4870x2: Crashing whenever I launch a game

[Harb]

I've had my 4870x2 for 5 days now, and everything was fantastic up until last night.

For some reason, whenever I start a game (been trying Crysis and Spore as that's all I have installed right now), I get a bunch of crazy artifacting patterns, followed by a crash and reset (sometimes BSOD, sometimes not). One time, through all the artificating, I even saw the popup bubble telling me that my video drivers have been reset, which makes it obvious that it's a video card/driver problem.

I was originally using the official 8.8 drivers (or whatever are the ones currently up on ATI's site) and everything was fine. I didn't change any settings to make this happen; I restored everything to factory defaults just to be sure and it still did it. I uninstalled (followed the method in the sticky on the main video card forum) my drivers and tried the 8.54 betas, and it's still doing the same thing.

Has anyone else had this problem? Any suggestions? I'll post a crappy cell phone pic of the artificating at the end of this post. The rig I'm using is listed in my sig.

Thanks!

 

[tannat]

Just a blind shot: I've only seen this when you have different clocks set on the two cores. Have you changed the clocks in ccc but only for one core? Also, it looks like you run in windowed mode?

 

[Harb]

I'm fairly sure I took both cores back to stock clocks after the problem arose.

I run in fullscreen normally, but once it started messing up it resized itself to what appears to be a window, but honestly I have no idea what it was doing...once it started the artifacting/crashing, it'd do something new each time.

I did a full reformat/reinstall of everything, and I'm reinstalling Crysis now. I put in the 8.54 beta drivers in this time, hopefully it helps.


*edit*

The format fixed things. No idea what was wrong, but it's better now. May have been a blessing in disguise; I'm running Crysis better than ever with these 8.54 beta drivers. Maybe it's just the placebo effect though. In the end, I'm happy things just work.

Sorry to anyone who may happen to come to this thread with the same problem looking for help; no real solution here Formatting works, but it's sort of using a sledgehammer when a small rubber mallet may have done the job :\

 

[Harb]

An update for anyone who might find this thread useful:

It turns out that the problems were Overdrive related. After formatting and verifying everything worked as it should, I began tweaking Crysis and my CCC 3d and Overdrive settings. Everything was fine until I began trying to fiddle with Overdrive. Using both some custom settings and the settings CCC came up with using Auto-Tune, I would get the artifacting/crashing again. I set everything back to default and disabled Overdrive altogether, and everything works again.

I guess I'll wait till the new drivers before I try to overclock again Not like this card really NEEDS OCing though

 

[vwguy]

reformats FTW, until you realize the setting was a 5 second adjustment.