Timeout Detection Recovery (TDR).

All of the above points to a video card that is not behaving properly. 

Frustrated, I removed the Gigabyte GTX 570 from my system for packing up for the RMA and I found an older Nvidia Quadro FX 4600 sitting around, so I installed that.  I tried and tried to replicate the crashes, but I could not.  Changing the video card eliminated the observed crashes.  The logic is inescapable: it's not software, it's not my setup, it's not my configuration.  The only variable that changed was the video card itself.  Observation: video card is causing the problem. 

Guilty? We shall see.

It's weird that this would indicate that so many people have faulty video cards.  But then again, is it really so many?  In hindsight, no.  Sure, there are a lot of forum posts about it, but then again there are probably a lot of forum posts about....well, anything.  More than half of the posts tend to be trollers, leaving only a few with the same actual issues.

And then I remembered how my video card got a low rating (around 68%) for the ASIC in GPU-Z.  Perhaps it's true: Skyrim does push your hardware in ways other games and stress tests do not.  Here's another interesting fact: Had I not played Skyrim, I would have had zero issues with this system.  Well, at least I think so.

This is a very good video card.  When it works.

Hopefully this is the final test.  It is important to note that prior to the video card swap, I was already up to over 10 crashes in one day.  It was getting crazy.  After the swap and after several hours in Skyrim, loading saved games that would consistently crash, I got zero crashes with the older card.  

The GTX 570 now sits in a shipping box, ready for RMA.  However long it takes to get there and for CyberpowerPC to send me a replacement will hopefully be worth it if I've found the root cause of the problems for the last four months.  Now I just hope CyberpowerPC doesn't get the card, run Furmark against it and then send it back to me.  If that happens, I may just have to get another video card altogether.

"Video card, huh?  You were losing the video feed?  And then crashing?  Must be tough to be so frigging smart!"