How to Fix your HD 7970 from crashing / locking up on monitor sleep

Many of you have been complaining about your 7970 locking up once your monitor goes to sleep.

What happens is basically, AMD's powerplay feature kicks in, turns-off and crashes the video driver. The result is a black screen you cannot recover from. Most have mouse cursor function, but that's it. Control + Alt + Delete results in a dead screen as well. Basically, you are forced to reboot.

I've even read where, across many threads, by my count, at least 10 to 12 people have RMA'd their 7970's because of them thinking they had defect cards.

Because AMD has a horrible track record when it comes to fixing these types of things, god only knows when this issue will be addressed. It's possible a hotfix is out there for this and I'm just clueless and have missed it somehow.

Here is the solution. Download MSI Afterburner. Once installed and you have your settings the way you like them, within the MSIAfterburner directory, find "MSIAfterburner.cfg" and edit "UnofficialOverclockingMode" changing 0 to 1. This keeps AMD's powerplay on and thus, keeps your HD 7970 video driver from crashing / locking up your system.

Does this prevent the voltages from changing? I have the issue where I believe the driver does not kick on the load voltages when its set to 1.2v and it gives a black screen driver crash even with force constant voltage checked.

Strange, because even when I was not using MSI AB beta12 I did not get crashes/lockups at the moments you describe. What I have had however (constantly) is that while my monitor is in sleep mode and the fans are stopped (and I guess the card is using this Zero-core new tech for low-energy standby) the fans of my GPU get a "jolt" every 1 min exactly and spin for a sec then go back to idle (and that makes some noise from the brutal start-up of the fans). I don't mean to steal your thread, I'm just reporting 1 more issue with the screen-saving mode.

I had the same issue. For some reason Windows automatically set to turn off the display adapter after so many minutes of idle. Mine was maybe 15 minutes. So I would also get the black screens and had to reset, as well as the stupid fan jolts. I set it to Never turn off the display adapter and all is well. Not sure why this was set up this way on my 7950 but not on my 6870.....

I have not had this problem, fortunately. I have had another small issue that about 1 out of 4 times that I start my computer up, I get through the BIOS and my computer boots up with no display. I'm in Windows with a black screen. Restarting fixes it 100% of the time, but it's strange nonetheless.

Ive not had this problem either, but my video card very very rarely is under 99% utilization. Since when im not gaming, its mining.

Yeah .... I didn't notice it either for several days because i was using my computer constantly. Then one morning I came downstairs and hear the fan whizzing ... almost sounded like someone sawing wood outside. Short bursts every now and then. Again, not really sure why windows would change this setting going from 6870 to 7950....

I have never experienced this issue. I have left my machine on overnight, and all day, and not once have I seen it crash the system when coming out of display sleep mode.

Same here, have not experienced this issue

I have not experienced this issue either. The only issue I encounter is from time to time when the computer comes back from sleep the middle monitor(DisplayPort Lennovo ThinkVision) is without signal. Powering the monitor off then on again fixes this. Wow sorry to hear you've been having problems, but at least your found a fix. I would make sure you have the latest bios for your motherboard, then set it to safe defaults. Then of course configure everything you need to. May just be an incompatible set of power saving settings in the bios.

i can confirm i got this issue, so it does exist - i turned off sleep mode and that sorted it out - not cared about power usage or electrical bill. Really annoying bug though, didn't help i was diagnosing SSD issues at the same time.

I have this issue also. Just used your instructions with afterburner.. I guess I will see if it works.

Thanks.

It turned out MSI Afterburner was causing this issue (with unofficial overclocking enabled) for me. I stopped using unofficial overclocking mode (and just extended the clock limits) and now the card works fine.

What do you mean, extended the clock limits. I still got pickups after following this advice.

Bosom said:

What do you mean, extended the clock limits. I still got pickups after following this advice.

Click to expand...

Right click on your Afterburner shortcut, and use the command line switch -xcl in the target. After running it once and rebooting, remove that switch and run Afterburner normally. The clock limits will have been lifted (in CCC too as well, I might add), and you don't have to run "unofficial overclocking mode" anymore.

Kaynar said:

Strange, because even when I was not using MSI AB beta12 I did not get crashes/lockups at the moments you describe. What I have had however (constantly) is that while my monitor is in sleep mode and the fans are stopped (and I guess the card is using this Zero-core new tech for low-energy standby) the fans of my GPU get a "jolt" every 1 min exactly and spin for a sec then go back to idle (and that makes some noise from the brutal start-up of the fans). I don't mean to steal your thread, I'm just reporting 1 more issue with the screen-saving mode.

Click to expand...

This is the exact symptoms my Sapphire 7950 is exhibiting.

This sounds like the famous blue screen of the 5870. Will AMD ever learn?

I did the -xcl fix (thank you Mr. K6) with afterburner, and now I no longer get black screen lockups, but I do still get 'display driver has crashed and recovered" after my monitor goes to sleep for about 5 minutes.

It's not a total crash anymore though. That's better. Here's to hoping they fix this stuff officially soon!

hey all, i seem to be having this problem too.

i recently built a new pc with a sapphire 7970. everything is brand new and a new win7 64bit install. diags and stress tests all pass fine. idle/load temps seem normal as well. my system is not overclocked at all, cpu and gpu are all running stock frequencies.

Usually i set my screensaver(the stock windows mystify screensaver) to activate at 15 minutes and my monitor to power off(turns the power light to amber) after 30 minutes of idle time. with this configuration, i would get weird video like in the link below. and this would usually happen when i attempt to 'wake' the screen/monitor. my system is not set to standby or hibernate. just the screen 'sleeps.' sometimes it seems as if the screen resolution temporarily changes to 640x480 cuz i see an enlarged mouse arrow. despite the ugly screen, I can still press ctrl+alt+del and log in and all is normal.

http://imgur.com/a/gnRXy

to alleviate this issue, i started just leaving a screensaver on and disabling the 'turn monitor off after xx minutes' and physically powering off my monitor. for the most part, it seems to work well. when i come back to the computer after awhile, i just power on my lcd, see my screensaver like normal, then just log in. i have noticed that randomly the pc locks up. i can't ping it. i turn my lcd on, and it turns amber like it's not getting a signal at all. then i just have to hard reboot it.

i have a sapphire 7970 stock and im not overclocking at all. i might be in a few months, but i dont really see a need to overclock at the moment.

the msi software doesn't seem to be running upon boot up. i've actually only used the software to run benchmarks and watch temps, but i've never actually overclocked. should i just uninstall the msi software since im not using it? is the msi software supposed to launch upon bootup? if i make changes to "MSIAfterburner.cfg" how would that change my current state if msi isn't launching or running upon boot up?

i just had a few hard reboots yesterday

I have the exact same issue described by the OP. In fact, it started happening directly after I upgraded from a 6950 to a 7970. I know it's the 7970, because I have one monitor plugged into it, and one into my HD Graphics 3000 and the 7970 remains black when I come back to the PC, while the Intel connected monitor wakes up fine and I can move the cursor around on it, but that's it.

This happens with the 13.1, 13.3 and 13.5 drivers. The MSI Afterburner workaround mentioned here does not fix it for me. Super annoying, because otherwise, the card is great.

Try downloading the latest Afterburner beta and disabling ULPS (Settings -> General Tab). I just tested monitor sleep on my setup and have no issues.

I did had the same problem back in last summer when I flashed the BIOS with the GHz upgrade from Sapphire, but with the August driver update, it never happened to me again.

heat plays a big part in amd ccc.
Its written in crayon and heat melts the code.

Tried the latest afterburner 3.0 Beta 9 with ULPS, no luck. I'm also getting a random atikmdag.sys BSOD as well. I have open a thread over at the AMD forums with the memory dump analysis.

As soon as I get my Mini DP -> DVI converter, I'm going to try hooking up both monitors to the AMD card to see if that resolves it. It's the only thing I can think of, short of the card being defective. But I doubt that, because it plays games perfectly for hours on end.

Just thought I'd reply with some pleasant findings, since I've been suffering with this for a while now. My solution was just to disable monitor standby and turn them off manually. But I'm happy to report that the Windows 8.1 preview with the new AMD 8.1 preview drivers fixes the problem completely!

i see this thread is old, but i'm experiencing this issue as well.
i'll keep MSI AB running even when i'm not gaming
and see if it does the trick.

thanks for sharing.
Sapphire 7970 OC.

MSI cfg file Change didn't work.
testing disabling ULPS..

Let us know, one thing that also helped me was pushing the powertune to 20% even if I didn't overclocked. I no longer have the HD 7970Ghz but wow, I had it for two years and I am more surprised by its performance consistency that I am now with the R9 290X.

I had a similar issue with my 7990, but it would BSOD my machine. I finally turned off the power saving functions and haven't had a problem since.

disabling/enabling ULPS. did not work aether.
downgrading driver with clean uninstall did not work as well..

my monitors go off in middle of game
i hope AMD understands they lost a old multiple ATI customer.

can't wait to get rid of it & get something from people that don't cut corners
and don't do half ass job.

i think AMD has no future,
it's sad because i head MANY.. ATI cards & one EPIC K6 CPU
but i do not care for amd no more.

Yd1 said:

disabling/enabling ULPS. did not work aether.
downgrading driver with clean uninstall did not work as well..

my monitors go off in middle of game
i hope AMD understands they lost a old multiple ATI customer.

can't wait to get rid of it & get something from people that don't cut corners
and don't do half ass job.

i think AMD has no future,
it's sad because i head MANY.. ATI cards & one EPIC K6 CPU
but i do not care for amd no more.

Click to expand...

What you're talking about is a completely different issue from what the thread is about. I would recommend that you start a new thread with your unique issues in it as monitors cutting off in the middle of gaming has NOTHING to do with the monitor sleep issue being discussed in this thread.