I recently bought a 2nd-hand surface book 2 with the gtx 1060.
However, i have been having the following issues with the GPU:
A few seconds after running compute tasks on the gpu (like rendering with cuda in blender or running inference with lm-studio with both cuda and vulkan backends) the nvidia gpu crashes.
In the Device-Manager i get the following message after the crash:
“Windows cannot use this hardware device because it has been prepared for “safe removal”, but it has not been removed from the computer. (Code 47)
To fix this problem, unplug this device from your computer and then plug it in again”.
After detaching and reattaching the keyboard the gpu will be available again (until it crashes again). The cash always happens after the task is done and never during processing. I don’t get the issue with gaming tasks (so far only tested superposition with directX and openGL). I also tried Linux Mint with blender and i didn’t have that issue (tested it only once).
So far, i tried everything i could think of but no luck.
Anyone got an idea on how to find the source and maybe fix it?
That GPU is EOL. No more driver support. My guess is some Windoze update decided to update your drivers to the latest WHQL ones and boom, or old driver that is no longer compatible with some Windoze NT kernel APIs or CUDA APIs?
Or it may just be hardware failure, if your laptop is often hot to the surface (unintended pun), the PCB might have warped slightly which can cause PCIe integrity errors and all kinds of fun.
Or since you mention it does not happen in gaming, it could be a heat related hardware safety shutdown? Or VRAM corruption, which means dead GPU effectively.
Since you also mention running ML workloads, could it be running out of VRAM and then crashing the driver? Do you have the 3GB variant or the 6GB variant of the 1060? And does the LLM model + context + other running apps fit into VRAM with room to spare?
Lots of possible reasons.
Ensure you are using the correct legacy branch of their driver. The last update for it was this one:
Any newer versions will eventually break compatibility, as NVIDIA is no longer QA testing those EOL cards.
See this Reddit thread on how to install the last supported legacy driver linked above, it requires some trickery (possibly, maybe not, see updates on original/main post):
Thanks for your reply. it somewhat helped me solve the issue. At least i hope the issue has been resolved.
When i first got the device i tried to download the latest drivers from nvidia which failed to install. I also tried to install the nvidia app, which also didn’t install because the hardware is not supported. This led me to believe, that it was a special GPU which required special drivers from microsoft. The ones provided by microsoft/windows updates are from the 22nd of Jan 2021.
Reading in the links you posted, i was inspired to try around, however, the earliest drivers i could download from nvidia for the 1060 still failed to install.
Finally, I remembered that the cuda sdk installer also provides graphics drivers and nvidia provides the cuda sdk installers all the way back to cuda 1.0. So i tried the cuda 11.8 installer and installed the drivers and the geforce experience app. From there, i was able to upgrade the geforce experience to the nvidia app and install the latest drivers that supported this gpu.