Odd flickering

[Springheel]

Since upgrading my machine (and switching to a Geforce 8800 GTX) I've noticed a couple times now in TDM where I get a strange flicking effect. At first it just looks like the screen is randomly flickering to black for half a second, occuring every 5-10 seconds. Tonight (the second time I've noticed it) it started happening again, and the frequency started getting faster and the effect more severe--after a few minutes surfaces almost looked like they were z-fighting every two seconds or so. It seemed to be somehow related to the flickering of nearby lights...there were a couple places where the flickering stopped, and it was always where there were no lights. As soon as there were flickering lights visible it started up again.

 

Anyone heard of this before?

[Serpentine]

Have you tested it out in vanilla D3 and perhaps other games? theres a good chance its the physical fault that all 8800's have... if its happening elsewhere, theres an extremely good chance.

[Springheel]

I haven't really had it long enough to test it on other games. Though I've played TDM a fair bit and only seen this twice. What physical fault are you referring to?

[Serpentine]

The 8800 and some of the 8 and 9 series have the issue. Pretty much what happened was they decided to go with a cheaper underfill lower grade bump material than what they were going to use, the 8 series was about cutting prices and getting things out quickly. Underfill is the material that surrounds the the solders between a core and the substrate, the bump is the solder between the chip and the substrate and the substrate and whatever else (in some cases, like graphics cards). If you've ever seen a non-capped CPU, you will know that theres the glass top of the core sitting on the green board, theres material between the core and the board, thats what this is about.

 

The cheaper material was not fully tested, as its used in other situations very commonly and time crunch came down, the fabrication plant warned them ahead that there were issues that were going to occur, but time and money change things. Depending on the heat cycles, power uage, cooling and even things like handeling, the issue occurs where the underfil causes a bad connection between the substrate and the core, the substrate fractures and expands very differently to how they imagined, hence the physical fault. In some cases people notice artefacts, others just suddenly have bricks, some have extreme lag under high load situations then the card resets itself...

 

In an alliance of around 450 eve players, I've seen about 6 threads and 10+ people that I know of just from there being affected... and thats just desktops, laptops got it much worse off. The best part comes that nvidia never actually accepted that this issue has been happening, instead they offered to cover costs for a few laptop brands, but have never officially owned up, tho their partner companies have confirmed it there is little they can do besides replace cards. Want to know why nvidias stock price died? mis-management at its finest.

[Tels]

The 8800 and some of the 8 and 9 series have the issue. Pretty much what happened was they decided to go with a cheaper underfill lower grade bump material than what they were going to use, the 8 series was about cutting prices and getting things out quickly. Underfill is the material that surrounds the the solders between a core and the substrate, the bump is the solder between the chip and the substrate and the substrate and whatever else (in some cases, like graphics cards). If you've ever seen a non-capped CPU, you will know that theres the glass top of the core sitting on the green board, theres material between the core and the board, thats what this is about.

 

The cheaper material was not fully tested, as its used in other situations very commonly and time crunch came down, the fabrication plant warned them ahead that there were issues that were going to occur, but time and money change things. Depending on the heat cycles, power uage, cooling and even things like handeling, the issue occurs where the underfil causes a bad connection between the substrate and the core, the substrate fractures and expands very differently to how they imagined, hence the physical fault. In some cases people notice artefacts, others just suddenly have bricks, some have extreme lag under high load situations then the card resets itself...

 

In an alliance of around 450 eve players, I've seen about 6 threads and 10+ people that I know of just from there being affected... and thats just desktops, laptops got it much worse off. The best part comes that nvidia never actually accepted that this issue has been happening, instead they offered to cover costs for a few laptop brands, but have never officially owned up, tho their partner companies have confirmed it there is little they can do besides replace cards. Want to know why nvidias stock price died? mis-management at its finest.

 

The gist of all this seems to be that Springheel should see to get his card replaced by the dealer pronto!

[rebb]

Did you try different driver versions ? Sometimes the latest official NVidia Driver isn't necessarily the "best" one. I usually install newer drivers when they get enough good reviews on the guru3d.com forums.

 

But be sure to do the uninstallation of the older driver properly, that can sometimes lead to glitches as well.

 

http://downloads.guru3d.com/Guru3D---Driver-Sweeper-%28Setup%29-download-1655.html ( See the "How to use" for a good way to go about uninstalling the driver )

[LeatherMan]

Springheel, are you able to get a warranty replacement for that card? If not, I just read an interesting fix for the card, you may want to check it out.

 

You have to bake it in an oven. Really.  

 

Farther down the thread people say it works!

 

I know of several people that used the oven trick and it fixed their cards...

 

It basically melts the solder points and this fixes any contacts that got loose over time...

 

It won't fix dead cores or dead graphics chips or blown caps. But cores / graphics chips usually don't fail and blown caps, well you can spot them easily...

 

Graphics card companies to the same thing. They just call it rework station or something like that :-)

 

Thats also why people buy dead cards. In hope they can revive them and sell them on...

 

 

 

[Crispy]

Haha, that's hilarious. Not something I'd recommend for the average computer user though, since you have to disassemble and reassemble the graphics card by hand to avoid melting the bits that you really don't want to melt. I'd definitely only try it as an extreme last resort.

[Springheel]

I didn't pay for the card, actually...it was someone else's cast-off, so I can't really complain. It doesn't seem to be happening very often (only 2-3 times in 3 weeks of regular TDM use) so I think I'll just live with it for now.