Windows 7 64bit + 5870 locking up randomly

C

Compddd

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 6, 2003
Messages
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Recently got a XFX 5870. Occasionally when I'm browing internet, watching movies, etc the machine will lock up with a completely black screen, no ctl-alt-del response, forcing me to hard reset. This same issue is occurring with games. Just to make sure, I formatted and installed Windows Vista and was getting the same complete black screen lockups.

Right now I basically have a $399 unusable paperweight, it's very frustrating.

Details:
Windows 7 64-Bit
Catalyst 9.8A and 9.10(Tried both, and used drivercleaner between uninstalls just to make sure)
XFX Radeon HD 5870 @ Stock

Could this be a driver issue or simply a bad card?

Thanks for any insight.

-Compddd
 
I thought I was the only one but I'm on 7 64 bit with a 5870 (Sapphire) and my computer does that too. The screen just suddenly goes blue. Or I get a good old fashioned blue screen caused by the ATI drivers. In my case, it seems to be caused by some kind of corruption that happens in sleep mode. The longer it's in sleep, the more likely something bad will happen. If I don't use sleep I'm ok. It actually seemed to be worse before this months catalyst driver refresh. The corruption seemed to affect data in memory causing all kinds of strange crashes and random software failures in windows.
 
If you do see huge mouse cursor and use a gigabyte mother board, then update your bios, it solves the problem.
 
Try backing off your overclock a little. Apparently Windows 7 is a little more picky in that regard. I haven't seen the same issue with mine yet.
 
Hmm I havent had this problem at all.

The only thing I have had issues with is locking up in Stalker:CS.

Of course there hasnt been a patch for the game in awhile, so I took as (who cares its an old game)

But yea W7 64bit (retail) has been rock solid for me, and I am using the WHQL 9.10 drivers
 
Blackforge said:
Try backing off your overclock a little. Apparently Windows 7 is a little more picky in that regard. I haven't seen the same issue with mine yet.
Click to expand...

I was using a GTX 285 just fine at these overclocked settings before I got the 5870, it's not my overclock.
 
maybe contact XFX and see if they have heard anything.. if it is a bad card they would probably replace it with no fuss..
 
I got it from Fry's, I'm still under 30 days, so I can go return it or exchange it. You think I should do that?

Sounds like a bad card to you guys?
 
my xfx 5870, on windows 7 64 bit, cat 9.10, oc to 900 core, has no problems at all.
 
I was having tons of problems with my 5850 thst were solved using the 9.11 beta driver.
 
if you could get a new card I would if I where you, I was on the same boat as you same blank screen, random flickering, horizontal lines and bunch of crash and lock-ups, I reformatted (XP, Vista and Win7) and installed new drivers.

A trip later to fry's solved all the problems...
 
I AM ABOUT TO LOSE MY F***ING MIND HERE

Returned my 5870, picked up a new 5850, SAME PROBLEM, black screen of nothingness!

Here is how I know it is the ATI drivers, If I have them installed, and I set my Vcore low to something like oh 1.2 for instance(a setting I know will cause a x101 too low vcore BSOD), when I do that, I should get a BSOD with auto reboot right? Wrong, it just freezes to a black screen and sits there until I manually power down and power back on.

If I uninstall the ATI drivers, and attempt the same test using the Windows standard VGA driver, I will get a proper BSOD with error code instead of a blank black screen.

I am at my witts end here. I've tried Catalyst 9.8A, 9.10, and 9.11 beta, they all do it.

Do I give up on ATI and go back to nvidia?
 
Compddd said:
Recently got a XFX 5870. Occasionally when I'm browing internet, watching movies, etc the machine will lock up with a completely black screen, no ctl-alt-del response, forcing me to hard reset. This same issue is occurring with games. Just to make sure, I formatted and installed Windows Vista and was getting the same complete black screen lockups.

Right now I basically have a $399 unusable paperweight, it's very frustrating.

Details:
Windows 7 64-Bit
Catalyst 9.8A and 9.10(Tried both, and used drivercleaner between uninstalls just to make sure)
XFX Radeon HD 5870 @ Stock

Could this be a driver issue or simply a bad card?

Thanks for any insight.

-Compddd
Click to expand...

Got a Sapphire 5870 and a Core i7 at 3.6GHz. No problems with 64-bit Windows 7 crashing. If you've absolutely ruled out overclock stability as an issue (4.0GHz seems mighty aggressive), looks like your only option is a fresh install of Win7.

Edit: Agg. Just noticed you did a fresh install of Vista. Try swapping x16 slots?
 
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I had the 5870 for about 3 weeks under Vista and using one of the beta drivers in between CAT.9.8A and 9.10 I believe, didn't have a problem

Then I got Win 7 Ultimate when it came out, and formatted and did a fresh install and installed CAT 9.10, and that's when everything started going wrong. Random freezing, blank black screen hard freezing.

I formatted and installed Win Vista again with CAT 9.10 and got the same freezing and black screen crashes.

So I formatted and installed Win 7 again, tried CAT 9.8A, CAT 9.10, and now CAT 9.11

Still getting random freezing and blank black screen hard freezes.

I returned my 5870 and got a new 5850, and getting the same problems still.

I don't know what to do! :(
 
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Step one.. go get the 5870 back lol. If it was two cards with the same problem id start looking more at my machine. If your overclocked then take it back to complete stock settings and see if the issue remains. Also make sure there are no known issues with the power supply your using and this card. Also what voltages are your video cards reporting under load and at idle?
 
do you have a friends comp you can try it in?

return everything to stock as Copyright said, only way to know for sure what it is.
 
have you read your event logs?

sim problem, but with nVidia card in a 790 AMD MoBo...

i had issue with my GTX 260 under 7, random lock ups, and screen would go black or white. had to reset.

fixed my problem:
safe mode
- Start->cmd
- sc delete nvsvc
- sc delete nvlddmkm

installed the latest WHQL from nVidia and no more freezes. the screen going white or black, was corrected with a slight increase to my RAM +0.05v on my DDR3 to it is now 1.75v

Obviosly you have to target the ATI specific services, as these are nVidia specific services. sorry i dont remember them by name.
 
My computer worked flawlessly when I had a GTX 285. Everything started when I got the 5870 and now this 5850. =/
 
I have the 9.11 drivers installed, still getting the same problem though :(
 
Compddd said:
My computer worked flawlessly when I had a GTX 285. Everything started when I got the 5870 and now this 5850. =/
Click to expand...

Listen to the wise people that have told you to return your CPU to stock speed and start from there.

Drivers for these new cards are going to be a little immature for a while, but it is highly unlikely that you got two bad cards in a row.
 
I'm saying it is the driver, because if I uninstall the ATI drivers and use the standard vga graphics driver, I don't get the black screen freeze any longer.

I guess I have to wait for ATI to mature their drivers, or get a Fermi when they come out.
 
Compddd said:
I'm saying it is the driver, because if I uninstall the ATI drivers and use the standard vga graphics driver, I don't get the black screen freeze any longer.

I guess I have to wait for ATI to mature their drivers, or get a Fermi when they come out.
Click to expand...

dude listen to what they are saying, put everything to stock and start from scratch..work your way up..
 
I have just started having some problems with my 5870 while playing GTA IV... It ran great with no issues OC'd at 900/1300, but beginning two days ago my system has HARD locked up 3 times, had to force a restart. Went back in and checked my CPU overclock, reset GPU overclock in CCC Overdrive. GPU-Z was still reporting 850/1200. Ran 3dMark Vantage and have noticed about a 2000 point drop. I know these cards throttle themselves when they are OC'd too high. I run the fan at 44% when I game and it keeps the temps around 60C MAX.

Right now everything is set back to stock settings and I played for a few hours last night with no issues. Should I flash it to either the ASUS slightly bumped up BIOS or the totally unlocked MSI BIOS? I'm just a little skittish about breaking the darn thing because I do love it..
 
I don't get any hard locks, but I've had lots of trouble with Win7 x64 over the last few months I've used it.
I get constant "windows explorer has stopped working" errors, I've had issues with icons disappearing, my mouse and keyboard create a jitter effect when used at the same time, and I've had weird problems with MSI installers disappearing and no way to fix them besides registry deletion.
What's odd is that none of these things happened before installing my 5870.
I tried a fresh re-install (at stock speeds) and nothing changed at all.
I don't think the ATI Win7 x64 drivers are very mature right now.
 
I've had some similar problems with my 5870 and win7 64 bit. Games have been acting strange (random crashes) and there's the occasional bluish greyish screen that hard locks the computer. It's sort of like the computer wants to bsod but it isn't, and windows doesn't report it as a bsod.

All started happening after getting the 5870. Not much if at all on the first set of drivers, yet the more recent ones have seem to made the issue worse....

I'm going to guess drivers. Annoying nonetheless, I look forwards to every new driver version they release.
 
Try flashing your motherboard BIOS to a recent revision. It solved a whole host of issues people were having with the "Big" mouse cursor.
 
I upgraded to windows 7 64bit and i have my 5870 at 900/1250 with a 920 D0 at 4.11 and 3 gigs of ram at 1980 and i have no problems....but.... when i upgraded from a 4870 to a 5870 i noticed that some games act alittle wierd. Left for dead starts out dark until i get to 2 min into the game and at the same point every time it brightens to normal. All drivers do this. Second, i used to be able to vsnce my card at over 100hertz depending on resolution but now it says my monitor can only do 85. 85 is cool, but i love to vsync at 1600x1200 at 100hertz. So, the drivers need to mature. Also, i have the asus p6t deluxe V2 and i needed to upgrade the chipset driver and direct X run time and my comp runs like a dream. The darkness in LFD still hapenns in mercy hospital till you get outside and 85 hertz still remains so i truely think its still the drivers and they need to mature abit more.
 
Random locks that aren't resolved by multiple video cards are a sign of something else. Insisting it's the only thing that's changed isn't going to change that. Everything has to break sometime, and when you start changing things, they can become more sensitive to that change.

Besides, how do you know you didn't bump something loose, or slightly jostle the heatsink on your cpu causing a minor movement losing how flush it is? Are you monitoring your temps on anything but your video card? If you're hell bent on it being the problem, and it's NOT the problem, you're just going to give yourself headaches.

Don't dismiss things out of hand just because you don't think they're the problem.
 
I'm having the exact same problem! It's not instability because I have stress tested this rig a ton (thinking it was instability), never getting a single error. Plus it will happen when I'm just browsing the web or doing some other trivial non-intensive task.

I chalk it up to the drivers.

My system:
i7 920 @ 3.99Ghz (1.26v), 67C load (Apogee XT)
Asrock x58 Extreme
3x2GB OCZ1600 Gold @ 1140 8-8-8-24 (it isn't stable at 1592 because OCZ doesn't post all 9 or 10 timings needed to get 1600 and I hate them for it)
MSI 5850 @ 1000Mhz core, 1000Mhz (stock) memory, 46C load (watercooled)
 
same problem with the 5770 see Sapphire 5770 problem, in the amd forums there are several complaining too :S I would have to try my card in a friends machine and/or reinstall everything from scratch and see if it gets solved, but for me is a driver issue anyways.
 
dergreg said:
Random locks that aren't resolved by multiple video cards are a sign of something else. Insisting it's the only thing that's changed isn't going to change that. Everything has to break sometime, and when you start changing things, they can become more sensitive to that change.

Besides, how do you know you didn't bump something loose, or slightly jostle the heatsink on your cpu causing a minor movement losing how flush it is? Are you monitoring your temps on anything but your video card? If you're hell bent on it being the problem, and it's NOT the problem, you're just going to give yourself headaches.

Don't dismiss things out of hand just because you don't think they're the problem.
Click to expand...

Wrong, it is when many of us are getting the the exact or nearly the same errors after switching to 5800 series cards.

Anyone have this gem of a driver bug happen to them? If I set in power options for Windows to turn off my display after a certain amount of minutes, when I come back to my computer and move my mouse to turn my display back on, it will hard lock every single time. Using Catalyst 9.10 WHQL

Fix your sh** ATI :mad:
 
ATI 5850. Asus P5K-E. 4GB. Vista Ultimate x64. Q6600. Seasonic 650watts. 9.10 WHQL driver

No overclocks in any component. I get random computer locks after long idle times or after long sleep periods. In my case the monitor is not losing the video signal and going into stand-by, the monitor seems to receive a solid all black signal from the GPU

After the black screen crash, everything is locked. CTRL-ALT-DEL will not respond. CAPS LOCK will not respond. The whole system is locked. Only pushing reset, or a 10 seconds push of power button gets it out of it

I upgraded the ASUS BIOS to the latest version available. Same problems

Games work fine, video work fine. The crashes mostly happen after long idle periods, and/or after long sleep periods

Most times after I login, I get a Vista message from the Error Reporting system. It says that the graphic card stopped responding. Microsoft advice is to get new graphic drivers

I didn't have this problem with my previous 8800GTS 640M in the same system/configuration/software installation. I used drive sweeper to remove the nVidia remaining files, so that is not the problem either

In a possibly related problem, checking with GPU-Z, sometimes it reports the GPU load goes at 99%, when the computer is doing nothing, just at Vista desktop, with ~0% CPU load. When that happens, GPU-Z reports that the 5850 is using the highest voltage/GPU freq/Mem freq settings, which seems true given the higher than normal temperatures it is reading

Vista Logout/Login doesn't clear the GPU high load, but setting the computer to sleep, plus a wake-up a few seconds later seems to reset the GPU, which goes back to low voltage and 175MHz at idle

In summary, my 5850 seems to have an instability at idle condition, at low frequency and low voltage, when it is using little current (what would mean that in this case it is not a power supply problem)

Based on all this, my best guesses right now are:

- GDDR5 memory corruption causing a crash of the graphic system and taking Vista down with it
- Poor GPU BIOS causing memory/PCI Express errors
- Poor ATI drivers causing GPU memory or system memory errors

I see many other people in this and other forums with similar problems. Given that the volume of ATI's 5850 sold up to date is not that high yet, this configuration of GPU+GPU BIOS+ drivers seem to have serious stability problems
 
I have a Q6600 @ 3.2, Win 7 x64 and 5770 xfire (950/1400) with the similar problems. Any games I try to play will hard lock the system a short time after playing; sometimes after ten minutes, sometimes not even half a minute.

9.10 and 9.11 Beta presented the same problem, however, 9.11 Beta recently started letting me alt+tab out of games and close them via task manager. Stock and OC'd give the same results. Hopefully the 9.12 Beta fix this..
 
Ton of ppl are getting the gray screen with vertical bars lockup. If you wait long enough the system finally unlocks and then I am able to play for hours without issue. I did not have this problem with crossfire and the same driver and same cards. I went and sold one of my cards and kept the XFX for warranty reasons. Now that I am down to a single card If the pc is on all night long and I go to game the next day I get the gray screen with vertical bars. There is a forum post of a guy with the same issue and a picture of what it looks like. I can't find it now that I need it. This has to be driver related. Even ppl with 4000 series started running into this with the new drivers. I have heard its power play related. You can try locking your gpu clock and max voltage to see if the issue goes away.
 
I fixed my problem for the time being by switching to Catalyst 9.10 WHQL, and setting sleep to "never" and setting turn off display to "never".

It would hard lock every single time I brought my monitor out of standby mode by moving my mouse. It's definitely ATI's crappy Win 7 drivers.
 
I posted in another thread with similar symptoms.

I have a Core i5 OC to 3.7, 5870 stock......... Win7 64 Ultimate
I think it has something to do with ATIs drivers and Windows 64. I stated on the other thread I was on a q6600 + GTX 260 + Win7 64 system.. no problems.

Swapped in a 5870 in to the above with current drivers for everything..... crashes start.

Built new machine Core i5..... crashes still. Sometimes I can go for hours and hours no problem. My Dragon Age crashed 4 times today. WoW was completely stable for 6 hours.

The GTX 260 ran on both XP Pro and Vista 64 Ultimate. The 5870 on Win7 only.


*****wanted to say one thing I noticed while Dragon Age Origins crashes......... It always crashes on a cutscene. Every time. It could happen a few minutes in......... or 3 hours later.
Guess I just gotta wait........ I should probably stuff my Velociraptor back in my box and install XP Pro 32 in the meantime.


UPDATE***** I turned off my overclock completely. I went back and tested Dragon Age Origins. No crashes in the 3-4 hours I played tonight. I will keep testing this week and see if the OC was indeed the culprit. Odd it picks random times to lock on up the ATI driver error. Was happening all day earlier in Dragon Age......... then once playing a WMA file. Tonight no problems...... stock speeds on cpu and video card. I hope that it is a driver issue. I stress tested this computer with absolutely no errors for 16+ hours on all cores. World of Warcraft has not triggered the crash at all. (with absolutely the highest settings in game and forced through the ATI tool). I also ran without Aero on...... crash still occured. (when oc'd)
 
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I've been getting very similar crashes ever since getting my xfx 5870. I had absolutely no stability problems when I had my 8800gt, but now I'm constantly holding my breath waiting for another hard lock. The card works fine in games, never locks up or anything, it just crashes when coming out of sleep when I log in. sometimes the driver can be reset, other times I just get a black screen. If I'm lucky I get the "display driver has stopped working" dialog and then it's ok. Nothing is overclocked and it did the same thing in vista64/win7 64 beta/win7 64 rtm. My guess is it will go away if I shut down every time or don't put it to sleep, but wtf kinda crap is that!

:mad:
 
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