Hi Zuhl - thanx for the reply....The machine has been opened very recently a few times - and dusted out pretty good. (It had actually been sitting unused for a couple of years). The two 1gb ram sticks are 3 weeks old. I have a Hirens Boot CD with memtest86 and I did run it for about 5 hours...the ram is okay. I was looking at heat as an issue but I have an infrared heat gun and it is running at about 112F...NOT centigrade....I don't know anything about thermal compound. 
 
I keep playing with this thing though....finally, I researched out a thread where all the usual "cures" were bandied about ....one person posted to lower the hardware acceleration setting. Finally, at completely disabled, the card is working pretty good - as in, it had not frozen the system at all - and i put the machine through over two almost non-stop hours of mostly you-tube video (which seemed to be the worst offender) with no lagging or poor picture etc. It was after everyone else was in bed so I had the whole range of bandwidth to myself just to eliminate narrow bandwidth as a culprit.
 
Now, reading about the hardware accelerators, it seems that the suggestion is that the acceleration could be enabled with newer drivers....but my experience at the beginning seemed to indicate that the system did not "like" them at all.
do you have any further suggestions re - drivers and setting?...
thanx again!
 
My gut feeling is that it is setting/driver related 

Hi Zuhl - thanx for the reply....The machine has been opened very recently a few times - and dusted out pretty good. (It had actually been sitting unused for a couple of years). The two 1gb ram sticks are 3 weeks old. I have a Hirens Boot CD with memtest86 and I did run it for about 5 hours...the ram is okay. I was looking at heat as an issue but I have an infrared heat gun and it is running at about 112F...NOT centigrade....I don't know anything about thermal compound. 
 
I keep playing with this thing though....finally, I researched out a thread where all the usual "cures" were bandied about ....one person posted to lower the hardware acceleration setting. Finally, at completely disabled, the card is working pretty good - as in, it had not frozen the system at all - and i put the machine through over two almost non-stop hours of mostly you-tube video (which seemed to be the worst offender) with no lagging or poor picture etc. It was after everyone else was in bed so I had the whole range of bandwidth to myself just to eliminate narrow bandwidth as a culprit.
 
Now, reading about the hardware accelerators, it seems that the suggestion is that the acceleration could be enabled with newer drivers....but my experience at the beginning seemed to indicate that the system did not "like" them at all.
do you have any further suggestions re - drivers and setting?...
thanx again!
 
My gut feeling is that it is setting/driver related 

dynaryder
Now, reading about the hardware accelerators, it seems that the suggestion is that the acceleration could be enabled with newer drivers....but my experience at the beginning seemed to indicate that the system did not "like" them at all.
do you have any further suggestions re - drivers and setting?...

Dynaryder, if you read through many of the post in these forums you will find that not all newly released drivers are frequently not the best choice for a specific GPU. To find the best fit you have to be patient and try a several setteling for the driver that works and most closely offers all the options you require (games - Etc.). I would first try to locate information that others have posted concerning the dirver of choice for your specific GPU and go from there. If you find one that works, but is fairly old, you can move toward newer driver releases. Just remember drivers advance in version to cover not only the GPU but also later development in overall machine technology as well. Since your machine is several years old an older driver may be the best fit.
 
Happy Holidays
N9ZN-Extra 

n9zn-extra

dynaryder
Now, reading about the hardware accelerators, it seems that the suggestion is that the acceleration could be enabled with newer drivers....but my experience at the beginning seemed to indicate that the system did not "like" them at all.
do you have any further suggestions re - drivers and setting?...

Dynaryder, if you read through many of the post in these forums you will find that not all newly released drivers are frequently not the best choice for a specific GPU. To find the best fit you have to be patient and try a several setteling for the driver that works and most closely offers all the options you require (games - Etc.). I would first try to locate information that others have posted concerning the dirver of choice for your specific GPU and go from there. If you find one that works, but is fairly old, you can move toward newer driver releases. Just remember drivers advance in version to cover not only the GPU but also later development in overall machine technology as well. Since your machine is several years old an older driver may be the best fit.
 
Happy Holidays
N9ZN-Extra 

I think I am starting to get that part N9ZN-*..... I had a pretty interesting reply back re: my motherboard on another post....he figures much the same thing - & being that MSI also markets nvidia gpu, he had a bit of insight on where I want to go with this ol' dinosaur....
thanx much for the reply!

I just bought a gtx950 2gb  from bestbuy   installed it on my680i mobo  and it doesn't even recognize that the card is there   what am I doing wrong ?  I previously had 2 8800gts on the same mobo and they worked fine  I thought it was time to upgrade

blackdog
I just bought a gtx950 2gb  from bestbuy   installed it on my680i mobo  and it doesn't even recognize that the card is there   what am I doing wrong ?  I previously had 2 8800gts on the same mobo and they worked fine  I thought it was time to upgrade

Make sure you have the latest BIOS for the motherboard installed. There have been reported issues of newer video boards not being compatible with older hardware. I did use a GTX-680 in my 750i SLI motherboard but never tried my 980 boards so I can't say from personal experience.
 
EDIT: It might be the UEFI BIOS on your video board not being supported by your motherboard. You can check with EVGA support to see if there is a 'legacy' BIOS available for your video board.

I am back again with recurrence of the same problem on the same computer. My orignial fix for the problem with Windows XP was to turn off hardware acceleration. The freezing up completely disappeared after that & the computer ran well - probably better than it ever ran. The video on youtube was still choppy though, but other video played reasonably well.
 
This time, though, I have installed a new 1 tb HDD which I partitioned to two (nominally) 500 gb "drives". I have a fresh, successfully installed Windows 7 Home Premium Edition on one partition. The whole computer is prone again to randomly "freezing". The usual scenario is while moving a displayed object with the mouse pointer or simply moving the lines up or down on, say, task manager or in MS Config.
 
At first, it seemed co-incidental with extremely high RAM & CPU usage (like 70% & up and 100% respectively). I disabled automatic updates which "cured" the high RAM & CPU usage. It continued to freeze though. I thought that I would simply disable hardware acceleration again but the access button for doing so is "greyed out". I tried several other drivers - a new one, the Windows 7 default driver and an older Vista driver with a number prefix of "178." This last driver seemed to work a bit better - as in it would allow slow movement of the cursor for a while before it froze. It is now my understanding that the hardware accelerartion cannot be disabled while using this card in Windows 7 (while, in XP, it is available). Does anyone else know this to be true as well? My usual test for the video is to try the various included card games - solitaire, spider solitaire, freecell etc and see how the resolution looks, how fast they deal out and how fast the game will put all the cards "up" once the last move is made. So far, I could get it to deal all the face down cards and at about the fifth face up card, it froze. It is not high tech and the cards really aren't super fast things but ....that is not positive, to say the least.
 
I ran memtest 86 again (for "only" about 2 hours - there are 2 - 1gb cards of ddr 240 pin ram. They're about a month or so old). The test run showed no errors.
 
Now, here is the part I do not understand. I can run this machine in safe mode with or without networking. It does NOT freeze at all - at least it hasn't yet. I am prevented from trying the card games though. I checked to see that the device manager shows the same driver is also being used in safe mode.
 
I actually sent my questions to their online support people but, sadly, never received a reply....anyway...I am a bit fed up with all of this and I am a bout ready to try a seriously downgraded gpu to see if I can make things work properly.
 
Does anyone have any other ideas?

dynaryder
I am back again with recurrence of the same problem on the same computer. My orignial fix for the problem with Windows XP was to turn off hardware acceleration. The freezing up completely disappeared after that & the computer ran well - probably better than it ever ran. The video on youtube was still choppy though, but other video played reasonably well.
 
This time, though, I have installed a new 1 tb HDD which I partitioned to two (nominally) 500 gb "drives". I have a fresh, successfully installed Windows 7 Home Premium Edition on one partition. The whole computer is prone again to randomly "freezing". The usual scenario is while moving a displayed object with the mouse pointer or simply moving the lines up or down on, say, task manager or in MS Config.
 
At first, it seemed co-incidental with extremely high RAM & CPU usage (like 70% & up and 100% respectively). I disabled automatic updates which "cured" the high RAM & CPU usage. It continued to freeze though. I thought that I would simply disable hardware acceleration again but the access button for doing so is "greyed out". I tried several other drivers - a new one, the Windows 7 default driver and an older Vista driver with a number prefix of "178." This last driver seemed to work a bit better - as in it would allow slow movement of the cursor for a while before it froze. It is now my understanding that the hardware accelerartion cannot be disabled while using this card in Windows 7 (while, in XP, it is available). Does anyone else know this to be true as well? My usual test for the video is to try the various included card games - solitaire, spider solitaire, freecell etc and see how the resolution looks, how fast they deal out and how fast the game will put all the cards "up" once the last move is made. So far, I could get it to deal all the face down cards and at about the fifth face up card, it froze. It is not high tech and the cards really aren't super fast things but ....that is not positive, to say the least.
 
I ran memtest 86 again (for "only" about 2 hours - there are 2 - 1gb cards of ddr 240 pin ram. They're about a month or so old). The test run showed no errors.
 
Now, here is the part I do not understand. I can run this machine in safe mode with or without networking. It does NOT freeze at all - at least it hasn't yet. I am prevented from trying the card games though. I checked to see that the device manager shows the same driver is also being used in safe mode.
 
I actually sent my questions to their online support people but, sadly, never received a reply....anyway...I am a bit fed up with all of this and I am a bout ready to try a seriously downgraded gpu to see if I can make things work properly.
 
Does anyone have any other ideas?

Maybe you should create a New Thread with your issue and list all of your Hardware Make and Model so we can better help you.
Being a XP computer it may be time for a new computer.

bcavnaugh
 
Maybe you should create a New Thread with your issue and list all of your Hardware Make and Model so we can better help you.
Being a XP computer it may be time for a new computer.

+1, a fresh thread with all system components listed would go a long ways to helping you with this.

bcavnaugh

Maybe you should create a New Thread with your issue and list all of your Hardware Make and Model so we can better help you.
Being a XP computer it may be time for a new computer.

   +1