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Black screens on 6850

C

castun

2[H]4U
Joined
Sep 23, 2010
Messages
2,636
I finished building a budget gaming/HTPC for the living room big screen a few weeks ago. It has an AMD X3 3.2Ghz, 4GB of Gskill Ripjaws DDR3, and a Sapphire 6850.

I didn't put it through any Memtest or CPU stress tests at all, because everything ran perfectly the first couple weeks without issue. No overclocking either.

The only game I even have installed on it is Kingdoms of Amalur which played fine, but just this past week there's been the occasional black screen of death lockup, along with the stupid AMD control center app somehow kicking me out of the game by 'stealing focus' yet going away again without any window opening up. There's even the somewhat more rare "video drivers failed and recovered" error or somesuch, even when I'm just browsing the internet.

I'm not even sure what version of the Catalyst drivers I installed, although I think it's the latest official ones. After checking Google I tried to use MSI Afterburner to underclock the card & video memory a bit to see if that helped, which it didn't.

Should I try to completely remove the AMD control panel software? Is there a better version of the Catalyst drivers I should try.

I'll be really annoyed if it's a defective video card, because I'm just past the 30 day mark to RMA to Newegg and heard that Sapphire support can be pretty unhelpful.
 
man im still running my sapphire 5870 though it was exchanged ( defective so i thought, but turned out to be that my PSU wasnt cutting it with 2 opticals installed and 4 hdd's and 7x120 fans ALL at once). Latest drivers are 12.3 Do you have enough fans and cooling? Re-apply thermal paste might not hurt either. Otherwise id contact sapphire ive never had a issue with them at all I can Honestly say. Guud Lux and Hppy G4ming :D
 
If you don't know which drivers you have installed, hop over to AMD's web site and download the full package of 12.3 drivers. The problem you are running into can occur when Windows decides that there is a newer driver for your video card, but Windows doesn't update other tools. You can end up with a garbled mess. Be sure to check the installation log for messages. You don't care how many times it says you succeeded, you only care if there are installation failures. I used to feel like screaming when I was making sure that the OpenCL driver matched the video card drivers. (The problem was an OpenCL driver for my CPU that had to get uninstalled if Windows installed it. I think that issue is gone now.)
 
if you are able to put a spare GFX in there, u can at least see if it's a bad card. You can try to reformat if you don't mind doing that too.
 
I know I've got enough fans and cooling, the case is an Antec 300 Illusion which came with quite a few fans in it, and the CPU cooler is a CM Hyper 212+ Evo. The PSU is a 430W Antec 80+ cert PSU, which may seem low to some, but I've only got 1 optical drive and 1 HDD, and with no overclocking I double checked a couple different PSU calculators to make sure it was going to be enough. Recommended level was only something like 350W IIRC.

This is honestly the first ATI/AMD card I have used, EVER and I'm a bit annoyed as it's seriously the first card to give me any problems ever since my old GeForce 4600 started to die on me like 10 years ago.

Also, I do have a spare graphics card, but it's an nVidia, and an older one at that, an 8800 GTX. Even though it's something like almost 5 years old now, I think it requires more power than the 6850 hah. Would also make it more difficult to determine if it was only a driver issue.

I'll take a look at the drivers though again, once I get the chance.
 
After some further messing around with the drivers, it does seem to be a faulty card. Reinstalled the 12.3s and still had issues. Then upgraded to the 12.4s when they came out and while at first everything seemed to run smoothly for a few hours, it started acting up again with black screening.

Monitored the temps with Afterburner, and it's definitely not from getting too hot either.

Time to RMA I think.
 
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