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Display Driver Keeps Crashing

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ohboring1

n00b
Joined
Aug 16, 2004
Messages
37
I have a problem where the display driver stops working no matter what I try. It is usually okay for the first ten minutes or so after start-up but it always crashes no matter what. It always crashes in games and will often crash with just web browsing.

My hunch is that the video card is overheating. The video card fan does not spin up during post. I have put the same card in another PC and it does spin up during post. I have tried other video cards that do work in other systems and they have the same error on this PC. The video card nor any other video cards spin up during games or other intense work. When crashing in games the screen will usually flicker random pixels.

Things I have tried:
4 different video cards 3 Nvidia 1 AMD. Install and Uninstall using CCleaner and Registry Cleaner
New 650 Watt Antec Power Supply
3 Fresh installs of windows 7. Each time formatting the HD before install.

Is it possible that I just have a bad mother board?

The system is a Gateway FX-4710 UB003A
The Current Video Card is an MSI Radeon HD 6870 Twin Frozr II
 
This problem affects both camps and it is based on Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR) being overzealous on Windows 7.


There is no perfect fix, for AMD the solution i have found is to make a performance preset in which the speed of the ram at the 3 power states (2d, 2d multimonitor & 3d), are set at the same speed (3d ram speed).


This setting will have to be reloaded if the card goes to sleep (in my case, i tend to turn off the monitor for hours while i let my pc crunching something in my sleep, when i wake up i tend to forget to reload the preset until i see the first crash :p)


To do this, activate overdrive, then add a preset, go to your drive >users> your username > app data > local > ati > ACE > profiles, pick your profile, right click to edit it.

You may wanna edit the memoryclocktarget entries, so that want_0 and want_1 have the same number as your want_2; do not mess with the memory voltage. Also, if you have problems that 2d video clocks are taking precedence to your 3d clocks, then you can make a profile that forces 2d video to also use 3d clock's and voltage on the core, for those times one alt tabs while gaming and loads a youtube video.
 
Hey Thanks for the response! Unfortunately it didn't seem to work. I'm still crashing. want 0 1 and 2 are set to 105000. Do you know of any other potential causes?
 
ohboring1 said:
Hey Thanks for the response! Unfortunately it didn't seem to work. I'm still crashing. want 0 1 and 2 are set to 105000. Do you know of any other potential causes?
Click to expand...

Problem is that the ammount of potential causes is staggering :S from bad system memory (can be physical or just improper timings), to just "it doesn't really like the way the PSU joltz when changing speed"

Wish i could help you more but all i know is that they overdid the zealousness of Win7's TDR function, there is no proper way to turn it off, and is pissing us off on both camps with no real explanation how to fix it :S


http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff569918(v=vs.85).aspx

You can give that a try? good luck.



edit to add:

Ohh just in case, i bumped my basic 2d speeds to at least 350mhz on my setting, and i do set my want 1 to want 2's core speed since i tend to alt tab and check strategy vids. I also set my core voltage to 950mv for want0 and 1150 for the other wants, this is on a 6850 so you may have to change them to safe number on a 6870.

Also after you activate your profile check out on the CCC overdrive page to be sure that it applied the speed.
 
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You said you think its overheating, but did you check the GPU temperatures via gpu-z, msi afterburner, ccc, etc? I dont like my video cards getting over 90C and your msi with dual fan should run cooler then other 6870s.
 
I had this same problem when this same machine was running vista.

I did memtest86 and passed just fine.

I have a dell i7 with windows 7 and an HD 6770 and it doesn't crash.

The hottest the card gets is 69c.

Could it be motherboard related? Do you know how I can test for that?
 
After that many video cards, re-installing windows, and a new PSU, it would have to come down to Motherboard, Memory, or CPU.

You've run memtest, but have you tried single sticks of memory at a time? TDR's that result from memory usually are not because of faulty memory, but unstable memory timings or insufficient voltage; something that memtest can easily miss.
 
I had this problem with my GTX460 on a 775 board... had to increase the voltage on the pcie bus slightly.
 
XFXSupport said:
TDR's that result from memory usually are not because of faulty memory, but unstable memory timings or insufficient voltage; something that memtest can easily miss.
Click to expand...

Interesting.

I had tdr's with a different system properly configured by hand, but just in case i will set this one by hand instead of the automatic bios setting and not load the profiles that i use to "fix" this.

And to really stress test, i'm turning flash acceleration on :) if this works for me then i'll promote this fix too :D


Ohb, sent you a message just in case, but i'll be testing this other fix too (didn't work on my 775 system, but honestly that one was running an almost private beta bios)


edit to add:
so far had 2 bumps on the test but i am not entirely willing to blame on the fix not working but on Chrome beta settings, i am turning it vanilla and keep going.
 
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If the system is still under warranty you can always make it Gateway's problem but then you'll be without this pc for a while.

Fist thing you do is not assume that's its anything in particular. I think the guesses above are a good start. Likely causes are

1.) CPU overheating
2.) Memory with insufficient voltage or too narrow of timings
3.) PSU is not supplying sufficient power, or the power output is not up to spec
4.) Faulty motherboard
5.) Bad bios settings

I'd say that's a good start as to what could be causing your issues. Now just try to rule out as many of those as possible. IE monitor CPU temp in the scenarios that cause the problem. Doesn't get too hot then probably not the issue. Use CPU-Z to see what the voltage on the memory is. If it is below or above spec then adjust if you have the option. Retest. Look up good professional review of your PSU and see if they had any issues with the voltages dropping below spec or having too much ripple. Check your bios settings and reset everything you can to a setting such as fail safe defaults and change back the stuff you have to. Good luck
 
69C while gaming. Yes same error with all 3 cards. How do I adjust memory timings and voltage?
 
Memory timings and voltage would be with your BIOS, first run cpu-z to know the proper timings for your system ram:
http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

The SPD tab will have the timings, look at the highest JEDEC number, write them down in order and properly label manner.

Restart your machine and hit del or F2 to enter setup, depending of your Bios version there will be a place to configure your system memory timing (refer to your motherboard manual), chances are that it is set to auto, but we don't want that, we want to be sure that it is using the proper settings so we will go and change all of the values by hand, following the notes you took.


So far i can say that by hand it is indeed way more stable than the "auto" setting of my mobo, i can't call it perfect but this is actually quite a nice improvement in stability that allows me to forget the power profile of my vidcard most of the times (but like i said, wasn't perfect as in the initial testing i found 2 bumps on my road, pertaining hardware acceleration and Chrome, all in all tho i can live with those features turned off ;-) )


EDIT TO ADD:
Hmm yet another crash... ok the difference is that before the crash would properly trigger the TDR response, now i get way less crashes but they are all out crashes with no driver reset. Will have to weight in if this is worth it.
 
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well if you get the same error with 3 different video cards and fresh installs, it could be something wrong with the motherboard
 
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