Hey guys, i just bought this thing and its freezing up on all my games. I cant play anything., need for speed pro street, farcry, the sims 2. I dont know whats going on. Ive read a lot about the 8800gt just now, and a lot of people are having the same problems with the freezing in games. ive even tried and lowered the settings to 600/1800 as opposed to what my card is supposed to run at 675/1950. Ive had no success with that, still the same problems.I've tried a lot of different drivers and still the exact same. I ran 3dmark06 and it finished that, but i had to run it like 5 times before it actually completed the test because it kept freezing on me.

I dont know what to do. Ive emailed BFG and told them about the problems im having. Im getting soo frustrated its not even funny anymore. I just wanna return this thing back and stick in my old 7600GT. at least that didnt give me any problems.

The thing is now, that if i wanna return it back to CanadaComputers, im gonna have to pay a %15 restocking fee, which is bull$hit. So now im in the same spot i was in a few days ago, but now with lost cash.

What am I supposed to do guys?

I would contact canada computers and see if they will waive the restocking fee since they sent you a defective video card.

BFG in my experience has extremely good customer service. Call them up, tell them the problems your having and most importantly be nice to them. Tell them you called to get an RMA number and that Email tech support told you to call up and get an RMA number (even if they did not). They should give you an RMA number in no time and you should have a new 8800GT sent to you in the mail for free in about a week or less. In my case, with my old BFG 6800, I had a new one on my doorstep just 6 days after mailing out my old one. It did cost me about $10 to mail the card from the UPS Store, but BFG did pay the shipping for the new card that came back to my house.

Well I just brought the card back to Canada Computers. They tested it, and it was kinda screwy even with them. The tech guy there told me that those cards have a tendency to overheat, and theres other problems aswell. He actually suggest that i go with the EVGA 9600GT. Everything went pretty smoothly actually, no problems, exchanged cards, got money back in return.

So thats what i did. I have it installed now with the 174.74 drivers and i'll keep you updated on this one.

Did you exchange for another 8800GT or did you get a 9600GT? The 8800GT is a bit faster, but the 9600GT is a good card too.

i just exchanged it for the 9600gt and got some cash back. yeah i did notice a hit. with the 8800gt i scored a 9866 now im scoring a 9288.

Make sure your cpu has enough voltage.When i had my AMD setup i went through this and it ended up being that i wasnt giving the cpu enough voltage.even though it was stable in everything else games would freeze my sysem up pretty quickly.I was overclocked to 2.7ghz with1.40v added about .050v making it 1.45v and all was well.This is probably not your problem but it might help

Adam Kolak said:

Indeed. I had my old 6800Oc RMA and to my surprise they replaced it with a 6800ultra which was the world's fastest card of the time. Imagine how happy I was of the super upgrade I got. I adore their customer service, infact I would've sticked with BFG if it wasn't for EVGA's low prices.

Meats of Evil said:
Yeah, my new card is a eVGA too, mostly due to the lower prices. I feel bad, because BFG treated me very nicely.

saleengt said:

The 9600gt is an excellent card for it's price. Now update your sig, you are now a proud owner (I also think the 1st here) of a 9600gt.

yup i found out the problem. i went back and bought a cooler master extreme power 600w psu and that did the trick. i guess my good old antec wasnt good enough anymore

Anywho, im very exited of the 9600gt, it performs quite well. Thanks for all the help guys.

Well here we go again!

The 9600GT is doing the same thing the 8800GT did. Freezing in games. I got a decent enough psu, so whats the problem here?

So, what i did was went to canada computers again, and got a ATI 3870 512mb. Put that in, was good for a bit, there started freezing too?

I didnt know what to do. My last option that i could think of was to update my mobo bios to 1008 from 0902 and for some reason that did the trick. So far, no freezing.

3Dmark06 scores are pretty much the same as the 9600GT. Wish i had the 8800GT though, i was almost @10000 3dmark06, now with the 9600GT and the 3870, i get about 9250 3dmark06 scores.

Would it really be worth going going back to the 8800GT(seeing that the updated bios did the trick) or just stick with the 3870?

What do you mean by "It did the trick"? I know that there was an updated bios for the 8800gt that helped compatibility with older PCI Express 1.1 motherboards so you could check if that's a possible cause; OR! it could be you have a faulty PSU. Maybe the 12v rails have gone bad.

what i meant by "it did the trick" is that its not freezing in games anymore.

So now back to the question at hand, is it worth going back to the 8800GT or just stay with the 3870?

Bump.

Anyone?

.......maybe its NOT the video card?

LOL...whats going on, where am i, what am i speaking freakydeekee?

I know its NOT the card, i found out with trial and error that it was the motherboard. I had to update the bios for these newer cards to work I guess.

It makes sense now Well the 8800gt performs better than the 3870, so If you're not paying anything and have the time and patience to do it then go for it. You won't get ground breaking performance but you won't suffer a major loss in performance when you enable Anti-aliasing in the games.