Let's play a game :)

[kaiweiler]

It's called what is wrong with my 3850/drivers?
My card: Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 256MB GDDR3 PCI-E Dual DVI-I HDCP HDMI HDTV Out

I just did a fresh re-install of Vista x64 and loaded on the 64bit version of Catalyst 8.1 drivers.
Poo.

I randomly get a crash in drivers? I was playing online poker/watching a DVD and after over an hour of doing the same thing, bam, out go the drivers, get the message Display Driver has crashed and "recovered" or whatnot, and then bluescreen/shutdown.

What the hell.

Using 2 19" widescreen LCD's with a total resolution of 2880x900.
I had problems with this before my format/reinstall, but I figured it was likely some conflicting drivers with the previous 7.12, however in this case I booted up my computer with Vista x64 for the first time with no internet, not allowing Vista to search and find it's own drivers, and installed the 8.1 drivers clean.

So no conflicting drivers.
What now?

Temperature? Card idles around 33C and while gaming never goes over 50C, perfectly healthy. I'm using the Accelero S1 cooler and Zalman ramsinks on the memory with MX-2 paste. Also at stock speeds.

So....
Let's play

 

[Lucky007]

Try using only one monitor, it should work with 2 monitors but maybe one of the DVI ports is buggy or something. IDK I don't see why it shouldn't work, I recently just had my 8600GTS die for no apparent reason just because I shipped it to someone. Video cards sometimes do unexplainable things

 

[kaiweiler]

I wear an ESD strap when working inside my case, so static or something weird shouldn't have harmed it...
do you think an 8800gt is in order?

 

[Lucky007]

If you play games like Counter Strike: Source, TF2, or WoW than going from a 3850 to an 8800GT won't make a noticable change. But if you play the newest most graphically intense games you can get your hands on, an 8800GT would be an awesome card for you.

Depends on what games you play. Crysis, The Witcher, UT3, Lost Planet, Gears Of War would all benefit from a 8800GT. Most other games would play fine on most cards, only the really high end games, or ones that arent released yet would you need a top end card for.

So that said, if you need a 8800GT and it wont hurt your pocket to buy one, then get one. Try to get a refund on your 3850 or an RMA so you can sell it, or use it in another computer.

 

[Sr7]

If you play games like Counter Strike: Source, TF2, or WoW than going from a 3850 to an 8800GT won't make a noticable change. But if you play the newest most graphically intense games you can get your hands on, an 8800GT would be an awesome card for you.

Depends on what games you play. Crysis, The Witcher, UT3, Lost Planet, Gears Of War would all benefit from a 8800GT. Most other games would play fine on most cards, only the really high end games, or ones that arent released yet would you need a top end card for.

So that said, if you need a 8800GT and it wont hurt your pocket to buy one, then get one. Try to get a refund on your 3850 or an RMA so you can sell it, or use it in another computer.

But the "only need a fast card for the current high end games" logic fails because all the new games coming out will continue to be more and more "high end" as you mention.

So essentially you don't buy your card purely to play what's out this second, you buy to play future games too, hoping that your card lasts as long as possible. A faster card is going to be faster in those too.

To the original poster, what does the bluescreen say? If it reboots automatically, disable the "automatically restart" option in the system properties. Right click my computer, go to properties, go to the advanced tab, and click "settings" under startup and recovery. You'll find the checkbox there.

The file mentioned in the blue screen will give us insight into what's wrong. Write down the file name and the long string of characters... the whole line (or take a picture).