GeForce 6800 GT Pausing

I recently upgraded my Gigabyte GeForce 5700 Ultra 128MB to a Gigabyte GeForce 6800 GT 256MB. It consistently goes into pause mode. I'll be playing or running a benchmark, and suddenly the screen will pause and the sound will stutter and/or repeat for 1-2 seconds then stop. The whole system is at a standstill for about 4-5 seconds, and then it resumes like there is nothing wrong. I did a search on Google and found many GeForce 6800 GT & Ultra Owners were livid about similar problems. I am running a Gigabyte K8NS Pro with the latest bios which is F8. It has a NForce 3 250 chipset and I am running latest 5.10 drivers for the chipset. I am also running latest 66.93 WHQL drivers for the video card. Very very Annoying.

Power supply? I remember reading that those cards are pretty power hungry and the minimum power specs were either a solid 350 or 400 power supply.

**edit** nevermind, just saw your other thread

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Originally Posted by thirdfey

Power supply? I remember reading that those cards are pretty power hungry and the minimum power specs were either a solid 350 or 400 power supply.

**edit** nevermind, just saw your other thread

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I think that I may get an Antec TruePower 550W just to make sure, but from what I've read, upgrading the Power supply hasn't helped very many people solve this. I was looking at a message board last night where there was many many pages of posts from GeForce 6800 owners.

I just got through posting in the Video Driver section; I'm running a Gigabyte 128MB GeForce 6800 on a K7S5A (ECS) motherboard with an Antec TruePower 430W supply. Aquamark 3 and 3DMark2003 run just fine with the v61.77 drivers, but anything later and the system reboots during the second test in the series.

I've tried v66.93(WHQL), v67.03(beta) and v70.41(leaked) with the same results, only the v61.77 drivers are stable for me. BTW, the videocard and motherboard both have the latest available BIOS's.

I was wondering if anyone else was having similar trouble, I see here that I'm not alone.

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Originally Posted by Zerotech

I just got through posting in the Video Driver section; I'm running a Gigabyte 128MB GeForce 6800 on a K7S5A (ECS) motherboard with an Antec TruePower 430W supply. Aquamark 3 and 3DMark2003 run just fine with the v61.77 drivers, but anything later and the system reboots during the second test in the series.

I've tried v66.93(WHQL), v67.03(beta) and v70.41(leaked) with the same results, only the v61.77 drivers are stable for me. BTW, the videocard and motherboard both have the latest available BIOS's.

I was wondering if anyone else was having similar trouble, I see here that I'm not alone.

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I may have to try those drivers... my system doesn't reboot, it hangs, the sound skips and then everything is still for 5-10 seconds, and then it resumes like nothing was ever wrong.

I wonder if this is one of those situations where you have to crank the AGP down to 2X or 1X for stability?

I'd hate to think that's still the case in these days of AGP 4X/8X.

I started monitoring heat, which I hand't been doing much of. My 6800 GT was running in the 60's at idle. I also noticed that one of my hard drives was running in the 40's. I added a belly-mounted set of cooler fans to the hard drive. This dropped it about 10 degrees. I then thought and thought about the pausing. I decided to get an Antec True-Power 550W. I also decided to explore better ventilation as my Lian Li PC-60 was pretty full. I made a cheap and ugly case out of a rubber-maid conatiner and a 16" house fan from Canadian Tire. The airflow was pretty good, but it didn't drop the temperatures as much as I expected. And the way I had my hard drives in there, they actually ran hotter.
When I ran the fan at full-bore, I could bring my 6800GT down to 58 Degrees.
When I shut the fan off I climbed up to 70. My Game ran better, don't know for sure if it was heat or lack of wattage, but I suspect heat. After quickly getting tired of the fan noise, I bought a Lian Li V1000 and a Arctic Cooling NV5. My video card is now 43 degrees and my hard drive temperatures are alright. Haven't tried any games yet.

I figured out that another issue that I was having with one particular game was related to copy protection. I decided to create a new partition solely for games.
So I created a new partition and installed XP Pro. Then I installed Nforce and Forceware Drivers. I cleaned it up with XPLite. I install my game (LOR: BFME), and it runs like crap. Start, Freeze, Start, Freeze, etc. Long story shorter. I try several rounds of beta drivers, some of which after installing I have to go to safe mode, uninstall Video & Gart drivers, and then re-install. The 61.76? worked better, but still some pausing. The 71.20's or the 67.xx is what finally worked. Hope this helps somebody, sometime, somewhere. It's a great card, but this has been way more hassle than it needed to be. I never would have expected updated WHQL Nividia drivers to give so much hassle !!

I had to update the BIOSes of both the videocard and the motherboard before I could run my benchmarks successfully with the v67.03 drivers.

I'm holding tight with this setup until the next official nVidia driver release.

I'm praying you you're pointing me in the right direction as this damn card is driving me insane!

Incidentley - Although this doesn't solve the problem I found that by setting up the memory manually in the BIOS and then turning AGP 8x down to 4x and Fastwrites off, this stopped the stuttering - but defeats the object.

I was also using the latest drivers downloaded from nVidia but I'm about to try the ones from ASUS - the 66.72 driver. I have my fingers crossed.

I'm running a the only BFG 6800GT OC and the only problem I've had is not being able to run a dual monitor setup (monitor/TV) with the 67.93 drivers. Mine runs in the low 60's at idle so that seems to be typical temps.

I still had more trouble with this card. It wasn't just a power issue. It wasn't just a heat issue, it wasn't just the nvidia GART issue. I tried different drivers, and different chipset drivers. I think the best drivers may have been the one on the Manufacturers website, but I lost patience and ultimately did another upgrade to NF4-SLI (Because of NCQ) and got a Radeon X800 XL. No stuttering yet :)