Black screen of death with 5970

R

rampantandroid

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 14, 2006
Messages
1,962
Hi all,

I recently sold my old 5970 off to a friend, along with a X58/920 system I built.

Now, he's been having black screens of death when doing stuff...that doesn't really stress the system - when chatting, playing a video file, gaming, furmark, flickering while doing Intel burn test (the 920 is OCed to 3.2) and running unigine.

I stuck my multimeter on his PSU 12v rail and it's stable at 12.13...and I see no error messages in the windows event log for the black screens.

What could this be? Memtest OpenCL shows nothing; memtest86 similarly shows nothing...Furmark can sometimes run stable for ages. Intel burn test used up 4.5GB of his 6GB (and windows otherwise pushed him to 90% of RAM used) and showed no errors.

The best I got him to do so far was drop from the latest AMD drivers (11.4?) to 10.11 and so far that seems to have helped...if that isn't the issue though, what else is there to try? I've told him to remove the OC next if he sees further issues...but I'm otherwise at a loss.

Are there known issues with the 11.4 drivers (wouldn't surprise me at all)?
 
Definitely put all of the clocks/voltages throughout the system back to stock speeds and see if it still happens.
 
I figured I'd update this: The driver itself was at fault.

Dropping to the last 10.XX driver stopped the black screens, and reintroduced the amazing driver crashed when watching flash videos.

So glad I sold that POS card off, and so glad I sold it to a friend willing to deal with the shortcomings of it. Performs great in games, otherwise it (and it's been RMAed on TWO occasions, so it isn't the hardware) has been a total turd.
 
my 5970 rarely presented a problem,very stable in over 25 titles and never a 2d problem
maybe a hardware conflict could be the explanation for yours being a turd,the psu is suspect
 
ta addict#2 said:
my 5970 rarely presented a problem,very stable in over 25 titles and never a 2d problem
maybe a hardware conflict could be the explanation for yours being a turd,the psu is suspect
Click to expand...

3 different PSUs, 2 different mobos, 3 different RAM sticks...I'm going to just point at AMD drivers.

Oh, and I also suffered the wonderful 'downclocked in 2D mode until it's unstable' bug back in the day and had to OC the 2D mode. The 5970 was my first ATI card in ~8 years, and it taught me (reminded me?) to avoid ATI/AMD once again.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top