Starting ED and monitor screen goes black

[Hooplah]

1440p with a 2gb GTX 680 really is asking a lot of that card, even in SLI. Remember, at this point even the GTX 1050ti will outperform it by 5-15% under most circumstances. The GTX 1050 in my laptop will give it a run for its money too. Neither of those cards are capable of anything meaningful at 1440p.

That said, if you are still happy with the rest of your system then your best bet would be to change the GPU. A single GTX 2060 or 1660 would be a very good match for the rest of your rig and the resolution you want to play at. All that extra VRAM will mean you can game at high, or even ultra settings rather than the mid/low settings you'll be stuck with now.

A six years old PC. The ASUS Rampage IV Extreme X79 LGA motherboard and Intel core i7-3930K 3.20 GHz six-core CPU, Corsair Hydro H80i liquid/water CPU cooling and 48GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600MHz RAM has no problem the latest ED April 2019 updates. At 21% CPU and 14% RAM with the game running in 3440x1440 borderless plus several other support websites running on a curved screen Acer Predator 35" Z35P monitor the computer is not an issue...Except that it is 6 years old using two SSD drives for the OS and the games and we haven't figured out how long they can last. I already replaced the standard hard drives that failed but then I was unlucky getting a bad batch.

My good MSI GTX 680 4MB card is doing fine only using 47% of memory but it is 80C heat playing ED. Maybe that is how the other card eventually failed. The problem is that I'm going to need a card to deal with the heat and that 3440x1440 monitor. Older cards won't guarantee a positive result. Researching I found that a GTX 1070/1080 Ti or a RTX 2080 with three fans (non Ti) and amazing FPS as a secondary benefit. I'm not big on FPS as long as I can get 60 FPS. I'll never do VR as one of my eyes won't cooperate.

But do I pay big bucks for a graphic card with a computer that might fail in year 7? When ED atmospheric landings show up will this purchase be up to the future graphics? Maybe purchase the best card and swap it out with another build a few years later. Playing ED something is wrong with me!

Regards

 

[Riverside]

I bought a 1080ti to go in my existing pc a little under a year ago, it has plenty of overhead at 60hz (I have three 1080p monitors). Expensive but worth it.

However, I bought a 2-slot EVGA FTW3 and while it manages the heat just fine with its fan profiler app running, it sounds like a hoover on planet surfaces at 144hz. I bought the wrong card for noise, get a 2.5 or 3 slot card with a bigger heatsink if you can imo.

 

[CMDR ATIMO]

Sounds like the thermal paste has dried out on the card, it happens on older cards it's not the best stuff from the start.

 

[Hooplah]

I bought a 1080ti to go in my existing pc a little under a year ago, it has plenty of overhead at 60hz (I have three 1080p monitors). Expensive but worth it.

However, I bought a 2-slot EVGA FTW3 and while it manages the heat just fine with its fan profiler app running, it sounds like a hoover on planet surfaces at 144hz. I bought the wrong card for noise, get a 2.5 or 3 slot card with a bigger heatsink if you can imo.

One of the negatives with the Predator Z35P monitor is that it's max refresh rate only goes to 100 hz. I can overclock it to 120 Hz but haven't needed it even with my older graphic cards playing ED. So maybe your graphic card would like me better. I don't play more graphic intensive games like the latest "Call of Duty" depicting real war. I did check it out and it is pretty accurate. But I was in a real war and don't want to play a game that reminds me of those memories. At best CofD shows others who have never been to war the messy business that war is. It is a good thing to avoid.

 

[Hooplah]

Sounds like the thermal paste has dried out on the card, it happens on older cards it's not the best stuff from the start.

I pulled the card, cleaned it up, replaced the thermal paste but haven't installed it back into the computer. The heat sinks were 90% clean while the underside of the fan blades were heavily covered with a paste that couldn't be removed without disassembly. Actually disassembly was pretty easy, Four black screws with springs around the CPU and the CPU board separated from the heats sinks. Four more screws and the aluminum cover used to dissipate heat separated from the heat sinks. More to follow...

 

[Riverside]

One of the negatives with the Predator Z35P monitor is that it's max refresh rate only goes to 100 hz. I can overclock it to 120 Hz but haven't needed it even with my older graphic cards playing ED. So maybe your graphic card would like me better. I don't play more graphic intensive games like the latest "Call of Duty" depicting real war. I did check it out and it is pretty accurate. But I was in a real war and don't want to play a game that reminds me of those memories. At best CofD shows others who have never been to war the messy business that war is. It is a good thing to avoid.

I don't play any other games that tax my PC as much as ED.

On a 1080ti (and an i7 7700) I can run 1080p at 144hz, it never dips below 60fps, in scenarios like CZs or a station instance I'm more CPU limited than GPU, your extra cores would help to keep a 1080ti supplied with data to crunch. On planets, at 144hz the GPU ramps up (as do it's fans), I have 11Gb of VRAM, the most I've seen it use is just under 8. Your extra cores wouldn't help here, but I think you would see a major improvement over your current GPU(s). Whether the cost is justified is up to you but I think in your position I would think it was

There is a rule of thumb for Nvidia cards that for every generation up (the hundreds in the name) you can go down 10 in the tens for an approximately equivalent card. So a 680 would be roughly equivalent to a 770, a 960 or a 1050. A 1050ti would be an upgrade for you (for a single card) but probably not worth paying for. More card than that the more of a performance increase you'll see for the money. I went from a 970 to the 1080ti and it was a big step up. Hopefully I'll have this card for as long as you've had your 680s

 

[Hooplah]

Greetings,

Thanks Riverside for your reply adding a lot to the discussion and aided me in what cards can work without paying a fortune for them. A "Nvidia Rule of Thumb" is great but let's see if we can dial it in to prove that it works.

After cleaning, replacing the thermal paste, reassembly and reinstalling the heavily used card it is working again and is compatible with the lightly used card. Specs are heat 80C, fan 60%, GPU 92% and MCU 60%. No difference running ED 1920x1080 windowed or 3440x1440 borderless. Cleaning the card with a vacuum before disassembly the fans were ~85% clean so replacing the thermal paste made a big difference. This is a MSI GTX680 purchased in 2013 running ED in 2019.

With my build running ED a 6 year old Intel i7-3930K CPU (21%), 48GB of Corsair DDR3-1600MHz RAM (14%) and a GTX680 with 4GB of RAM (60%) is overkill. The math says that with a decent CPU ED can run on a 4GB video card and 8GB of computer memory although I'd probably go with 16Gb. The video card even supports a 35" wide screen curved monitor.

Maybe the latest, greatest most expensive video card is not needed which gives users something to consider before purchasing one. The weak link in the setup is the heat and frame rate the video card has to process. I'm not all that big on frame rate as long as 90% of the time I can get to 60FPS. Of course newer cards will take care of this. My issue is the heat and would like to lower that 80C while everything else I do running apps and even HD-4K movies never gets past 45C. Even No Man's Sky and more intensive graphic games on the PC don't generate the heat that ED does. But maybe others do that I haven't played.

The challenge for players. Install Nvidia Inspector (free) on your PC, run ED with several resolutions, see what heat and other specs that your video card is dealing with and post it on this thread. It could be interesting with all the cards from my old GTX680s to the latest RTX 2080 Ti providing information that we can all use.

Meanwhile the one thing I have learned is to clean your PC often for the best airflow. Then you won't have to post threads like this on the Forum trying to figure it out.

The scary part. Six years from now or maybe a lot sooner this thread will be obsolete. Even Riverside predicted this hoping whatever we purchase will last another six years!

Regards to All

 

[Riverside]

I'd just like to point out that your twin 680s were top of the line premium cards in their day, and as you imply it's not unreasonable that they are still relevant (assuming they are maintained & working correctly). I bought my 1080ti with probably much the same lifespan in mind as you had when you bought your 680s, assuming you bought them new.

I could run my GPU fans quieter than they do but then I would have thermal concerns just as you have. At 100% load (144Hz refresh rate landed on a planet (GPU limited)) my GPU maintains around 65-68c with the fans at 100%. The CPU barely reaches 60c even in a station instance with the framerate uncapped (CPU limited).

My CPU has fewer cores but those cores are probably running faster (~4GHz), the newer extended features probably make no difference (nor, probably does my 16Gb of DDR4 2133) but both newer CPUs and especially newer Nvidia GPUs use a lot less power and are more heat efficient for the performance, there was a big improvement in efficiency with Maxwell (750ti, 9xx cards).