GTX 660 TI Smoked.. twice

[dnbluprints]

My x51 came with the OEM 660 GTX and I'm just not happy unless I'm tinkering so I put a EVGA 660 TI with reference cooling in along with my 256 Kingston Hyper-X SSD. Everything seemed great, good fps in Bioshock Infinite, Tomb Raider at ultra. There were a few crashes I attributed to the games just not being very optimized but assassin's Creed 3 just totally rebooted my pc. I loaded up some Star Craft 2 and it worked flawless up to the second map where my pc crashed. During the screen crash there were graphic anomalies and BOOM! dead card. My temps on max load were low 60c's but usually stayed around 50-60c.

So I decided I got a bad card, sent it back and got a new one a few days later. I purchased a fan to exhaust air from the cabinet the X51 was housed and my temps improved a few degrees but nothing major. Card worked with many of the same crashes and reboots even underclocked. It actually even messed up my SSD drive and my BCD boot partition was corrupt and the pc wouldn't even boot. I fixed it all up and backed up all of my data and was playing something older after again, underclocking a bit more. Dead video card with little green lines all over my boot screen and desktop.

So, just a warning to anyone thinking of upgrading the video card, if you have a loaded X51 with a separarte SSD and hard drive, and a lot of USB peripherals think about running a second psu for the video card or risk blowing up your vid card or damaging the psu supplied. I was lucky enough I could return the card for a refund.

Maybe I have another issue causing the problems but my stock psu measures proper voltage via multimeter so I'm not quite sure what it is except I was pushing the card hard enough to get starved for power and effect the SSD as well when it crashed. There has to be a good reason some people get away with gtx 670s on stock power brick and some of us can't even use a gtx 660 ti.

 

[mav711]

Did your Ti use a "blower" type cooling system that exhausts air out the back? That is the reference design and the recommended design to use with X51. Otherwise heat could be getting "dumped" into the chassis by the GFX card.

For example fancy GFX cards with Dual Fans are just blasting air down on the GPUs and flooding the chassis with hot air which is not a good idea. Also all video cards are not created equal.

 

[dnbluprints]

Thanks for the reply, yes it was the reference design with the simple blower out the back. After replacing the card with the stock gtx 660 things have been running smoothly.

I'd attribute the problems with just not enough juice when things got demanding. I am running the i7 3770, 16 gig ram, bluray drive, 2tb 7200 rpm hd, a wifi usb drive, led backlit keyboard (Gigabyte Osmium? Aivia), Logitech g9x, Logitech wireless headphones, a 3200 rmp external fan off usb and the ssd drive. Only reasoning I can think of is all of the usb devices pulled power along with the top model X51, maybe 330 was just not enough during peaking. It was definitely symptoms of either overheating or slight power deficiency. I do know it affected my SSD when it crashed. It was not overheating either according to the logs from evga precision.

 

[nando2323]

This is odd to me because I have the x51 with the EVGA 660TI + SC 3GB and a 256GB SSD Samsung drive with the 330w psu and I have no issues at all. Played all the way through Crysis 3 on ultra with no issues. I do not have the original HD in there though but do have a logitech G510 keyboard and mouse hooked up. I would get a wattage meter plug thing and see how much you are actually drawing from the PSU, the PSU you have could be faulty. I think there are many others out there running the 660ti in the X51 without issues also.

 

[GoHack]

Thanks for the reply, yes it was the reference design with the simple blower out the back. After replacing the card with the stock gtx 660 things have been running smoothly.

I'd attribute the problems with just not enough juice when things got demanding. I am running the i7 3770, 16 gig ram, bluray drive, 2tb 7200 rpm hd, a wifi usb drive, led backlit keyboard (Gigabyte Osmium? Aivia), Logitech g9x, Logitech wireless headphones, a 3200 rmp external fan off usb and the ssd drive. Only reasoning I can think of is all of the usb devices pulled power along with the top model X51, maybe 330 was just not enough during peaking. It was definitely symptoms of either overheating or slight power deficiency. I do know it affected my SSD when it crashed. It was not overheating either according to the logs from evga precision.

Are you really gaining anything by going w/a GTX 660 Ti SC+ 3GB over the stock GTX 660?

Looking at the total power draw of the two (2) cards, the standard GTX 660 draws around 140 watts, while the TI model draws around 150 watts. We are only talking about a 330 watt power supply for everything.

Then you are running an external fan off the power supply as well.

My guess, if you really want to stay w/the Ti model, try getting rid of that 2 TB HD, and going w/the SSD only. Then run that external fan off an external power source, if you really need it.


.

 

[sway]

I was running all that with a 4gb 670ftw that was overclocked, pushing a 1440p monitor, there maybe an underlying issue somewhere. PSU might not be giving out the right wattage, or something else. I ran ssd, stock hdd, alienware keyboard etc... never had issues.

tappin from a N E X U S

 

[dnbluprints]

Are you really gaining anything by going w/a GTX 660 Ti SC+ 3GB over the stock GTX 660?

Looking at the total power draw of the two (2) cards, the standard GTX 660 draws around 140 watts, while the TI model draws around 150 watts. We are only talking about a 330 watt power supply for everything.

Then you are running an external fan off the power supply as well.

My guess, if you really want to stay w/the Ti model, try getting rid of that 2 TB HD, and going w/the SSD only. Then run that external fan off an external power source, if you really need it.


.

The stock GTX 660 is oem so it's a slight less powerful than a manufacture GTX 660. The TI was a nice improvement, but I've been running stock and haven't had any major issues though. Everything I run, run smooth and if I'm working in 3DS Max, I just use my business pc now. I bought the X51 because it was small, preconfigured, and someone elses headache if it breaks, but I still get that itch to modify it, because, hey its what we techies like to do. Resisting the urge, the machine has performed flawlessly.

I dunno Sway what's up with this machine vs. yours, wattage checked out stable, it ran fine for awhile with the evga GTX 660 TI, then smoked. I guess if I want to upgrade I should stick with building my own. Although this X51 is a sweet little box.