Anyone experiencing hard locking?

L

LstBrunnenG

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jun 3, 2003
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Got home to night at ~6:30, computer was completely unresponsive to the mouse and keyboard. Reboot, check the event logs, and I find that the previous shutdown at ~3:30 PM was unexpected. So it was apparently locked like that for 3 hours or so.

I did not have this problem with my hot and loud GTX 480. Any other ATi users having problems like this?
 
Do you have your monitor set to go to sleep? If you do thats a known bug with the current 7970 drivers. That happened to me on the first night of my new computer being on, and found a thread on here about it, turned off monitor going to sleep and haven't had a lockup since.
 
It doesn't happen every time the monitor goes to sleep, and it's more than the driver crashing. Usually if that happens I can get Windows to make a sound or something to let me know that the video subsystem is the only thing that's crashed and it's still accepting my inputs just fine, just can't render anything to the screen. But in this case it's locked up hard. Is that what you were experiencing?

The worst thing is that none of this stuff is easily reproducible - not the Mass Effect stuff I made a thread about earlier, not this hard lock issue, and not the weird artifacts I sometimes see on the desktop just web browsing. I have to wonder if something's actually wrong with the card or if this is just the flakiness of AMD's drivers that everyone keeps going on about. I'm really hoping it's the latter, because then I don't have to go through the trouble of RMAing a card in a watercooled system, but I'm starting to worry I may be fooling myself.
 
Yeah I'm getting some hard locking here lately but haven't been able to track down what the culprit is. atikmpag.sys is usually what appears on the blue screen but BlueScreenViewer usually points to dxgkrnl.sys. Almost always atikmpag.sys, dxgkrnl.sys, and dxgmms1.sys are listed in pink as the possible culprits.

Currently running 8.95.5. Hard to pin down exactly what is causing the issue. This happens whether the CPU is overclocked or not. So at this point I think it's either drivers conflicting with each other, apps conflicting with each other, or a hardware problem.

During OS setup before driver installation I had no lockups. After running chkdsk on all of the disks no problems were found. sfc /scannow found no integrity violations. After backing up the system services using this VB script and tweaking them using black vipers windows services guide, then exporting all the autostart run keys in the registry and removing all of the ones I don't want to auto-run it seems that the atikmpag.sys BSOD is happening less often. Hopefully this goes away, or I can eventually track down the culprit that is causing it.
 
Did you reset your BIOS via the jumper/button/removing the battery after installing the 7970?

DMI has a nasty habit of not updating and can cause issues when changing out expansion cards.

Resetting the BIOS forces it to restart from scratch.
 
I've had a problem with hard locking in games in windowed mode, though it may have absolutely nothing to do with the 7970 but the fact that I use two different graphics cards to power monitors. Either way, it works fine in full screen mode.
 
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