Display Driver Issues After Watercooling

[kontradictions]

Hi guys, I'm really in need of some advice on how to troubleshoot this. I recently added my HD6950 to my watercooling loop and the display driver has been giving me issues ever since. I'm running the Sapphire HD6950 2GB non-reference with the EK waterblock. Even though the graphics card isn't listed on their site, the block physically fits onto the graphics card. I've stress tested the card with FurMark and OCCT and the card passes with flying colors, even with Prime95 running in the background. I've tried multiple clean installs of various version of the drivers as well as a clean install of windows, setting all my clocks back to stock, and I tore down the card and reinstalled the block with no luck.

Driver seems to give out when I'm surfing the net, moving or resizing windows, and playing video games. It ran the FurMark blend test just fine, I was running it for so long, I got motion sickness from watching it.

Here are my system stats.

Intel Core i7 920 (Stock for the moment with Swiftech waterblock)
EVGA X58 SLI3 (With EK full coverage block)
12GB Corsair Dominator
60GB OCZ Vertex 2
150GB Western Digital Raptor
2TB Seagate Baracudda
Sapphire HD6950 2GB (With EK waterblock)

Thank you in advanced. Have a great day!

 

[featsdontfailme]

what types of problems?

what are the specs of your system?

 

[boxleitnerb]

Did you use the same display driver before and after installing the waterblock?

Maybe the block has contact with some part of the card where no contact should be. Might also be the screws (metal I guess) - I have seen issues with this before.
First thing I would try: Reinstall the original cooler and verify that it really is the block.

 

[kontradictions]

what types of problems?

what are the specs of your system?

Haha oops! Sorry.

I keep getting that dreaded "Display Driver has stopped responding but successfully recovered message".

Did you use the same display driver before and after installing the waterblock?

Maybe the block has contact with some part of the card where no contact should be. Might also be the screws (metal I guess) - I have seen issues with this before.
First thing I would try: Reinstall the original cooler and verify that it really is the block.

Yessir. I did not mess with the display driver until after I noticed the problem started to happen.

Thank you very much for the advice, I'll give that a go over the weekend.

 

[Revdarian]

That isn't a driver issue per se, that is the TDR problem that you can find at random on both green and red teams.

That is Timeout Detection and Recovery, a new Windows 7 feature that is a bit overzealous, and with no real "sure fire" fix. For your browser turn off GPU acceleration, also turn off flash hardware acceleration.


Again, not a driver issue per se, look it up by it's name and good luck with the many possible solutions that have been found, like RAM memory timing adjustment, or in my case Video ram speed setting (i load a power profile that doesn't mess with the gpu core power states, but i make the ram of my card run at 3d speeds all the time).

 

[kontradictions]

I went ahead and took boxleitnerb and Revarians advice. Reseating the the block seemed to make a big difference. The games actually run now but I've been noticing something really interesting. When I boot up the computer and hop on a game, the driver would still lock up for a few minutes. But after a couple minutes of the graphics driver freaking out, it'll run just fine for hours as if it needs some time to warm up before it can run games.