5870 gray screen crash.

NeonGuy said:
has anybody found what causes it for sure ?? Some fix's work on some systems and dont on others.
any real fix yet?
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Thats the thing. There is no real fix because so many issues can cause the gray screen crash. Its almost like a BSOD but without the dump. Annoying isnt it?
 
I've been running an xfx 5870 here for quite some time now actually. Q9550 is OC'd on a Gigabyte es2l board @ 3.6ghz. No gray screen crash since I've had it...which is about a month now. I did a fresh install of vista 64 before ever installing the card BTW, and I am using the 9.12 hotfix - Card has been oc'ed to 980/1300 since birth on stock voltage. No issues in games, etc. I say if you have the gray screen crash, it must be a hardware issue.
 
Well u can say that but i used to get grey screen crashes at the desktop on a regular basis b4 i updated to 9.12hotfix drivers, now its all hunky dory and roberts your dads brother, or bob's your uncle.
 
Copyright said:
I agree with some of that but your like the 15th person to tell me ..."My system was 100% stable with my old card and now crashes with my new card" After eventually talking these ppl into going bakc to stock clocks and re-checking thier ram wtih memtest most of them found either ram issues or that going bakc to stock clock fixed thier crashes. This card is notorious for taking a completely stable OC in a system and makign it unstable. Not that this is your problem but its kinda getting old hearing someone say how stable thier system is and then finally they go back to stock clock and thier problems go away. Good luck with your issue though.
Click to expand...

Thanks. :) My issue hasn't shown itself yet after adding a second screen.

I think you misunderstand though. I've done days now with tests on a non-OC system. My crashes are not related to OC at all. Though OC can act as a catalyst (no pun intended) and therefore trigger the grey screen crash, I doubt its the root cause of it.

The behavior and fixes are very much like the crashes which Nvidia believes relates to TDR issues:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=31913

However, I think that the issues with the 5870 relates more to powermanagement. Like Intel Speedstep can BSOD an overclocked CPU, I think that the dynamic nature of ATI Powerplay, combined with the high and rapid changes of clock speeds on the 5800 series, makes the system more unstable and vulnerable to crashes.

Good news is, that if this is a power management issue, its fixable.
 
I have not had the grey screen cash once at stock. I oc'ed to 900/1300, set fan to 50%, grey screen after 3 loops of RE5 bench. Set fan to 60%, same thing. So I went into my bios and realized my ram voltage was lower than it was usually (2V as opposed to 2.2V usually). Set it back to 2.2, voila. Looped RE5 bench about 100 times no problems overclocked.

Up your ram voltage.
 
I bought the xfx5870 for 2 weeks ago, first i was getting gray, yellow, corrupted (smudgy graphics) while playing 3d games but never in windows.
Then I google the problem and found out the xfx released a new bios for this card that do the following:
Both the Gpu a memory clocks are set back: GPU from 875 MHz to 850Mzh and memory clocks from 1300 MHz to 1200 MHz.
Now here is what I did: I first tried updating all games without any luck, and of course I had the newest catalyst 9.12 Installed.
Then I went in Catalyst under over clocking and set back the clocks manually exactly as the new bios would do.
1. set the Gpu from (875 Mhz standard) to 850Mhz
2 Set the memoty from( 1300Mhz standard) to 1200Mhz
And now with these settings the card is rock steady everything works fine, tried out the default clocks one more time and directly I got the colored screens.
With the new clock settings I never encountered the problem again.
Before on this system I had Quad crossfire with 2 x asu eah 3850x2
My Opinion BAD DRIVERS or The card is too much over clocked by default.
My system is an
Corsair 850W TX 70A\12V, Asus M4A79 Deluxe motherboard, Phenom II x4 3,2Ghz processor, 8Gb Kingston hyper X 800Mhz, 1 XFX Radeon 5870, 1 samsung F1 500Gb primary disk and 1WD 1Tb slave, 1DVD burner multy. Chassis Cooler master HAF 932
 
you shouldnt have to flash to a lower clocked bios. rma it..
you paid extra for that card with higher clocks.
 
I bought the xfx5870 for 2 weeks ago, first i was getting gray, yellow, corrupted (smudgy graphics) while playing 3d games but never in windows.
Then I google the problem and found out the xfx released a new bios for this card that do the following:
Both the Gpu a memory clocks are set back: GPU from 875 MHz to 850Mzh and memory clocks from 1300 MHz to 1200 MHz.
Now here is what I did: I first tried updating all games without any luck, and of course I had the newest catalyst 9.12 Installed.
Then I went in Catalyst under over clocking and set back the clocks manually exactly as the new bios would do.
1. set the Gpu from (875 Mhz standard) to 850Mhz
2 Set the memoty from( 1300Mhz standard) to 1200Mhz
And now with these settings the card is rock steady everything works fine, tried out the default clocks one more time and directly I got the colored screens.
With the new clock settings I never encountered the problem again.
Before on this system I had Quad crossfire with 2 x asu eah 3850x2
My Opinion BAD DRIVERS or The card is too much over clocked by default.
My system is an
Corsair 850W TX 70A\12V, Asus M4A79 Deluxe motherboard, Phenom II x4 3,2Ghz processor, 8Gb Kingston hyper X 800Mhz, 1 XFX Radeon 5870, 1 samsung F1 500Gb primary disk and 1WD 1Tb slave, 1DVD burner multy. Chassis Cooler master HAF 932
 
CTV said:
I bought the xfx5870 for 2 weeks ago, first i was getting gray, yellow, corrupted (smudgy graphics) while playing 3d games but never in windows.
Then I google the problem and found out the xfx released a new bios for this card that do the following:
Both the Gpu a memory clocks are set back: GPU from 875 MHz to 850Mzh and memory clocks from 1300 MHz to 1200 MHz.
Now here is what I did: I first tried updating all games without any luck, and of course I had the newest catalyst 9.12 Installed.
Then I went in Catalyst under over clocking and set back the clocks manually exactly as the new bios would do.
1. set the Gpu from (875 Mhz standard) to 850Mhz
2 Set the memoty from( 1300Mhz standard) to 1200Mhz
And now with these settings the card is rock steady everything works fine, tried out the default clocks one more time and directly I got the colored screens.
With the new clock settings I never encountered the problem again.
Before on this system I had Quad crossfire with 2 x asu eah 3850x2
My Opinion BAD DRIVERS or The card is too much over clocked by default.
My system is an
Corsair 850W TX 70A\12V, Asus M4A79 Deluxe motherboard, Phenom II x4 3,2Ghz processor, 8Gb Kingston hyper X 800Mhz, 1 XFX Radeon 5870, 1 samsung F1 500Gb primary disk and 1WD 1Tb slave, 1DVD burner multy. Chassis Cooler master HAF 932
Click to expand...

I seem to have issues at 1300mhz on teh ram also.. but not at 1275mhz. Have you tried adding a little bit of voltage see if it fixes it.
 
I think he means add some voltage to the ddr5 and/or the gpu core... but IMO, this is a case of the card not being able to run OC'd at factory spec... RMA it.
 
Thnkx revenant but where exactly do i ad voltage to the graphics memory? the only thing I can raise is voltage for SYTEM RAM and PCI-exp slotts, processor but nowhere there is specifyied for the GPU and the DDR5 memory
 
You need to use a voltage/oc tweaking tool or edit the card's bios.. xfx has a voltage tweaking tool which would likely be the easiest thing to use to test the card with a voltage bump..

http://www.xfxforce.com/en-us/Features/XFXOvervolt.aspx

you'll have to register to get to the page though. BE *careful* when applying extra voltage!!!

edit: wait.. arg, this might be for black edition owners only..
 
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Ive been advised RMA time from XFX

my XXX card will not say run the Ladybug demo... after about 5 seconds.

underclock the card to 850 1200 (from 875 1300) and it runs...

then Ill get random crash / white screen etc

this can be anytime after ive benched (3d mark vantage) - DCS black shark.... played for 30 minutes+ then pow.... Iracing... Dirt 2 - even windows desktop.
Have tried fan @ 50% etc - nothing seems to work.

gotta be a duff card.
 
This is what is listed when i log in Features
Double Lifetime Protection
XFX and Nvidia
The XFX Challenge 1
Bring It - SLI
Get Vista Ready

But there is not any XFX overvolt as you see.
And when i try using your link it tells me to log in, but there is no log in so i use support and then log in but still there is no overvolt there
 
I'm getting a blank screen on that XFX page for their voltage tool... so looks like you might have to either flash to the Asus bios then use the Asus voltage tweaking tool, or use a combination of AMD GPU tool with MSI afterburner, which has been linked to possibly causing other issues.. but ymmv!

but again, your card should work at factory spec, so if you want to play with it to find a stable config that's fine, but personally I would want a card that works out of the box as it should.
 
BUT after install I take run but it tells me that: Sorry this tools is not supported on your graphics card
 
er.. which one did you install? honestly, I am probably not the best person to be giving this advice as I have not done any voltage or clock tweaking on my own 5870... the blind leading the blind? ;) I thought afterburner worked on all cards though.. or maybe you need to edit your bios to make the mfg on your card MSI. not sure on that one.

edit: looks like the AMD GPU tool should let you change voltages.

with all of the talk of crashing and stuff I didn't want to even install anything beyond the base drivers until I can confirm my card is good.. after one solid week of holiday gaming it's been 100% stable so far.. /me knocks on wood. ;) I'm hoping it continues to behave well. :) good luck with your card!
 
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I got my card in early on 11/2. It was great even keep my system a few C` cooler. I updated my ASUS P6T Deluxe BIOS to 1804 on 11/23 and things went sour. This BIOS code was such crap it wouldn't let me go back to any other BIOS. ASUS told me to get a new BIOS chip. I did with 1701 but it was still crashing. I had put my 4870 back in and was crashing also. Just click and the monitor did a analog-digital check and went to sleep. Both cards doing this. ASUS insisted to reflash with 1804 and I did and things got better. In he mean time I had turned Intel SpeedStep on and things seemed better. I set my PCI-E frequency to 107. It seemed better. As long as I turned ATI Overdrive off I could go on in Crysis and Dirt2. I tried MSI AfterBurner so I could keep my fan on as I turned off OverDrive. I found the voltage and went to 1212. It seemed to help but I still go black in a game or just surfing. I went back to ASUS 1605 BIOS which worked for 20 days and I played alot. Would this card run long and hard for 20 days and go belly up? I had a RMA with XFXForce and told them to scrap it since the 4870 was doing it also. I'm still crashing and trying to go back one step at a time to get my system back. I just went back to SpeedStep off. It will be hours-days before I know.
 
So, I have good news. :D

Didn't want to tell anything before I got confirmation that I could, but the ATI rep on our forum, David Baumann (product manager of 4000 and 5000 series), have forwarded all my tests to the ATI engineers about my issues with grey screen and are also paying attention to the issues in this thread. Rest assured that ATI is taking our problem seriously and are looking into it too on whats causing it. :)
 
Well I have good and bad news.

I RMA'd my card (Radeon HD 5870) back to XFX. In the mean time, I purchased an eVGA GTX 285.

I fully reformatted again after installing my new nVIDIA card. No more grey screen/vertical line/looped audio crashing. That is good news.

Bad news is that now I am getting tons of random BSODs.

So back to researching and I ran into a post on the Corsair forums regarding BSODs and having all DIMM slots populated with memory. Turns out that sometimes there is not enough voltage for the RAM if all DIMM slots are populated (I am running 8GB or 4 x 2GB and I only have 4 DIMM slots). Keep in mind that I do not OC anything. I am running my 1333MHz DDR3 at JEDEC timings of 9-9-9-24 @ 1.5V. Corsair techs kept asking folks to raise their RAM voltage since all their DIMMs were populated. Soooo...I went to the Intel website and read that I can run my RAM at a max of 1.6V considering I have a DP55KG motherboard and i7-860 CPU. I raised the voltage to 1.6V and now I am rock solid stable!!! No more crashes in Hulu, no more crashes in games. Could this have been the poblem all along???? That may be why memtest86+ never found anything! The memory is fine...it was the wrong memory voltage being applied by the motherboard/CPU!

Not sure if this would fix the grey/vertical screen lock issue with the 5870 yet since XFX has it.

Anyone else wanna try this??
 
Could be, insufficient DIMM voltage seems to be one of the causes for these crashes. In my experience Memtest doesn't exactly ensure that you're completely 100% stable either. It's great for testing for bad modules but I find the only way you can test for true stability is through general usage.
 
I asked XFX why overvolt wont work with this card, they simply said it would damage the card and the card it set from factoryto use corecct voltage, so that isnt the problem. As i said i suspect BAD DRIVERS, or BAD Bios on the card or to much over clocked and to little benchmark.
 
I locked up after 14 hours (7 over night). I surfed a little during breakfast and stepped away. It should have been asleep but the power light wasn't flashing and my USB HID receivers were lite up. It took three tries to restart. The second startup attempt on my ASUS P6T Deluxe V1 BIOS 1605 had one and three shorter beeps.

This system run perfect since Jan. 08. It run a month with my XFX 5870. I upgraded to ASUS BIOS 1804 and it goes a little farther towards a paper weight every day.

I set my PCI-E frenquency back to 100. CPU, RAM, GPU don't matter. I still go black screen. And to make it more crazy my 11 month old HIS 4870 1gb does it also when my board checks out.

The only thing i have found with the 5870 is 2 PSU's kick on and off sometimes when things go crazy. Surfing, e-mail, Crysis & SilverCreek Solitaire III will lock me up randomly. Dirt 2 will always lock me up in either a gray screen with buzzing audio or a black screen. Any time I play with ATI Overdrive on I get "freckles" after 2-4 laps.
 
mike_j_johnson said:
Well I have good and bad news.

I RMA'd my card (Radeon HD 5870) back to XFX. In the mean time, I purchased an eVGA GTX 285.

I fully reformatted again after installing my new nVIDIA card. No more grey screen/vertical line/looped audio crashing. That is good news.

Bad news is that now I am getting tons of random BSODs.

So back to researching and I ran into a post on the Corsair forums regarding BSODs and having all DIMM slots populated with memory. Turns out that sometimes there is not enough voltage for the RAM if all DIMM slots are populated (I am running 8GB or 4 x 2GB and I only have 4 DIMM slots). Keep in mind that I do not OC anything. I am running my 1333MHz DDR3 at JEDEC timings of 9-9-9-24 @ 1.5V. Corsair techs kept asking folks to raise their RAM voltage since all their DIMMs were populated. Soooo...I went to the Intel website and read that I can run my RAM at a max of 1.6V considering I have a DP55KG motherboard and i7-860 CPU. I raised the voltage to 1.6V and now I am rock solid stable!!! No more crashes in Hulu, no more crashes in games. Could this have been the poblem all along???? That may be why memtest86+ never found anything! The memory is fine...it was the wrong memory voltage being applied by the motherboard/CPU!

Not sure if this would fix the grey/vertical screen lock issue with the 5870 yet since XFX has it.

Anyone else wanna try this??
Click to expand...


Its funny how quickly people forget. Trading Grey screen crashes for Nvidia's nvdisp popular BSOD. lol

Thats possible though, I too have 8GB populated on my p45, but my issues were 110% afterburner 1.4.0 and 1.4.1. Since going back to Afterburner 1.3.0 and using cats 9.12 hotfix I havent a single crash in about 3 weeks now running 1.187v / 1Ghz core.
 
My torture appears to have finished. I went down last eve and my system would come on, blink weakly 3 times and off. This has happened before when I swapped the Corsair HX1000W out with my Antec 500W. I put 2 Antec 500W PSU's on and have been runing better than ever! I really thought the XFX 5870 was dead.

I've been up 5 hours now and have given it quite a running. Dreamkiller twice, Crysis, Dirt 2, SilverCreek Solitaire, Kyodia Mahjong, surfed & e-mail several times. It's went to sleep 4 times. I'm putting in a RMA request. I read somw articles about 2 PSU's and I think I got a little snap out of this. I may just put the replacement Corsair up for a back up. I got a deffinite boost or I'm just so happy to have my system back that my mind is messing with me : \
 
breif update for records:

I just build my new system. installed windows 7 etc and drivers for mobo, vid card, printer etc.

Before i installed windows updates my comp froze only 2 times where i would start lagging very bad, sometimes show aplications but then the screen would blink and everything would be black. this happened before once before eyefinity was workign and once after (checking integrated audio stuff, and testing out web cam)

then i installed the win 7 updates.
comp restarted and my DP monitor was off, when i tried to enter CCC to make eyefinity group got blue screen of death.

Restarted the computer and unpluged and replugged the DP monitor in and all three monitors were fine. i was able to get back to my desktop like nothing ever happened. so far so good but well see.

system specs are

Intel i5
Gigabyte UD2
XFX XXX 5870
4 Gig DDR3 Ram
650 watt corsair
 
I'm at a record for the last week. 15.5 hours! I needed to get my creation back into the desk si I pulled the Corsair HX1000 and tried to make my new smoning dual PSU setup somewhat tidy. It's just smokin'!
 
I fixed my problem.

I totally uninstalled all 9.12 drivers including the CCC. Rebooted and installed 9.11

I havent had a Grey screen crash now in 4 days :)
 
ok im not getting the grey screen crash but ever so often (thisis the 3rd time now i think..) i get a BSOD
with error code

BCCode: 116

not sure what that means or how to fix it...
anyone know?
 
I am so happy. I have run for 3 days perfectly!
I ama dual-PSU man from know on. I really did get a kick from this accident!
 
Legolas said:
I am so happy. I have run for 3 days perfectly!
I ama dual-PSU man from know on. I really did get a kick from this accident!
Click to expand...

My Corsair 1000MX was powering dual 5870s for a while. You must have had an issue with yours.
 
My issue doesn't come up at all as long as I run the fan at 100%. If I run it in auto, it will stripe screen after about 5 min, regardless of game. Card is ice cold either way. I'll RMA when I can be bothered to do it.

It's an XFX XXX (I won't bother to turn the clocks down to see if it will help, I'm sure it would though)
I'm on an EVGA X58 board with a 1200W PCP&C. Power at least is not an issue.


meh ati. meh.
 
Seems like a lot of people are having trouble with the XFX XXX card and having to back the clocks down or increase fan speeds to be stable. Not surprised after my experience with the XFX Black Edition 260s. I think they push those cards too far from the factory...it might help if more manufacturers would use an aftermarket cooling solution like Sapphire's Vapor-X card, or use higher binned memory...of course if XFX did that then it would probably drive the cost of the card up even more, and if there's a $50 or $60 difference between the XFX Super Mega WooWoo edition and a stock clocked card, most people are going to go for the stocker. At the current difference of $30, it is reasonable to pay the extra for the XXX edition (assuming you don't have to downclock it).
 
my XFX XXX was randomly verticle-stripe-lines crashing with stock 875/1300 settings. even playing some games like Batman AA and CODMW2, it would randomly "hiccup". by that i mean gameplay is fluid and smooth but it would randomly "freeze" for a split second then resume gameplay again.

i haven't thoroughly tested it yet but downclocking to normal 850/1200 settings seems to have eliminated the random crashing and hiccup problems. considered RMA'ing the card but it's not worth the time/hassle to save $20.. especially if it's stable now.

i didn't read through the entire thread but were people able to fix their XFX XXX problems by adding more volts? the thought of "flashing bios" scares me
 
what the ehll, these are some really immature drivers or something. Upon installing my new 5870 and the 9.12 drivers my system has become sluggish and l4d2 is locking up with looping audio for short periods of time and then after like 5-10 minutes its a gray screen with vertical lines as described above.

edit: after hotfix and underclock it seems better.
 
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So I guess I get to choose: Underclock or high fan speed. Either allows it to be stable.
 
what % do u guys crank your fan speed up to?
i ran "auto-tune" and it set the card to 890/1300??
 
You guys have some pretty bad luck it seems. I am completely stable on my 5870 XXX clocks. 9.12 hotfix and auto fans (I can never hear it).
 
yea i agree.. ive even bumped mine up to 900 and im fine. the only time i grey screened was when i tried going over 900.

i bumped the card to 975 with 1.225 volts and ran the heaven benchmark. it froze and grey screened after about 1 min 30 seconds. temp were stable at 65C so the only reason it grey screened was bcasue it didnt have enough voltage.

i clocked it back to 900 because during the time on the bench mark with the core at 975, there was about 2-3 FPS difference. i didn't think the over clock was worth it just for a number and almost no performance increase..

i still have afterburner for my fan curve though. i like keeping the card below 70C and the noise of the fan is lost in the game. during intense parts in crysis the game will drop into lower FPS but i feel that is due to eyefinity, not the card under preforming.

heres one thing i noticed ...

Playing Dawn of War 2:
With eyefinity, the FPS was at about 35 average with all graphics maxed except for rain.

Without eyefinity, the FPS was about 60 average with everything maxed.

it seems those extra 2 monitors really tax the card
 
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