SOLVED Questions about my 6950

I got one of the early 6950's from Asus, pretty card with an all aluminum cooler and clocked at 810. I have been having issues with it for a little while but I am unsure of what is causing the issues.
First off I had the great idea to update everything because I haven't for a long time. I updated the ATI drivers, but I am unsure of what revision they were because it showed the old version in CCC, some kind of fluke I guess. I should also say that I updated the mobo bios which had not had an update released in over a year. Something started causing BSOD's at random times, mostly when at rest with the screen saver running. Mostly IRQ less or not equal. An even newer version of the drivers came out and i also tried them, no luck as far as not BSODing and they also caused some other unexpected problems. Smart Doctor can no longer read the graphics card information and won't run on startup so I have no control of the fan settings.
I uninstalled a lot of programs to try and stop the BSOD's and just yesterday I went back to an older mobo bios. I am uncertain that the BSOD's are gone or not but it has run over 24 hours without one. I also had to install MSI afterburner even though it had previously caused issues with the early drivers. Right away I noticed that the voltage varies along with the clock settings that I am pretty sure it didn't use to, dropping to .9 volts most of the time but spiking every time the background or screen saver changes and I am thinking that this may be causing my issues.
Question is are there better older drivers for 6950's? I don't overclock it and the only game I run is BF3. Is my card so old that the newer drivers aren't really tested for 6900 series cards, or are the ATI drivers just that crappy? Is anyone else having problems with their 6950 and newer drivers? Are there prefered drivers for the older cards like mine? I am not ready to upgrade what was such an expensive card yet and I am not sure that I would go with an ATI again even if I did because of all the problems I have had lately.

irq less or not equal is an unstable cpu overclock or ram overclock for the most part.

as for my 6950 im using the latest drivers and have no issues at all with bf3 i play @ 1920x1080 ultra settings. im thinking the bsod's are being caused by the cpu OC tbh, not the amd card or their crappy drivers.

I had thought so to at first but ran a few memory tests and prime95 for several hours and no problems at all. What made me think more ATI was that it happens on desktop and not in a game. WhoCrased also mentions the driver in it's summary. I just enabled the MSI oc feature using the cfg file and now the voltage stays the same at all times, hopefully it may solve the issue but only time will tell. I never had the under voltage problem when running Smart Doctor.

Personally my HD6950 flips out with drivers above 12.4. But then again its flashed.
The driver updating could cause issues, if i was in such a case i would format, and reinstall the OS. But i would also not have updated, if it works, leave it alone

I run 12.11 without any problems in BF3

I was getting rondom Bsod with 12.8 drivers so i had to go back to 12.6 and now on 12.11 beta havnt got a Bsod since

Just got another BSOD, PFN list corrupt. I have been trying to trace back what happened and when. only thing that I see that it might be a combination of drivers and Windows updates. The BSOD's have been daily since 10/01, the day Windows did 18 updates. Given that ya'll have had no issues with the 12.11's I think I will try them.

Uninstalling ati/amd drivers leave many leftover .dll's. Installing beta/preview drivers over such an uninstall can indeed cause all sorts of troubles. I've had this after 11.10preview2.
This driver seems to work the best and the fastest for me so I compare every new driver with them. So after an uninstall/install performance drops and/or the system crashes when gaming, and in one case I could barely see my mouse cursor but the rest was black with some graphical anomalies, totally unworkable and I needed atiman uninstaller to get rid of that. This also cleaned out my pc from all leftover ati files, and ever since it all works much better.
The 12.11beta4 works very good and is on my system almost as good as my trusted 11.10preview drivers.
I guess we have to wait till amd releases new drivers for our cards, at present it's for the 7000 series cards and while they work on older series, they are not meant to improve things for them.

You could uninstall drivers through software, then after the reboot run atiman uninstaller, when that's finished ccleaner, and then your system should be clean for a fresh install of new drivers.

It seems that it was the drivers, I had upgraded from the 12.4 a while back. The BSOD's got worse for every driver after that untill the 12.11's, with the 12.10's giving BSOD at least daily. Haven't had one for three days now, hope it is a permanant fix.

shadowdr said:

It seems that it was the drivers, I had upgraded from the 12.4 a while back. The BSOD's got worse for every driver after that untill the 12.11's, with the 12.10's giving BSOD at least daily. Haven't had one for three days now, hope it is a permanant fix.

Click to expand...

Lets hope so, but great to here there was a fix, i never got BSOD, but alot of flickering. Will try 12.11 witht he card, or maybe higher since the rig is far from complete atm.

But never the less, good to here its working with 12.11, cant wait to see them out as full drivers.