NF3 + 6800 + 7x.xx drivers = game freezing issue

Help me out everyone, I'm wanting to gather as much info as possible on this issue. Call me crazy but I really have a hard time thinking this is as unresolvable as numerous people are coming to believe. I have spent countless hours researching this because (so far at least) I refuse to believe that Nvidia is just going to "get away with this" crap. I have had this issue since day one I bought my BFG 6800GT. For those that aren't aware of this issue, here is all I have been able to gather so far:

Apparently there is some kind of bug when you bring an NF3 motherboard, an 6800 series video card, and supposedly any driver in the 7x.xx series. Some have had varying symptoms but the overall symptom that I have seen is that you can play any game fine EXCEPT that it will all of the sudden freeze for roughly 3 seconds or so and then proceed as if nothing happened. Some have this happen every 10 seconds and some only have it happen once every half hour. Doom3 and maybe all other OpenGL games work perfectly fine, this seems to only affect DirectX games. There have been many "fixes" recommended by many people (none by Nvidia that I'm aware of), however those "fixes" only seem to work for a few and not the vast majority. Here's a list:

Turn off AGP fast writes
Adjust the latency of your PCI bus with RivaTuner
Change your AGP aperture size to "something else"
Remove the nForce GART driver
Some have moved to the 80.40 driver and it fixes some games but breaks others.
Simply moving to WinXP 64-bit has fixed this on some games with no hardware changes at all
Move back to the 6x.xx drivers, however this of course makes some newer games not work right
Increase the voltage on your AGP slot
Flash your card BIOS to force 2D and 3D to be the same clock rate
UPDATE: Uninstall GART driver from add/remove per BFG tech support (didn't help me)
UPDATE: Turn down graphics settings to keep all game data in card RAM. This of course sucks after buying an expensive card.

I'm sure there are more that I haven't seen or have simply forgotten. And none of these are fixes technically, they are workarounds. And as far as I can see, none of this has anything to do with heat or not meeting the minimum requirements for the card (including power supply).

Now here's the rant part. This appears to be completely random. There are lots of NF3/6800 people not having this issue at all. But there are enough to where I think this warrants some serious help from Nvidia. Simply google "nf3 6800gt freezing" or various other combinations of those words and you will find plenty of people that have this issue or used to have this issue and went to ATI or VIA. This is even all over their Nzone forums. Are you paying attention Nvidia? You make the chipset for the motherboards and the cards and the drivers, so as far as I know this is your issue and you are losing a decent amount of respect and business. This appears to me to be related to drivers alone since moving to WinXP 64-bit fixes some games without changing any BIOS settings or swapping out any hardware. However once again some games still have this issue in 64-bit.

Now (if you've read this far), please use the poll and/or post what you know about this issue. Correct me or tell me to add whatever info you know about this and then direct everyone that you can here so that we can get as much info as possible in one place. Please PLEASE (maybe some mods help out here?) do not bother posting "Just go to ATI" or "Nvidia sucks." Maybe we can get enough info to then go tell Nvidia exactly what the issue is here so that we can get a fix.

The bottom line is that "we" paid good money for good hardware. We shouldn't have to be forced to purchase more hardware to resolve this issue. I didn't go with the cheapest crap I could find, I spent the money to get the quality stuff. How flagship products like their top of the line AGP chipset and top of the line AGP cards have this issue when used together is beyond reason to me. Its unacceptable.

had the same problem, made numerous posts about it, and everybody here claimed the problem was on my end.
my solution was i went ATI.
now im not telling you to go ati because obviously there is a way to fix it, just try different vid card drivers, maybe something a little older

my cusion run a DFI nf3, 6800Gt (agp) and has no problems with the new drivers... he paly BF2, Hl2 Doom3 and now hes into the fear demo...

I have not had this issue or heard of it.
Except from you.

I just realized I did this in the general video instead of Nvidia. Can I get a mod to move it please? I know more people have this issue, I've seen plenty of posts about it here.

Hey great to see discussion on this topic. One of best friends has a rig

3000 AMD 754
Gigabyte S754 NF3 chipset
BFG 6800 GT OC
1GB Crucial Memory


This rig had the very same issue your talking about. Hes tried swapping CPU, PSU, GPU (same card for different one) Memory, etc... even switched to a DFI 754 board and an IDE HD for awhile to see if it was a bad HD causing his lag in games. It will either freeze (hang) momentarily in Warhammer, BF2, Far Cry, etc or freeze/bluescreen/reboot all at once... Very annoying... and stressful... We did have him turn Fast Writes off.... I think that might have fixed most (but not all) of his hickups...

I hate the new drivers. I have to maximize some games, like Brothers in Arms about 10 times before it stops minimizing itself.

The drivers previous to 77.72 did not do this. Nvidia is really pissing me off. "I feel your pain." (Clinton, 1998)

I wonder if this issue affects only 754 NF3 boards. I have a friend with a 939 setup and he doesn't have the issue either.

UPDATE: Scratch that, have found numerous other threads where all types of NF3 boards are having this issue.

I've had this issue as well. When HL2 first came out i had zero problems with it. Recently i went to replay it and it was stuttering and locking up every few seconds (did the same thing in CS:S). i hadn't changed any of my hardware inbetween the 1st and 2nd go through. I ended up going back to the 66.93 drivers from the 7x.xx and all my problems went away. I had fast writes off the whole time. so i would guess its most likely a driver issue that they need to fix. specs are :

MSI K8N Neo Plat 2 (socket 754)
Athlon 64 3000+
BFG 6800GT
1gig RAM

Add me to this list. Removing the GART driver fixes it but performance is down 30% or so. I didn't try all the solutions you listed though. I found that the latest nf3 drivers with ANY driver would cause this problem. I have to use nforce 3 drivers from my mobo maker and old drivers for the freezing to disappear.

And all of this was done without overclocking. Hell I even underclocked to card to 400/1100 to rule it out. I gave up on finding a solution, there were several threads a long time ago about this. Even some people who had contacts at Nvidia were trying to bring it to their attention but nothing ever happened. If I re-call nf3 and nvidia were the common thread but not everyone had the issue which makes it hard to find a solution. I just gave up...

I bet a frontpage news article on [H] would bring some attention.

Seriously this sucks, I just went to a LAN party over the weekend and even Command and Conquer Generals froze up. I crashed one multiplayer game because it froze just long enough to force the game out of sync. I turned it down below 1024 and lowered the detail and could then play. I dont think the freezing "went away", I just dont think it was processing enough graphic information for it to stutter. Great use for my $300 video card and what would generally be classed as a great gaming system.

I don't have money to burn, what money I DID have to burn went to this card which I can't take back because I cut the UPC and sent in the rebate before I noticed this issue. I mean Doom3 and XP64 proves that there is nothing wrong with my system other then Nvidia's screwup. There isn't even a buyer beware posted anywhere. You don't see this issue until you buy it and then GET the issue and then do a search on it. That's why I'm wanting this to get more public, because more people will be buying these cards and this year old issue is going to just keep getting larger and larger.

I updated to the newer drivers that came out a few days ago and I think my problems went away.

Again I would like to say poop on the 77.72 drivers.

I've heard about this. Not much meantion of it on these forums but on many others I've heard people meantion the "Nforce 3 6800GT stutter issue" as if it's a well known problem. This is just another thing keeping me away from A64 for the time being.

Glad to hear it. 77.77 didn't help me or many others in various other threads I'm watching unfortunately. Nvidia needs to own this issue and at least explain what is causing it.

I just tried to run a few tests. I installed the newer chipset drivers (5.10) along with the 77.77. Same old problem. I then removed fast writes and the freezing went away. The only game I tested was BF2.

I distinctly remember turning off fast writes before the 7x.xx drivers and it did nothing. Guess the new drivers with fast writes off does the trick for me.

I got 2 x 7800GTX on the way and I didn't want to sell a "broken" rig to a friend of mine. I would of had to seperate the mobo / GPU...

BF2 is the only game I've got working with this combo, but only in XP64 and with the latest drivers. Even then, I wonder if I cranked the settings and resolution up a little if it would surface. Every other DX game I've tried except the original Half-life in either version of Windows (FarCry, HL2, Fear SP Demo, BF1942, C&CG) all still do it to varying degrees. I finally got ready to START playing FarCry now that I have a great card and its the worst of them all and completely unplayable.

I'm so sick and tired of writing about this issue... my head might just blow up If I have to explain what this problem is again.

I've tried to resolve it with no positive result.. I know now, that only nVidia at this point can fix it. I'm not posting for help...I'm posting cos OldPueblo has this great idea and it just might work.. so please, anybody who doesnt know, or hasn't experienced this problem please..PLEASE, dont suggest "try a different driver" or some other lame suggestion. That might just send me over the edge...

My other thread at nvidia forums...
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=5553

Good idea posting the thread link. Here are other threads from other forums detailing this screw up. There are honestly FAR more then I will post here, these are just the ones I went back to find. One of the reasons this has not surfaced as a scandal in the limelight I think is that many think it is user error or they have given up and swapped hardware. Trust me, I have done a lot of reading on this and there is still a lot of disinformation. But with Nvidia being tight-lipped its of course hard to get to the true root of the issue. There are far too many variables being tried and some are accidently finding the winning combination only to have it resurface months later when they do a reinstall.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=32759 (28 pages! from Jul 04)
http://forum.msi.com.tw/index.php?topic=67156.0
http://forum.msi.com.tw/index.php?topic=66561.0
http://forum.msi.com.tw/index.php?topic=72816.0
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=136906
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?act=ST&f=34&t=126
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?act=ST&f=26&t=4758
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?act=ST&f=33&t=6350
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?act=ST&f=34&t=5553

I can almost guarantee you can go to any enthusiast forums and search on 6800 and nforce3 and find this issue. Its everywhere and it gets glossed over because at a thread glance you might think "bummer, sucks to be that guy with the bad hardware/bad build/whatever." Then you buy the combination. We've all taken some kind of red matrix/nvidia pill and woken up to this issue thats been there for over a year. It'd be nice if Nvidia could divulge exactly what the issue is and then supply a flowchart or something to take us all step by step through all the real fix resolutions.

i'm gettin some stability issues and some random freezes/lockups. I really hope these problems can be fixed with newer chipset/vid card drivers

there are many threads on this very topic. and i've posted in a few of them...i ended up giving up after 3 different 6800gt's from 3 different vendors and getting the same problems. i even tried a different nf3 mobo, same issue. in the end, i sent them all back and got an nf4, 939, and 7800gtx...expensive solution, but i'm happy now.

edit: forgot to mention i also tried a larger psu, 3 different versions of drivers, formatting, etc. none of the suggestions anyone had (fast writes, etc) did anything for me. Also, if you run nview monitoring you'll notice that the freezes happen at whatever your peak temps are (which vary from card to card, and driver to driver). My guess is that for some reason the driver thinks the card is overheating and throttles it. On one of the cards i had, the temp it did this on was 82, another was 78, and i think the last was 84. I'd also love to know what's causing this problem, just because i ended up upgrading all my hardware because of it. The problem is gone now, but it does suck that i couldn't get it straight despite replacing every component around it to no avail. The only thing in common was the nf3 chipset and my proc (at the time A64 3000+ s754).

Since the 80.40beta forceware work perfectly albeit with some major artifacts in a couple of games(Farcry, 3Dmark05, CSS), I'll be waiting for the 80 series drivers. If that doesnt fix it... ULi is going to be my saving grace. nVidia can go to hell....

i had lots of problems initially, but it was a problem with my hard drive. after doing the FIXMBR command and installing XP pro instead of XP Home, everything is working out nicely again, even with fastwrites on and using the nforce GART drivers. i used to have worse problems though, which included stuttering, crashing, and just plain no starting with games and i almost gave up...but my solution prevailed.

Got my Neo2 yesterday...experiencing the same problems :[

*edit*

if my observations are worth anything..

77.77 at 400/1100 (6800GT) = stutters galore
66.93 at 400/1100 = no stutters
77.77 at 370/1000 = no stutters (not 100% confirmed).

I've tried swapping out my PSU and running 2 PSU's one specifically for my graphics card, ruled and still had problems, i swapped out my ram with another one and still had problems. Bought a different brand Geforce 6800GT and tried it, still didnt work, i tried a clean install of windows on a different hard drive and still had problems. Also tried diff drivers and that didnt work either, only thing which seems to stop the stuttering in D3d games is removing the nvidia GART drivers, but it seems to hurt performance a good amount.

As I have stated in other forums, I have tried everything and I always get pauses that last 8 to 10 sec. sometimes, or stuttering if you want to call it that. I have used all drivers and the only one that allows me to play D3D games at all are 66.93's. Being a computer tech. for almost 41 years, this frustrates me to no end since we are not getting any nVidia support on this. I'm tired of hearing about turning on/off fast writes, PCI latency tool, rivatuner, etc. etc. etc. None of them work and are all attempted work arounds to an nVidia problem which they need to address. I am getting very close to ordering an ASUS AV8 Deluxe which I wish I had ordered over 2 months ago when I built this system. The sad part about all this is my machine runs great except for D3D games which also used to work great when I had this same BFG 6800 GT installed in my P4 2.8 GHz system. I'm tired of all this work around B.S., I spend all day working on computers and when I come home I want to play not troubleshoot a problem which is nVidia's problem. Get your act together nVidia as you are pissing a lot of us off. Hello VIA and maybe even ATI.

OldPuebo:

Seriously this sucks, I just went to a LAN party over the weekend and even Command and Conquer Generals froze up. I crashed one multiplayer game because it froze just long enough to force the game out of sync. I turned it down below 1024 and lowered the detail and could then play. I dont think the freezing "went away", I just dont think it was processing enough graphic information for it to stutter. Great use for my $300 video card and what would generally be classed as a great gaming system.

Click to expand...

Nope, you were still stuttering as I recall.

I originally had this issue with the early 77.7x drivers where it would freeze for a second or two randomly in 3d games. Underclocking the core frequency helped fix this greatly, and now the newest 77.7x drivers (non-official) completely fixed the problem for me. I was really really pissed for a few weeks. It sucks spedning $500 on a video card to not even have it work right.

Well just to add to the information gathering, a clean install of Windows Vista beta 1, which comes with ForceWare 77.56 (I believe) has the same pausing issue. I used UT2004 to test this time just for kicks. Runs great except for the pausing. I just finished a dual-boot clean install of XP Pro as well and I'm going to be extrememly methodical in tracking down the nature of this issue.

When i had my 6800LE (unlocked to NU) i had this happen a couple of times, and it is VERY annoying.

When I played Guild Wars, it would just stutter for about 2 seconds, then work again (randomly it seemed, sometimes it would, sometimes it wouldn't). Meh, I could deal with that i suppose. But the problem was, everytime after the stutter, it would kill my wireless connection, so I was forced to exit (and lose any progress i had made). After I exited, the internet was fine, and I could fire up GW again and all would be well; until the next freeze.

Also, it seemed that it stuttered more when it was overclocked than not. Was with the DFI NF3.

No more 6800 any more, so no problems

I am also having this issue as well. with my specs in sig.... can't figure it out for the life of me

I have a "ground zero" setup of XP Pro SP2 that so far has no stuttering at all in several games that stuttered before, and is at driver 71.84 (from my BFG CD). BF2 is the only game that is technically having issues, but the issues are simply the shadows being black boxes. I can play them all at full detail at 1152x864 (dont ask) with no problems at all. Without changing any BIOS settings or my nforce drivers, my plan is to step up forceware driver versions one by one while recording any differences I see in riva tuner, everest, and the nvidia driver tabs shown to me via nvtweak. I suspect there are different defaults in the later driver versions that cause this issue, and I want to find out exactly what they are. I'm also watching for changes in whats being reported for AGP fastwrites and side band addressing in software through the various driver versions. I'm going for complete isolation. I'll let you know what I find out and paste the log books here.

I had tried the 71.84 drivers before and they didnt work, but who knows what BIOS settings I was set to or nforce drivers I was using at the time. I've made so many changes in the past I couldnt keep track. Now I'm logging it all from step one with a non-stuttering platform, something I've never had since purchasing the card.

OldPueblo said:

I have a "ground zero" setup of XP Pro SP2 that so far has no stuttering at all in several games that stuttered before, and is at driver 71.84 (from my BFG CD). BF2 is the only game that is technically having issues, but the issues are simply the shadows being black boxes. I can play them all at full detail at 1152x864 (dont ask) with no problems at all. Without changing any BIOS settings or my nforce drivers, my plan is to step up forceware driver versions one by one while recording any differences I see in riva tuner, everest, and the nvidia driver tabs shown to me via nvtweak. I suspect there are different defaults in the later driver versions that cause this issue, and I want to find out exactly what they are. I'm also watching for changes in whats being reported for AGP fastwrites and side band addressing in software through the various driver versions. I'm going for complete isolation. I'll let you know what I find out and paste the log books here.

I had tried the 71.84 drivers before and they didnt work, but who knows what BIOS settings I was set to or nforce drivers I was using at the time. I've made so many changes in the past I couldnt keep track. Now I'm logging it all from step one with a non-stuttering platform, something I've never had since purchasing the card.

Click to expand...

Say there OldPueblo, I too did a clean install of XP Pro SP2 2 1/2 months ago when I built this rig and have had this problem ever since I loaded up my D3D games like Far Cry and HL2 to see what would happen after reading about this in the MSI forum. It will be interesting to see what you find. I am trying not go out and buy another motherboard to fix this problem but I will if I have to.

I had the same problem on my DFI NF3 and DTR 3000+ rig with a 6800gt when using the 77.XX drivers. I just kept using the 71.84's with no problems dealing with the lighting/shadow bug in BF2 hoping a that sooner or later a new driver would work without the freezing/hitching probelm. I have since moved onto my nF4 rig and a x800xl....which is in the process of being replaced by a 7800GT.

oldfartjc said:

Say there OldPueblo, I too did a clean install of XP Pro SP2 2 1/2 months ago when I built this rig and have had this problem ever since I loaded up my D3D games like Far Cry and HL2 to see what would happen after reading about this in the MSI forum. It will be interesting to see what you find. I am trying not go out and buy another motherboard to fix this problem but I will if I have to.

Click to expand...

Well HL2 played fine and I'll be loading up FarCry as well since it more then any other game seemed to have this issue real bad. Part of me wants to just sell the damn card, but the other part of me wants to beat this issue! I'm sure its from my escalation engineer days Heh, I might even be a dick and reserve www.nvidiastutter.com or something to detail the whole thing. If we can find a solution, the next step is getting the word out everywhere since this isnt going away.

Same stutter here... seem to be a pain in the ass having bought that combination of hardware.....

Greets & push nV to give a statement!
S@uDepp

A64 3200@4200+ (280MHzx9) // DFi LANParty UT // 2x512 OCZ 3200 Plat.@3-3-2-7@1T // ALBATRON GeForce 6800GT@410/1100 // angefeuert von BeQuiet! BQT 520 // Aqua WaKü "von oben bis unten" // AOpen 1648 AAP + ext. firewire Brenner One-Tech 52/24/52 // CL Audigy 2ZS@T7900 // IIyama HA202DT 22" // Razor Diamondback "Magma" // AOpen Case H700B + nur eine UV-KKT // AEG Café Olé CO150

My first major gaming system I bought was:

Athlon64 3500+
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum
1xgb PC3200 OCZ Plat rev2
BFG 6800GT OC
WD IDE hdd
Plextor 712A on same chain.
SB Audigy2 Value

With this setup I had no problems w/ the latest drivers.

Later I sold my 6800GT OC and bought a Shuttle SN25P

After I sold it I went back to using the MSI K8N Neo2 Plat but since I sold the shuttle and the vid card. I needed a system so I threw a 5900U and a seagate SATA 80gb. I installed and updated all the drivers stutters, bsods and lockups. After much headache I formatted and reinstalled. Instead of updated the drivers I installed the chipset drivers off the CD that came w/ the motherboard and updated the rest to the latest drivers and everything was smooth sailing. I know its not the same problem as everyone is having but maybe it will help some or jog a few ideas around.

Guess what? Want to hear something interesting?

I have this problem too...

Actually, I may not have the same thing, but, it is pretty darned fishy if you ask me. For those with signature viewing off, this is a MSI K7N Delta-L, aka a nForce 2 Ultra 400. That's right, 2... Every now and then I'll be in the middle of a game and it will just completely freeze up. I'll stop, get really ticked, decide my system is locked up and reach for the reset, then, bam, jumps back into activity just a split second before that button is pressed. VERY frustrating... It happens less often for me, but, when it does happen, it lasts a lot longer. Closer to half a minute even perhaps. This problem started approximately at the time when I damaged my memory through a failed BIOS flash experiment (tried to use a 1.3V GPU bios mod, but, turns out they had memory timings changed, and now my memory is VERY upset and only runs stable at stock or so, and even then makes the occasional rare glitch.) However, it also coincided more or less with when I switch from some old 71.xx (may have been beta, I'm not sure, but, they were very stable whatever they were) to the whql 77.xx drivers that were latest at the time. I have always suspected the drivers as I had been using it for a little while with the damaged memory and not seen that, but, I figured it just got a little bit worse over time, so I never really said anything.

I'll try some of those fixes later I guess, but, the problem is, the problem happens more randomly, after a longer period of time for me, and will sometimes just not happen at all, so it's really hard to pin down.

I'm guessing this has some issue related to it attempting to do something or other automatically on the card. Perhaps it's still trying to autoclock just a bit even with that disabled? What about the whole fan speed control thing (I notice coolbits, I think 1, shows an option to force the fan to stay always on in the ocing section, but, the other coolbits wipes out the option - either way, that means the drivers have it in there and that they are probably playing with the fan a bit at least)? Are all the people experiencing the problems using a modified heatsink perhaps? (NVS5, original model here.) Isn't there SOMETHING in common between them all?

I'm having a similar issue, but since it's not the same, I'm wondering if it's a diffrent problem. I'm having freezes that won't go away.

If you wait a long time and they don't go away, it's probably instability with something. This is more like some little part of something gets stuck in a loop that goes out of control for a while than a system actually locking up.

Apparently 100% cpu is being used by a high priority process (probably the video drivers/helper because it'd have to be realtime priority to freeze up so completely most likely) because nothing responds at all, not mouse or ctrl+alt+del or anything, until it's done with it's little freezing session.

Update:

FarCry, HL2, BF2, and UT2004 run like champs with 71.89 (up from 71.84). No AGP or driver setting changes with the upgrade either according to the utilities.

And I believe in all my readings that I had seen a few nForce2 users claiming to have this issue. Its possible I'm sure, though not as wide-spread maybe.