Users Report AMD Crimson Driver Heating And Killing GPUs

So they go like 5 months without releasing a driver and when they finally do it kills cards. Fucking lol. AMD is a bad joke these days.
 
No issues here with a 290, it is paired with a fan profile with afterburner.

Although upon first installing I had the cpu and memory default to 300/300 and wouldn't go any higher than that until I used a default profile on afterburner, but I think that was an afterburner issue not a Crimson issue.
 
My experiences with the new Crimson driver on my R9 290 under Windows 10 resulted in a fresh Windows install using the last official Windows 10 build (15.7.1).

I was playing Smite with my wife, and suddenly, mid-match, the game started stuttering badly. Turning on the built-in Framerate monitor, I noticed the framerate jumping all over the place from 149 down to 27fps. Even if I was in a location with no movement or animation. Quitting and reloading the game did not help, neither did rebooting.

The trick is, Ive seen this problem before when I was beta testing Windows 10, and when it happened the only fix was to reinstall Windows (seriously - tried everything short of that to no effect). It only happened the one time, and with a beta build of Windows 10 - never really thought about it much afterwards until this.

I experimented this time with backing up and restoring my system, and each time Crimson was installed, Smite went to hell. The older drivres work just fine, though...
 
These drivers broke BO3 and SW:BF for me. Couldn't play either without immediate crash to desktop. Fan wasn't effected, just driver would crash.

I'll wait for a couple more versions.
 
Smells like FUD. The GPU will halt the system if it overheats.

Reminds me of an incident years ago when FUD went around the forums about nVidia drivers somehow killing monitors.

Without a doubt, FUD. The only real way you can "kill" your card is to mod your vbios (which this doesn't) or change default voltage (which this doesn't). Fan default adjustments will, at worst, throttle a card.

You're right: this is likely similar to the situation with the "bad" nV drivers from a couple years back. I'm betting those complaining either were sitting on a bad card (due to manufacturing errors, or more likely, because said user made a woopsee when tweaking) and are opportunistically making noise or were just people who's cards coincidentally went kaput.
 
My Sapphire 390X got fans locked "at 20%", which its not only locked is really stuck OFF unable to move, with or without crimson, I normally use afterburner for OSD and custom fan profile, afterburner can't make the fans turn ON, the profile seems to be working because If in the OSD the fan RPM move as like they were working, but the fact is the fans are completely turned off. used Trixx no way to make it work, reverted to catalyst 15.7 and guess what also doesn't work, fans just don't work anymore and it was after the Crimson driver installation.

Do a system restore to before you installed the Crimson drivers. Also, do the fans spin well in the motherboard bios? Your information is incomplete and does not tell us if it is a hardware or software issue. Personally, I think it is an incompatibility with the overclocking utilities since I had to roll back and then remove afterburner.
 
First thing I did when I installed the drivers was look where to change fan speed. I always run my fans at at least 50%.
 
I had to pull it because it broke WoWs. I was also not impressed when I clicked on "advanced" I think it was, and the old Catalyst control panel dialog came up. It was kinda like Tivo still having a few SD menu's that just show up uninvited.
 
Honestly, it sounds like more people fucking up on their own. Either not installing correctly, not uninstalling previous versions, or not adjusting the settings after install. AMD gets the blame, when people are most likely just being the idiots they always are.
 
Installed it on my air cooled secondary PC with an R9 290. The fans are working fine and revving up under load.

I'm tired of all the BS and FUD about GPUs and alleged 'driver issues.' I don't know if it's just stupid teenagers comparing their dicks or competing marketing departments trying to sway potential customers, but it's really fucking stupid.
 
This is why it's a lot easier and simpler to just get whatever graphics stuff comes with your processor and for that processor to be cool running enough to not need pointlessly dumb stuff like cooling fans to begin with. It's stupid in modern times when we can have cell phones with like a gajillion processor cores and graphics junk running without any fans that our much larger computers don't also do it. Stuff like Intel Braswell can be passively cooled and the graphics in it are perfectly fine. It's peoples' expectations that got them into this situation with their desire to waste vast amounts of time and effort sticking in huge video cards that waste tons of electricity. The fact that people are blaming AMD for their poor purchase decisions just underscores their inability to be responsible for their own actions and to make smarter use of their money to begin with.
 
I haven't encountered that issue but I also set my GPU fan to run at a manually set speed of 60% so maybe that's why. I also monitor my GPU temp on my second monitor along with task manager, Core Temp and Afterburner. At any point I can see my CPU temp, GPU temp, VRAM usage, CPU usage, RAM usage.
 
Honestly, it sounds like more people fucking up on their own. Either not installing correctly, not uninstalling previous versions, or not adjusting the settings after install. AMD gets the blame, when people are most likely just being the idiots they always are.

If people aren't installing it correctly then maybe AMD should have spent 10 minutes writing an install guide for people with CCC installed already.
 
If people aren't installing it correctly then maybe AMD should have spent 10 minutes writing an install guide for people with CCC installed already.

I just installed it on top of the previous driver like I always do, no problems on either of my machines. Sounds like there's a compatibility issue with overclocking software like afterburner that's screwing with fan settings, but at this point I'm convinced that the stories of GPUs 'dying' are bullshit. The GPU has driver-independent thermal protection just like all modern CPUs, if they overheat they throttle and halt before damage can occur.
 
Well, I just removed and reinstalled the Crimson drivers on my work PC. (The panel selection on the right click menu was missing after I swapped video cards.) After that, the fan control was set to on instead of Auto and the settings would not save because cnet.exe would crash on shutdown. I have removed them for now until the fix is released but, I highly doubt the cards are burning up unless someone is disabling the overheat protection or overclocking.
 
This issue only effects people using AMD's overdrive (overclocking) built into the drivers and when resetting to default it sets fan speed to 20% rather than auto. Can't see many people using it and if they are not very techincal they won't be overclocking to begin with. I use afterburner myself
 
My Sapphire 390X got fans locked "at 20%", which its not only locked is really stuck OFF unable to move, with or without crimson, I normally use afterburner for OSD and custom fan profile, afterburner can't make the fans turn ON, the profile seems to be working because If in the OSD the fan RPM move as like they were working, but the fact is the fans are completely turned off. used Trixx no way to make it work, reverted to catalyst 15.7 and guess what also doesn't work, fans just don't work anymore and it was after the Crimson driver installation.

Use Display driver uninstaller, the chances are it's part of the registry which is why reinstalling drivers may not fix the issue.

http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html
 
I uninstalled crimson drivers, rebooted , reinstalled 15.7.1 and all my problems disappeared, FWIW.
 
I never had this problem because I never used the Overdrive profiles in Crimson. I overclocked with Sapphire TRIXX. If I leave the program running I can have a custom fan curve. If I close it the card reverts to the default fan curve.
 
Installed it on my air cooled secondary PC with an R9 290. The fans are working fine and revving up under load.

I'm tired of all the BS and FUD about GPUs and alleged 'driver issues.' I don't know if it's just stupid teenagers comparing their dicks or competing marketing departments trying to sway potential customers, but it's really fucking stupid.

Its always something with you fucking people. It cant just be what it is, its either we are all Nvidia fanboys out bashing AMD for fun or we are idiots that broke our own shit and want to blame AMD or whatever dumb fucking bullshit you come up with to stay in denial.

AMD DRIVERS ARE FUCKING GARBAGE. Get the fuck over it. So sick of the god damned AMD fanboys blaming everyone BUT AMD when the shit hits the fan.

I know this forum hates calling out fanboys but enough is fucking enough... It really makes certain forums absolutely unbearable. This is an actual qyuote from one of these guys in the AMD subreddit talking about AMD drivers, you cant even make this shit up.
But if something goes wrong on a system that happens to have an AMD component, ALL fingers point at AMD, where if the same problem happens on an Nvidia system, people will thoroughly diagnose a unit and take a much more cohesive approach.

I really wish the mods here would stop punishing the ones calling out these forum ruining fanboys and start doing something about the fanboys themselves. They have literally ruined certain subforums and will threadcrap and flame all day long if you dare criticize. This happens in AMD, Nvidia, AMD processor and Intel threads but the AMD graphics threads are the absolute fucking WORST...
 
Working fine for me. Fallout 4 for 5 hours perfectly on a XFX 390.
Not saying the issue doesn't exist as it obviously does. Still no issue here.
 
AMD DRIVERS ARE FUCKING GARBAGE. Get the fuck over it.

I've used a mix of AMD/ATI, Nvidia, and 3DFX GPUs over the years. I've never been tempted to make any sort of claims like that about any of them. I can name three issues I've seen personally: poor Nvidia support for Vista for about 6 months, corrupt cursor issues with AMD cards for about 6 months, and poor SLI/Crossfire scaling from both of them at various points in time.

Get over yourself.
 
I have a 970 with a 390X on the way to try out. Interracial master race represent. I've been having minor issues with Nvidia drivers crashing since upgrading to 10, we'll see how AMD fares. I might skip Crimson for now though.
 
Its always something with you fucking people. It cant just be what it is, its either we are all Nvidia fanboys out bashing AMD for fun or we are idiots that broke our own shit and want to blame AMD or whatever dumb fucking bullshit you come up with to stay in denial.

AMD DRIVERS ARE FUCKING GARBAGE. Get the fuck over it. So sick of the god damned AMD fanboys blaming everyone BUT AMD when the shit hits the fan.

I know this forum hates calling out fanboys but enough is fucking enough... It really makes certain forums absolutely unbearable. This is an actual qyuote from one of these guys in the AMD subreddit talking about AMD drivers, you cant even make this shit up.


I really wish the mods here would stop punishing the ones calling out these forum ruining fanboys and start doing something about the fanboys themselves. They have literally ruined certain subforums and will threadcrap and flame all day long if you dare criticize. This happens in AMD, Nvidia, AMD processor and Intel threads but the AMD graphics threads are the absolute fucking WORST...
Someone got up on the wrong side of the bed, but i could say the same with nVidia's drivers/hardware when i gone to Windows 7 i used to get BSOD's on boot with nvxxx.dll drivers tried reinstalling from safe mode and still got them, thats on my nVidia 470GTX nVidia fixed it eventually, but then i gone to the R9 290 and it's been fine ever since except one issue... for me anyway... thus far. I have had lot of bad luck with nVidia cards i have had alot just die for no apparent reason the 8800GTX, 260GTX where you play a flash video and the computer would freeze and, the GTX 260 died while just browsing the internet, kinda pissed off really since the GTX260 was a year old and eVGA wouldn't honour the warranty since it was bought off of ebay even though it was factory sealed and never opened and registered on their website a week of having it. The 8800GTX died but the distrubuter gave a 9800GTX as a replcement which was slower.

As for the R9 290 it locks up while playing 3D Mark at stock clocks, if i greatly underclock it, it works fine but i have used furmark and other equally or more demanding applications with no issues so i am not sure i may RMA, waiting on the R9 290 stocks to deplete and RMA it so i can get a R9 380 LOL, but really it's a none issue 3D Mark is not a game but still you never know it maybe affected by other applications in the future so better safe than sorry, does it both my AMD and Intel based system so not a compatibility issue and other R9 290X works fine so not a power issue either.
 
Anecdotal:
I've been ati the vast majority of my life, aside from an S3 S2000 back when UT came out and an 8800gts (you'd be an idiot not to have one back in their heyday). Otherwise I went from 4870 to 6870 to Xfire 6870's and today I'm on a 770 4GB.

Ati drivers have been trash for a long time and have always felt "buggy" to me. Nvidia drivers aren't innocent of issues, and both sides suck ass when it comes to Crossfire/SLI support, but Nvidia just feels far more stable, and their updates are much more often. With ati, often it would be something that caused Blue Screens or hardlocks; with nvidia, crashed game or an error during driver installs, with error codes that actually point to something.

Further, the UI and settings possible with Nvidia are a leap ahead of AMD, with MSI/Riva/Other 3rd party tools pretty much required to get the same functionality that Nvidia has by default.

TLDR: I went from being skeptical of Nvidia, thinking they were just as bad as AMD; but my experience having switched has completely changed my opinion.
 
Well, I just removed and reinstalled the Crimson drivers on my work PC. (The panel selection on the right click menu was missing after I swapped video cards.) After that, the fan control was set to on instead of Auto and the settings would not save because cnet.exe would crash on shutdown. I have removed them for now until the fix is released but, I highly doubt the cards are burning up unless someone is disabling the overheat protection or overclocking.

The update fixed all my issues so we are good to go. From what I understand, AMD also provided some additional games patches and fixes in the update so kudos to them. :)
 
Anecdotal:
I've been ati the vast majority of my life, aside from an S3 S2000 back when UT came out and an 8800gts (you'd be an idiot not to have one back in their heyday). Otherwise I went from 4870 to 6870 to Xfire 6870's and today I'm on a 770 4GB.

Ati drivers have been trash for a long time and have always felt "buggy" to me. Nvidia drivers aren't innocent of issues, and both sides suck ass when it comes to Crossfire/SLI support, but Nvidia just feels far more stable, and their updates are much more often. With ati, often it would be something that caused Blue Screens or hardlocks; with nvidia, crashed game or an error during driver installs, with error codes that actually point to something.

Further, the UI and settings possible with Nvidia are a leap ahead of AMD, with MSI/Riva/Other 3rd party tools pretty much required to get the same functionality that Nvidia has by default.

TLDR: I went from being skeptical of Nvidia, thinking they were just as bad as AMD; but my experience having switched has completely changed my opinion.

Antecdotal evidence and opinion. However, I am glad everything has been working for you though. :)
 
I installed these on a fresh install of windows, w/o any prior version and haven't had this issue with the fan being stuck. I got worried b/c I think my card was on the list of those effected. Seems to only be happening randomly to some people?
 
The update fixed all my issues so we are good to go. From what I understand, AMD also provided some additional games patches and fixes in the update so kudos to them. :)

Crimson now is working great for me and the performance on Battlefront is awesome.
 
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