5870 gray screen crash.

If it isn't the HDMI driver you should check for some kind of instability in your system, especially if you are overclocked.
 
I am having these same problems with pretty much every setup imaginable on my machine. My I5-750 and 5850 worked both OCed for over a month then these issues started appearing. I know 100% that my OCs were stable. I get the issues with normal clocks on all components as well as with downclocks and any OC just the same.

Starting to get annoyed that it wasn't fixed with 9.12. It was understandable that something can break, but not fixing it in several weeks is not cool.
 
I spoke with a guy at Newegg today about getting an RMA for my card. Couldn't because too much time had passed and now I have to deal directly with XFX but he told me "off the record" that a rep with ATI spoke with a few of them and told them they are trying to track down the issue, that it is very wide spread and one of the things they are looking at is a small component used in the build process that is "degrading out of spec rapidly" his words not mine. I am not too sure what that means but it doesn't sound good.
 
mike_j_johnson said:
Someone on the AMD forums claims that AMD told them it is a Windows Update that causes the issue.

Has anyone tried reformatting Windows 7 x64 and NOT installing Windows Updates? (make sure to disable the auto update feature)

I almost wish I would have never switched over to ATI now. This just sucks that I cant game because of constant gray screen vertical stripe crashes. Now it sounds like 9.12 hotfix drivers still dont fix the issue.

I dont overclock at all by the way. Disabling ATI HDMI audio does not fix. Upgraded ATI VGA BIOS does not fix. Yes, I have all the latest drivers, patches, firmware, BIOSes, etc. Havent tried 9.12 yet since I have been trying to find out what other people have experienced thus far.

Not even using my new machine currently since it will even crash just browsing on the internet. Freaking ridiculous! I have been building computers for over 10 years now and never have I had issues like this. /sigh
Click to expand...

Check your RAM
 
He doesn't need to check his ram. Well, he could, but I think it would be pointless. He never had a problem with his ram before, why now? The problem he is having and many many others, openly, identically all over the web talked about in dozens and dozens of forums point to an issue with the card / drivers or both.

The fact that he has the same issue everyone else is having, "gray vert lines" means he can basically rule out overclocking, heat, hdmi audio driver, etc etc.

Something very serious is going on, with all of our cards and or drivers.

This is turning into a nightmare for ATI and could cost them, will most likely cost them customers.
 
I ask him to check his RAM because he is crashing just browsing internet explorer, the same situation was happening to me, and I was blaming my 5870, but it turned out my RAM was starting to go bad.

He didn't say if he was getting gray vert lines on internet explorer, just that he was crashing
 
ALL of my crashes are the gray screen vertical line type. That is why I am posting on this thread as well as similiar threads at XtremeForums, Guru3D and AMD Game Forums.

I just got done upgrading to 9.12 + hotfix. Was surfing online and BAM...it happened again.

Now I am testing out the PowerPlay theory. I enabled Overdrive, created a pofile and set the clocks to never go below 400MHz GPU and 900MHz memory. A lot of folks are claiming this fixes the issue. I will let you guys know the results.
 
Eh, it was crashing in FEAR 2, and that changes Windows over to basic theme, if I'm not mistaken.

edit: hmm... it also crashed when loading a level in Crysis Warhead, so I dunno what that means.

But man, if this is really all the video card... holy shit. Newegg doesn't let you return cards except for exchanges, so yeah... I'm a little fucking annoyed.

edit again: wait, no, it freezes at 59% on the loading screen every time, so it's probably something else that's fucked. God fucking dammit.
 
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mike_j_johnson said:
Has anyone tried reformatting Windows 7 x64 and NOT installing Windows Updates? (make sure to disable the auto update feature)
Click to expand...

Does this only affect HD 5870's? I just built a new computer yesterday, running a Q9550, Gigabyte EP45-UD3P, 4 GB DDR2, and the XFX HD 5770 on Windows 7 Professional 64 bit. I was reading this thread a few days before my parts got shipped and I was worried the same thing might happen to me, so when I installed Windows 7, I didn't let it do any updating. I was running 9.11 all day yesterday, no problems in any games or desktop applications. Running 9.12 right now with no problems either.
 
xSnowmaNx said:
Does this only affect HD 5870's? I just built a new computer yesterday, running a Q9550, Gigabyte EP45-UD3P, 4 GB DDR2, and the XFX HD 5770 on Windows 7 Professional 64 bit. I was reading this thread a few days before my parts got shipped and I was worried the same thing might happen to me, so when I installed Windows 7, I didn't let it do any updating. I was running 9.11 all day yesterday, no problems in any games or desktop applications. Running 9.12 right now with no problems either.
Click to expand...

There are threads on AMD's ATI forums for 5750/5770 and 5850/5870 all having similar issues. I am having the problems with 5850.
 
mike_j_johnson said:
ALL of my crashes are the gray screen vertical line type. That is why I am posting on this thread as well as similiar threads at XtremeForums, Guru3D and AMD Game Forums.

I just got done upgrading to 9.12 + hotfix. Was surfing online and BAM...it happened again.

Now I am testing out the PowerPlay theory. I enabled Overdrive, created a pofile and set the clocks to never go below 400MHz GPU and 900MHz memory. A lot of folks are claiming this fixes the issue. I will let you guys know the results.
Click to expand...

Er...did you make the profile in catalyst? I'm curious how you do this...
 
Hmm... so the gray screen could be caused by bad ram? Because my RAM was giving me hella errrors in memtest, and it did gray screen when I was just chillin' on the internet once. If that's all that's causing it, that's a relief. I can have that shit shipped back to newegg in like a minute.
 
Could be, but my ram has passed every test I've thrown at it, and I still get the gray screen/white lines crash (although it's a black screen/yellow lines crash when it happened in Dragon Age).

After 9.12 was posted, I scrubbed all ATI drivers, installed 9.12 and was able to play Dragon Age for a couple hours without a crash. I switched over to Call of Duty: MW2, and it froze and crashed to gray screen in about 2 minutes.

ASUS P7P55D, i7 860, XFX 5870HD, Windows 7 64bit. No OC going currently.
 
I noticed loosening up my RAM timings helped a bit with the crashes even though my RAM passed 24+ hours of memtest without any errors at stock timings.

I'm really curious if disabling powerplay with help at all. I'd try but I have finals for the next few days :(
 
UPDATE

I followed the Powerplay mod here:

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=260&threadid=123699&enterthread=y

I was able to play Darkfall (3D game) for about 1 hour and then I switched to Dofus (2D game) for another hour. No crashes!!!!

I then decided to try Aion again since I never could play that at all without gray/stripe locking right away. I started re-downloading via Steam and the computer ended up black screening twice and auto-rebooting during download...sigh
Once I got Aion installed, it blue screened over and over. Different BSOD errors each time. Also had several crash to desktop scenerios. Argh!

Decided to try Age of Conan (I already had this installed). BSOD almost right away.

Scanned my RAM for errors since some of you instist that is the issue and everything passed.

Sooo...I decided to experiment with GPU-Z's logging ability. I noticed that Powerplay keeps switching clock speeds for the GPU and Memory like crazy! It doesnt matter if you are in a 2D or 3D game. It just randomly goes back and fourth between high and low clocks like every 30 seconds. Keep in mind that my Powerplay mod from the link referenced above makes it so 400MHz GPU and 900MHz Mem is the lowest it will clock.

Can someone else log in GPU-Z and see if Powerplay is freaking out??? IS this supposed to be the way Powerplay works? I am starting to think that Powerplay is the problem child.

I guess the good news is that I am no longer getting gray/stripe screen locks, but the bad news is that now I am seeing black screen auto reboots or BSODs...
 
mike_j_johnson said:
UPDATE

I followed the Powerplay mod here:

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=260&threadid=123699&enterthread=y

I was able to play Darkfall (3D game) for about 1 hour and then I switched to Dofus (2D game) for another hour. No crashes!!!!

I then decided to try Aion again since I never could play that at all without gray/stripe locking right away. I started re-downloading via Steam and the computer ended up black screening twice and auto-rebooting during download...sigh
Once I got Aion installed, it blue screened over and over. Different BSOD errors each time. Also had several crash to desktop scenerios. Argh!

Decided to try Age of Conan (I already had this installed). BSOD almost right away.

Scanned my RAM for errors since some of you instist that is the issue and everything passed.

Sooo...I decided to experiment with GPU-Z's logging ability. I noticed that Powerplay keeps switching clock speeds for the GPU and Memory like crazy! It doesnt matter if you are in a 2D or 3D game. It just randomly goes back and fourth between high and low clocks like every 30 seconds. Keep in mind that my Powerplay mod from the link referenced above makes it so 400MHz GPU and 900MHz Mem is the lowest it will clock.

Can someone else log in GPU-Z and see if Powerplay is freaking out??? IS this supposed to be the way Powerplay works? I am starting to think that Powerplay is the problem child.

I guess the good news is that I am no longer getting gray/stripe screen locks, but the bad news is that now I am seeing black screen auto reboots or BSODs...
Click to expand...

I can second what you are seeing. The fix to change the 2D mem clocks and such eliminated desktop crashing for me, but still crashed in games. Also I had not BSODed before this, only grey/stripes, and afterwords the BSODs began. I am looking into THIS posted to AMD developer forums as well as using the fix above, but at full clock speeds all the time, not even just 400/900.

There has to be a way to set the voltage so that powerplay doesn't change it on a whim.
 
SixFootDuo said:
I spoke with a guy at Newegg today about getting an RMA for my card. Couldn't because too much time had passed and now I have to deal directly with XFX but he told me "off the record" that a rep with ATI spoke with a few of them and told them they are trying to track down the issue, that it is very wide spread and one of the things they are looking at is a small component used in the build process that is "degrading out of spec rapidly" his words not mine. I am not too sure what that means but it doesn't sound good.
Click to expand...

That's funny b/c Diamond finally officially admitted shipping bad 3870s years ago and ATI and Diamond both claimed there was nothing wrong with the card despite overheating/stability issues but now that they fessed up after the warranty expires.
 
NIKO-007 said:
I would like to try this, where is the flash util for my Powercolour 5850, how r u getting on with it wests any crashes at all now?
Click to expand...

I only did the profile part, not the BIOS flash.

It went a good 4 hours without crashing in 2D, but alas, it eventually crashed; Though, instead of crashing to the stripes, it gave a BSOD.

I've noticed that every time I crash on Dragon Age it's at a transition or beginning of a loading screen. This leads me to believe that the problem is directly related to PowerPlay.

Does anyone know how to disable PowerPlay?
 
Last edited:
Hmm... just as a test, I left FEAR 2 running for like 10 hours in an area where there was nothing being loaded into the game or anything... and it didn't crash. So I'm thinking it might indeed be my RAM that's fucked since I only seem to run into problems when there's a lot of shit going on... well, and because it gray screened when I was in Firefox once.
 
Chacranajxy said:
Hmm... just as a test, I left FEAR 2 running for like 10 hours in an area where there was nothing being loaded into the game or anything... and it didn't crash. So I'm thinking it might indeed be my RAM that's fucked since I only seem to run into problems when there's a lot of shit going on... well, and because it gray screened when I was in Firefox once.
Click to expand...

Do you really think that everyone that is having issues has bad RAM? There are too many people having the same problem for that to be the cause.

Oh, and I've crashed in Chrome numerous times because of these cards and my RAM is fine.
 
Wests said:
Do you really think that everyone that is having issues has bad RAM? There are too many people having the same problem for that to be the cause.

Oh, and I've crashed in Chrome numerous times because of these cards and my RAM is fine.
Click to expand...

All I'm saying is that that might be what's causing the issues for me. Relax.
 
My card has been ok since 9.12 hotfix, i have been experimenting with oclocking a bit,
got my 5850 up to 925mhz core 1175mhz mem & 1.225 Core Voltage

Msi afturburner allows 1.350 core volts but i dare not go too high, just how safe is it, any 1 know?
 
mike_j_johnson said:
Its definitely a VGA BIOS / Powerplay issue in my opinion.

http://forums.amd.com/devforum/messageview.cfm?catid=203&threadid=123623&enterthread=y

Also I suggest you guys log your card's activity in realtime using GPU-Z. You will see that Powerplay is all over the place randomly changing GPU/MEM clock speeds. This does not seem normal to me.
Click to expand...

has anybody tried the bios in the above link?

also i have nullified powerplay but it doesn't matter, still bsod every 1-30 minutes of playing anything 3d, havn't bsod out of game yet, only had 1 lock up.

Heres the logged data i got from gpu-z. I put it into an excel ss and graphed it on page 2.

http://www.filefront.com/15171741/graphed amp-temp-load.xlsx

(Core clock/mem clock/voltage never changed so i did not feel it relevant to graph them)
 
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Wests said:
Here is what you do. I'm not sure if it works or not though, haven't tried it.

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=260&threadid=123699&enterthread=y

Edit...

This seems to have fixed the 2D stability, we'll see how it goes with games.
Click to expand...

I didn't have any problems with 2D, but had crashes on 3d if ATI HDMI driver was enabled.

I flashed the bios with this and it seems to work so far. I ran some tests with Furmark and also ran the RE5 demo on a loop for 1.5 hours. No crashes. ATI HDMI driver was enabled and I haven't used any custom profile as in the link above.

Idle temps seems to have gone up from 37 to 43 with this bios (vs. original Asus bios).

I'm crossing my fingers.

I've also asked David Baumann if ATI is working on this program with links to different forum threads where people have it. Hopefully I will get some answers there. :)
 
5770 win xp 32 bits user here

I got grey and black screens as well.

Did a lot of testing. everything by the book so many times. Nothing changes.

So what must we do? Have we lost our money because ati doesn't give a crap cause no word from them.
 
UPDATE

So using the potential profile modding trick gets rid of grey screen/vertical stripes, but it creates tons of random BSODs, black screens, auto-reboots, etc.

Just got done reformatting again to test more. One BSOD and one solid grey screen (no stripes) followed by an auto-reboot.

After I got everything installed, I attempted to run the Windows Experience Index. I tried three times and it locked-up and auto-rebooted each attempt. I then remembered reading another possible fix where someone under clocked the GPU using Overdrive. I set the max GPU speed from 850MHz to 825MHz. Rebooted. Now the Windows Experience Index works and I havent had a crash yet.

Now I am starting to think this could be a hardware issue (TSMC screw-up anyone?). Or...maybe it is indeed a voltage problem. Maybe the voltage that is set for 850MHz is not enough and causes the instability. This is pretty much what that guy found out on the AMD DEV forums. I will let you know if I crash again.
 
Tamlin_WSGF said:
I didn't have any problems with 2D, but had crashes on 3d if ATI HDMI driver was enabled.

I flashed the bios with this and it seems to work so far. I ran some tests with Furmark and also ran the RE5 demo on a loop for 1.5 hours. No crashes. ATI HDMI driver was enabled and I haven't used any custom profile as in the link above.

Idle temps seems to have gone up from 37 to 43 with this bios (vs. original Asus bios).

I'm crossing my fingers.

I've also asked David Baumann if ATI is working on this program with links to different forum threads where people have it. Hopefully I will get some answers there. :)
Click to expand...

Update:
Everything has worked good and every stress test didn't bring out the problem.

However, after 10-15 minutes into L4D2... grey screen crash.

I hope ATI brings out some better news. Saved my old bios, so I might flash back again after some more tests just for warranty sake.
 
mike_j_johnson said:
UPDATE

So using the potential profile modding trick gets rid of grey screen/vertical stripes, but it creates tons of random BSODs, black screens, auto-reboots, etc.

Just got done reformatting again to test more. One BSOD and one solid grey screen (no stripes) followed by an auto-reboot.

After I got everything installed, I attempted to run the Windows Experience Index. I tried three times and it locked-up and auto-rebooted each attempt. I then remembered reading another possible fix where someone under clocked the GPU using Overdrive. I set the max GPU speed from 850MHz to 825MHz. Rebooted. Now the Windows Experience Index works and I havent had a crash yet.

Now I am starting to think this could be a hardware issue (TSMC screw-up anyone?). Or...maybe it is indeed a voltage problem. Maybe the voltage that is set for 850MHz is not enough and causes the instability. This is pretty much what that guy found out on the AMD DEV forums. I will let you know if I crash again.
Click to expand...

This is definitely not a hardware issue. I used to get these dreaded grey screens on my 4870 but they stopped, if this was some kind of hardware fault mine would have never stopped. I think we need to start a new thread or something documenting every model of card getting these crashes, along with driver versions and complete systems. We have had reports of them being caused by so many things like HDMI drivers, catalyst drivers, or system instability from bad overclocks and such.
 
/sigh

I got the computer to hard lock watching a video on Hulu. Rebooted and then the grey screen/vertical stripes right after opening IE8.

I dont think I can stand much more of this. XFX better let me RMA and replace it with a nVIDIA card.
 
what video card is = to 5870 ?


mike_j_johnson said:
/sigh

I got the computer to hard lock watching a video on Hulu. Rebooted and then the grey screen/vertical stripes right after opening IE8.

I dont think I can stand much more of this. XFX better let me RMA and replace it with a nVIDIA card.
Click to expand...
 
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