Flashing my 8800GT because i now have Windows 7

G'day,
I'd first like to apologize if there is already a thread that can help me.

I have a Leadtek 8800GT 512mb and I have recently made the change from XP to Windows 7. I have been having some system crashes during games and a few blue screens. (mainly in Empire Total War, but has also occured in CoD6) All my drivers are up to date so I am fairly sure it has something to do with something overheating.

My graphics card Temp idles at 75 Degree's C (according to Nvidia Monitor). nTune also shows that the GPU (3D) is always at 35%, I have never seen it change. Now i have been told that I will most probably have to flash my graphics card bios because of a fan speed problem that the 8800GT's have in Windows7.

This is the card i have:
Leadtek - We make dreams a reality
I would download the 3rd Bios download.

How do I flash my graphics Card?

Thankyou
Joe

JoeFish said:

My graphics card Temp idles at 75 Degree's C (according to Nvidia Monitor). nTune also shows that the GPU (3D) is always at 35%, I have never seen it change. Now i have been told that I will most probably have to flash my graphics card bios because of a fan speed problem that the 8800GT's have in Windows7.

Hi JoeFish,

To put it mildly, that particular reason is hard to swallow and extremely unlikely to be true.

Needing to do a BIOS Flash on your video card because you’re now running Windows 7 is as plausible as having to up the electricity to your computer because of Windows 7.

Not saying you don’t have fan issues, not saying a BIOS flash won’t fix a fan Issue, I did one when I had an ATI 3870 as it too had fan issues. BUT…it had nothing to do with running Windows 7, or Vista.

Flashing a video card can be tricky and if done wrong will render it dead. This is nothing to take lightly!

If you’re going to flash your card, do it for the right reasons, not because of some misguided information.

Sorry.

As to your issue, have you checked to see that the card isn’t failing or overheating? Thus causing to fan to run faster and louder.

The last driver in the line 196 (196.75) had serious problems with fans, if you are using it try updating to the latest
(197.13).
Inspect your card : fixed properly, fan not clogged with dust or simply failing ...

Strictly about flashing; I do use nvflash.exe (version 5.67) from Windows 7 x64, so there is no need to care that much about flashing from a bootable device. The process is fairly simple (but not without risk) .

Regards

JoeFish said:

G'day,
I'd first like to apologize if there is already a thread that can help me.

I have a Leadtek 8800GT 512mb and I have recently made the change from XP to Windows 7. I have been having some system crashes during games and a few blue screens. (mainly in Empire Total War, but has also occured in CoD6) All my drivers are up to date so I am fairly sure it has something to do with something overheating.

My graphics card Temp idles at 75 Degree's C (according to Nvidia Monitor). nTune also shows that the GPU (3D) is always at 35%, I have never seen it change. Now i have been told that I will most probably have to flash my graphics card bios because of a fan speed problem that the 8800GT's have in Windows7.

This is the card i have:
Leadtek - We make dreams a reality
I would download the 3rd Bios download.

How do I flash my graphics Card?

Thankyou
Joe

its nothing to do with windows , the 8800gt fan wont go over 40% untill it reaches 80 degrees , flashing your bios wont help , download and install MSI Afterburner and manually set a fan profile MSI Afterburner

or Riva Tuner and set a custom fan curve (all the instructions are easy to find on the interweb)

yes your GPU is running far too hot for idle that temp is INSANE , but the issue isnt with windows :)

Morning,

IN REPLY TO ENEMYWITHIN: The version of my graphics card is 196.21 I just looked on Nnvida and i can download a later driver, so I will do that. I thought mine was the latest since i installed it a few months ago.


Thanks for all the help, really appreciate it!

Well I am just confused as to why my games were running fine in Windows XP and now I am having all these problems in Windows 7.

I was planning on downloading this which came off the Leadtek Website:

Supporting Models : For 8800GT 512MB ONLY
New BIOS for imporving Fan module cooling capability.
Total size::[40 KB]

Due to the little explanation, I thought that might be the answer to my problem.

Ok so i will download MSI afterburn and turn up my fan speed when I am playing games, I shall see how this goes and let you know :) (If the latest Nvidia driver does not work)

Thanks again,
Joe

Cheers mate,

Well i just installed the latest Nvidia driver and it still froze on me in Call of Duty MW2. The colours went crazy and the sound stuffed up, had to reboot.

I decided to make the fan run at 100% and i didn't even last 10minutes into a game and the PC just blacked out and rebooted itself.

MSI Afterburn says this:

________________________________________________________________________________
Display device : GeForce 8800 GT on G92 GPU
Display driver : 8.17.11.9745, ForceWare 197.45
On-board memory : 512MB
BIOS : 62.92.1f.00.08
GUID : VEN_10DE&DEV_0611&SUBSYS_2AB0107D&REV_A2&BUS_1&DEV_0&FN_0

On-Screen Display server
________________________________________________________________________________
Active client : On-Screen Display module
Active 3D process : not detected


This is really fustrating lol, any help would be much appreciated :)