TuinalOfTheNexus
04-25-2008, 09:07 AM
<p>This applies to 9600GT owners and possibly 8800/9800 owners who experience intermittent system lockups during EQ2 (black screen with sound looping, forced or automatic reboot)</p><p>The issue is with the BIOS on early versions of these cards. The exact cause is undisclosed, possibly a protection fault, and the issue emerges in several other games (notably WoW). Cards with this issue will however typically run Crysis and other games without problems. The solutions are:</p><p>1) RMA the card. Return it to the supplier for a newer card with an updated BIOS.</p><p>2) Flash the BIOS using NVFlash and an updated BIOS. In the first instance try and obtain this BIOS from the card manufacturer through technical support to preserve any warranties. If you are more experienced, impatient, or the warranty has expired anyway, you need an updated BIOS with version xx.xx.11.xx.xx rather than xx.xx.0D.xx.xx (where x is any number), and the NVFlash utility. It should be possible to use any manufacturers BIOS, although for compatibility and least chance of issues the NVidia one would be advisable. It is also strongly recommended to make a boot disk to restore the old BIOS before making any changes (bear in mind if an issue occurs you will have a black screen until flashed again, so the disk needs to automatically do the flash).</p><p>3) Underclock the card. This seems to reduce the frequency of the crashing. You may find you can get a full evening's play crash-free by reducing the core and memory frequencies by 100MHz. The degradation in performance will likely be unnoticable since EQ2 doesn't tax the video card particularly hard. This is a 'quick fix' solution that may or may not work in some cases. You may also have to experiment to find the optimum balance for performance and stability.</p><p>4) Reduce the visual quality. Running on extreme performance results in less stress on the GPU and seems to reduce crash frequency. This is the easiest fix, but the least effective. Coupled with 3) it should make the game reasonably stable on most platforms, without needing to risk a BIOS flash or the hassle of returning the card.</p><p>A few myths:</p><p>This is <b>not</b> an overheating or power supply issue. People tend to instantly leap to these conclusions as blanket explanations for intermittent hardware failure. The fault is 100% with the BIOS on the card itself. New 9600GTs with the updated BIOS (or those flashed with an updated one) do not exhibit this fault.</p>