Emmanuel

EDIT: I'm laughing now that I read this, 3 years ago wow! What I said remains true but it sounds too much of a kid explanation to GPU troubleshooting, well I guess show this to your little cousins and siblings if they're having problems! Ah I remember those days where the news section was dedicated to FAQs!

I had many questions from friends and decided to make a really basic knowledge FAQ.
GPUs are great, when working. For basic troubleshooting where to start from?

-A really basic advice that can sometimes resolve problems are keeping all drivers up to date, not only the Video Card's one, but the BIOS versions, the chipset drivers that you can find on your video card's manufacturer and at the motherboard manufacturer website. Artifacting is one major problem with Video Cards today, it's most of the time caused by excessive overclocking, temps too high, but sometimes, the card just right of the box artifacts.

-Remember that in BIOS, you can always load defaults, but default doesn't necessarily means working, in other words, for example, when you buy DDRAM, most of the time, the motherboard will adjust its timings and voltages automatically, though, for many people, the automatic votage is too low so it cause any kinds of errors... Same for video cards, make sure the PCI Express Frequency is on default (in this case, PCI Exp Freq should always be on default) and that everything in BIOS is configured as instructed in the video card's manual.

-Another problem that might give you automatic restarts or errors is when the video card isn't receiving sufficient power, or you didn't plug the extra power cable directly from the PSU to the GPU, always make sure that not only the Power (Watts) is compatible, but the current... if it's supporting a multiple GPUs if you wish to SLI cards or Crossfire... (Of course all you guys now today's card are hungry, so aim around 600W-700W or more if you wish).

-Your temps are too high? High temps causes slowdowns and artifacts. High temperatures are caused by many many factors, the most common is that the video card runs hot by nature, or that it's overclocked, maybe overvoltaged, that there isn't air coming in/out from the case, dust blocks airducts, keeps heat, and may even interfere between components (if it's excessive). The best thing to do if you have room on your motherboard is too space the components to the maximum, so you can be sure no components keeps another hot for example. Also of course, if you installed any mods to change Vcore... if you changed the original VGA BIOS, well, you know where to look first.

-Now to come back to errors, you need to make sure that all drivers you install are from a trusted source, avoid BETA and even worse tweaked drivers that can bring errors (especially tweaked one since they aren't made by the video card manufacturer).

-Another advice is to always listen to your computer when turning it on for any beeps; keep in mind though that many motherboards beep when turning on to show that BIOS is ok and there aren't hardware problems, but when you have constant beepings (reffer to your motherboard manual that tells you exactly what each sequences of beeps mean), it means it's hardware related. Though, once my motherboard beeped because the case was overheated since its airduct was blocked by the computer seating next to it.

-But the hardest troubleshooting remains with SLI or Crossfire or any type of multiple GPUs configurations. If in Windows, you have artifacting, errors..., you might consider trying to single card your PC temporarily and use it normally, then switch to the other video card to see if you are experiencing problems. If when changing from one card to another, you don't have any problems anymore, you may have a deffective GPU. You can always make sure that the video cards are properly inserted and connected together with the bridge (on my motherboard, there is a switch between both PCI Exp x16 slots, Normal Mode/SLI Mode, check in your manual if you need to use that switch in order to run SLI or Crossfire, of course, only if avaiable). If you can access Windows, make sure that both of your video cards are detected and in use.

-Cannot access Windows anymore since recent video changes. Okay everyone knows this, but, when you change video cards, remove all drivers BEFORE putting the new card and not after (because then the old drivers will try to work with your new video card and could be fatal for your hardware) There are neat programs that allow you to completly remove any traces of previous drivers. Maybe one day, after making a couple changes on your computer, you will keep on freezing during the Windows loading page (the little blue bar will freeze) without errors. The only way out is to hold F8 when booting until a menu appears, and choose safe mode, and once in, to roll back any drivers you changed... So that's why, always keep all your drivers in a safe place in case of you can't access them from internet. Once after repairing Windows, somehow, it corrupted my video drivers, thank god I could access Safe Mode and get all my drivers safed on my hard drive. It's always good to backup them on CDs.

-There are some cool softwares like Futuremark's 3DMark0x that performs benchmarks, but it can always help you notice problems with your video card. You can try if experiencing problem to go in RUN and type dxdiag and it might help you troubleshooting hardware.

I hope I helped some people around here, it's a really long and boring FAQ for many I'm sure, but it could always help.