Help to Avoid NVDA Channel Exceptions Through Software and/or Hardware

Here's the screenshot of my Heaven Benchmark results.

I'm running at Medium quality, full 1080p, fullscreen. Antialiasing is turned OFF because I get graphics corruption with any antialiasing turned on.

This is also with all the extra settings like Volumetric Shadows and Occlusion turned on, but of course Vsync is OFF.

Benchmark score is 494, average fps is 19.6

very nice for a 30$ card.i also remember gt220, 4850 came out at the same time too.

I paid $50 for it, but I'm still amazed that I get that performance from a card this old and only 512MB of DDR3 RAM. It's significantly better than my 2GB GT 640 even discounting the crashes! But it is not as good as the GTX 650 I tested for a while.

i was just saying that the 4850 is 30$ on new egg and 35$ at frys brick and mortar.as long as your happy thats all that matters.

Well, after months using the 4850, I still was getting random freezes. However, when the freezes happen with a Radeon card, the error log doesn't show anything indicating the graphics subsystem. I decided to go through a few days of rigorous testing, and finally discovered that one of my memory sticks was the culprit. Going back to the NVIDIA card without that stick in, I had no crashes, but when only that stick was in, I could reliably make the machine freeze using the Heaven Benchmark program.

Therefore, I have concluded that my problem was a memory problem. Rather than replacing the memory stick, I have adjusted the timings for the memory and increased the voltage to it. It seems that everything is running well now, but I'll come back if I learn anything more.

Google led me to this thread. I have two hackintoshes, one about 5 years old, and a 2 yr old one. The newest one has always gotten these freezes, even after swapping graphics cards. I even tried the 8800GTX that was in my old one and it still froze. I now have a GeForce 210 1024 MB and it still freezes. Tried installing fresh OS. Nothing seems to help. I can't play a 3d game for more than a few minutes.
This led me to believe something similar.. there must be some other hardware at fault. Can you tell me how you tested the memory? And, what did you do specifically in the timings/voltage to fix it? I'm desperate to try to find a solution for this!!
Thanks

To test the memory, I removed one stick, rebooted, ran the Heaven app, and the system didn't crash.

Then, I powered off, swapped the memory sticks, booted, ran the Heaven app, and the system froze.

Then, I had read about how to increase the stability of an overclocked system, and tried those same kind of settings even though my system wasn't overclocked. My memory is rated at 9 9 24 9 or something like that. Since I don't overclock, I don't really care about the memory timings. However, I changed the 9s in my bios to 10 and changed the 24 to 27, and that improved stability with both sticks plugged in.

However, I still got random crashes/freezes, so I have since removed the problem stick, gone back to the recommended default memory timings, and am running now with 4GB of RAM instead of 8GB until I can buy some more RAM.

Bingo!
Adjusting memory timing/voltage in the BIOS appears to solve the problem. 48 hours without any crashes/freezes. I've also patched the AGPM a few months ago but it was not enough.

thanks to jeffmikels

@jeffmikels @vidalino I know this is an old thread but can you tell me what exactly you did for timing/voltage at BIOS?
Did you lowered it or increased it?

I am using ga-z97x-ud5h mainboard with Nvidia 660, what should I do?

I have the exact same problem

balkan.balkan.tonyma said:

@jeffmikels @vidalino I know this is an old thread but can you tell me what exactly you did for timing/voltage at BIOS?
Did you lowered it or increased it?

I am using ga-z97x-ud5h mainboard with Nvidia 660, what should I do?

I have the exact same problem

Click to expand...

This is indeed an old thread, you may or may not get an answer. I would suggest that you update your forum profile or signature to correctly represent the hardware that you are running. It would be good to know what version of OS X you are also using.
There was common RAM issue that appeared in Mavericks that may or may not be related to your issue - it has helped some with freezing issues. You can see more in the following link:
http://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/boot-flag-no-zp.150849/#post-973331

also:
http://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/troubleshooting-issuing-boot-flags.104536/
http://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/how-to-edit-a-plist.104463/