Gadgetory

we have to tighten our TX's and today we're doing a shot here in the test lab because one of them is not working it's stuck at 13 50 megahertz you might remember this issue that would be that one right there might remember this issue from when we got some user cards and some cards from you all and one of the EVGA cards was stuck at 1350 megahertz that was a twenty atti this is a Titan RT X so quite a bit different in terms of the issue it's about two times the difference in price and this is something we are now actively working with Nvidia they actually have a local office to us with an FA e there and they're sending someone out to swap cards with us so we're planning to give them this card because it is stuck at 13 to 30 megahertz for perspective it should be over 1900 megahertz and they're gonna give us a different one that way we can get back to testing so we have this card has gone through all the game tests that one we need for SLI and that's gonna put a bit of a hold on things but today I'm going to demonstrate how that is stuck at 1350 and what exactly we're going through before that this video is brought to you by us and the gamers access store you can go to store documents nexus net to pick up one of our ceramic mugs critically-acclaimed mod mats or educational video card tear down and PCB Anatomy posters that teach the names and placements of all the key PCB components learn more at store des cameras XS net or click the link below here's the issue here's the recap originally with the EVGA 20 80 TI that we had from a viewer that was stuck at 1350 megahertz it raised some alarm bells at in-video which is a good thing but this was the only instance that they knew of that the card was stuck at 1350 same for EVGA and so the problem is we were able to fix it and that's a problem because that is hard to diagnose it because it's been fixed so we fixed it by we tried flashing it once with the original bios that was on there and didn't do anything I'm still stuck at 1350 and the power target was showing 0 which is something another symptom we're seeing here so we zoom in on the screen you'll see a 0% right there and that's the same exact thing we saw in the EVGA card so to fix this we just reflashed it and we flashed it twice the first flash was that the original bios did not fix anything the second flash was with a slightly altered v bios but there are no significant changes that we knew of if any changes at all and that fixed it so problem solved we sent it back to EVGA anyway on behalf of the user and they I mean you can't really do anything with it because now it's fixed just for BIOS versions if you're curious this messed up card is ninety point oh two point two three point zero zero point zero one and I saved previously the V BIOS from this card and the other one and on the original ROM for the good Titan it's 9002 2300 one which is the same exact ID and if you do a comparison of the two binaries the same and if we open up NV flash we can also if you've never done this you can download it on techpowerup or similar site any flash 64 is what you want you just do like - - protect off and that will disable the right protection and then you can do a save name the BIOS ROM and that exports it which is what we've done there now if we wanted to load the good BIOS what we do is - - 6 I'm not going to type the rest I don't want to accidentally hit enter and then mess up and videos ability to troubleshoot this and then he type in the good BIOS name and flash it and that would be the end of that so we do think this is probably still an uncommon issue but if you did run into it and you don't want to go through the RMA process this tool and me flash is how you would probably fix it you could potentially just export your own and BIOS from the card to enemy flash 64 DXE - - you do protect it off and then the next thing you would do is save and give it like original BIOS ROM we can show how that works actually and then after that you would do the dash dash 6 like the number 6 and and target the ROM and then that would write it to the card write it back to it you have to reboot in between and and then it should probably fix it for you but we're not going to do that today so we want to help try and diagnose this issue at this point even though I really want to do sli testing now and I know I can flash that with the V bios from the one behind me or even probably just reflash it with its own and fix it because when we extracted the V bios from both of these cards the binaries are the same it's the same v bios so there's really no reason it should be messed up but I'm 99% confident it's a V bios issue in flash and we'll fix it so anyway I'll show you what's going on what's happening is yes the card is stuck at 1350 megahertz but some key identifiers to what a potential problem might be would be to look at the the readouts for hardware monitor or through GPU C and we've shown these in the past and gbz especially where you've got a perf cap perf cap reason performance cap reason this is something we've used for overclocking you'll see it's display an idle right now and ideally under a load like fire strike ultra on the background it should be showing something like maybe power PWR or thermal which would be THM and and this is neither of those another common one is V rel for voltage limits so those are kind of the limits you hit typically and you will hit a limit at by design you'll hit something it's just a matter of which one idle should not be where we're sitting because it's not so there's a problem and 13 50 megahertz also just happens to be the base clock of the card and by coincidence the 20 ATT I was also stuck at 1350 which makes me kind of curious about what's going on there because that wasn't its base clock so it might just be coincidence but other than that we can look at a lack of settings here so gpu-z typically for this card on on the other one we have that works it will have a readout for the current power the power consumption and that should be like - 80 watts + under stock conditions so we don't even have that it's not appearing which means something's wrong and other things not appearing under hardware monitor on precision x1 with this red number one we should have another option above GPU clock says total power or something to that effect and that is not appearing so we've enabled the other ones that we have power limit voltage limit temp limit no load limit and GPD usage all enabled and if we scroll through all of this stuff you'll see GPU clock 1350 memory clocks actually functioning because GPZ shows 1750 point 2 megahertz then you multiply it out and that gives you the correct clock number so that the memory is fine GPU temperature is at 63 which is fine power limit this is a binary so it's either 0 or 1 and we are not hitting a power limit so it's showing zero voltage limit binary it's showing 0 and the limit currently temp limit 0 no load limit is showing 1 so we are at no load limit which just means it's not really being treated like it's under low it's not being treated like it's doing anything GPU usage is still showing up about a hundred percent though and then memory use it's not really relevant but it is showing to about two gigabytes but it doesn't really matter and then frame rate I don't know how perfectly accurate this is but it is consistent with the frame rate number we're getting in fire strike right now you probably can't even read it is too blurry I was about 33 so it is actually putting out frames clearly just the wrong everything else in terms of the core clock there's also this really cool bug so other than the power being 0 right now if we change the fan speeds I've had issues here I don't know if it's gonna repro right now yes it it did do that change the fan speed the fan speed did not go up you'd probably hear it on my mic if it did and what we're getting is everything slowing to a crawl so it's still rendering in one frame so it's we're at about probably fractions of a frame per second right now or maybe maybe out about 0.25 frames per second so this is this is clearly a bug it should be increasing the fan speed not sure what's causing that the last thing to show here is we have thermocouples hooked up to this so we have a teardown that will go live after this video goes live and we did the teardown to stick thermocouples on here to try and diagnose things like we did the 20 series 20 atti so just like with the 2080 TI the thermals are completely within reason they're well within spec and even when the when fire strike is running at its 36 fps or whatever there was fire strike ultra so 53 degrees Celsius that is for the that is for the memory vram and that's for the hottest memory module 52 point 5 degrees for the hottest MOSFET that we could pinpoint both of those are way within spec memories under 90 95 that's fine the MOSFETs under 120 550 by a lot so that's fine then ambient is 23 just for reference so yeah took it apart to stick thermocouples on it just to confirm just like with the 20 series cards that you all were having problems with for the 2080 TI is that everyone sent in one of the things we looked at was is it thermal is it some component that's not reported in GP z like mosfet memory the answer was no and so we redid that test here stock thermocouples on mosfet and memory and the answer is again no it is not thermal so tearing it down unfortunately in putting thermocouples on it doesn't help us here because it didn't really teach us anything and the board itself you know it's it's creating this 13 50 megahertz lock you look at the board all the board components look fine so this is a probably a either a lower-level issue that we can't see like in silicon or something but that seems unlikely and or AV bios issue and that seems likely because last time it was a V bios issue and flashing this would almost certainly fix it but we are going to leave this one defective so that we can help Nvidia try and troubleshoot it because I'm very curious what the problem is I know they are as well the engineers there you know we can respect the position they're in because you make millions of video cards and then there are two that I happen to get that gets stuck at 1350 and one of them wasn't even it wasn't even mine to begin with it was a viewers we just ended up with it so it's not an issue with our test setup either because like there was a third party involved that sent it to us and yeah we can we can respect the difficulty of making that many millions of cards and not being able to encounter one in your own controlled environment or labs so we're gonna try and help them out maybe they can solve it does seem to be a low-frequency issue but if you also encounter this let us know because it's it's hard to know exactly how many people are running into this so first account below if you've encountered this on yours otherwise we're still gonna be doing SLI testing we're just waiting from point of this video about maybe 16 hours 12 16 hours to get a swab from Nvidia locally and then we can continue SLI testing we already have the review for the the single card done and that's using this one which is working without issue so we're good on that but anyway just wanted to show you the problem and show that it's come back 13 50 megahertz lock was not apparently entirely unique to that one EVGA card and videos very interested in it they want to solve it and so that's good and we're gonna try and help them out with it because it's it's a pretty serious problem I mean the card is are they useless otherwise so you could RMA it but hopefully just doesn't happen again so keep us posted if you run into this with any of your cards and we'll do the same for you as always subscribe for more go to that's lovely go to stored on cameras accessed tot net to pick up a shirt not like the one I'm wearing because it's out of stock you bought too many of the disappointment shirts we're gonna refresh this design into a front only design at some point or go to patreon.com/scishow and access and check back for the review of the Titan r-tx thank you for watching I'll see you all next time