SOLVED Driver keeps crashing on Saphire 6870

OCnewbee · Feb 4, 2011

Hello, I just got the new build up and running a few days ago and now the 6870 driver keeps crashing. It crashes when I have multiple windows open, and it will crash without any windows open as well but takes a bit longer to crash.

System specs:
AMD Phenom II 1090T stock clock for now.
Gigabyte 890FX UD5 mobo
AMD Saphire 6870 Cat 11.1 stock clock.
G.Skill RipJaw 8gb ram
Corsair 750watt PSU
Windows 7 64bit
Monitor is a dell 2407wfpm, single for now till I figure out driver issue then adding the second 2407wfp into the mix.

What happens is that I start too see a bunch of horizontal dashes across the screen, progressively it gets worse, sometimes the screen freeze, the driver crashes then the screen comes back for a few and then it repeats until blue screen of death. Maybe dropping down to Cat10 might help? Any suggestions, card is not OC'ed, running stock clock.

Also Anyone else with this card and have the fan slightly rubbing against something inside the housing while it spins? It goes away if you tap the card or pull the card upwards, and it does it when the fan spins at a higher seed on restart.

Thanks

Sevan

psionic98 · Feb 4, 2011

do you have an older card to test with.. you may have just gotten a bad card and need to RMA it.

Just because the driver fails doesn't mean its the drivers fault. faulty cards send the wrong instructions through the driver and the driver says whiskey tango foxtrot.. BSOD!

OCnewbee · Feb 4, 2011

psionic98 said:
do you have an older card to test with.. you may have just gotten a bad card and need to RMA it.

Just because the driver fails doesn't mean its the drivers fault. faulty cards send the wrong instructions through the driver and the driver says whiskey tango foxtrot.. BSOD!

No I do not have an older card to test. Maybe the card is faulty, gonna try the 10.2 Cat and see if the issue happens. Also gonna try it with out any drivers as well to see if it the card itself.

Grnfinger · Feb 4, 2011

OCnewbee said:
Hello, I just got the new build up and running a few days ago and now the 6870 driver keeps crashing. It crashes when I have multiple windows open, and it will crash without any windows open as well but takes a bit longer to crash.

System specs:
AMD Phenom II 1090T stock clock for now.
Gigabyte 890FX UD5 mobo
AMD Saphire 6870 Cat 11.1 stock clock.
G.Skill RipJaw 8gb ram
Corsair 750watt PSU
Windows 7 64bit
Monitor is a dell 2407wfpm, single for now till I figure out driver issue then adding the second 2407wfp into the mix.

What happens is that I start too see a bunch of horizontal dashes across the screen, progressively it gets worse, sometimes the screen freeze, the driver crashes then the screen comes back for a few and then it repeats until blue screen of death. Maybe dropping down to Cat10 might help? Any suggestions, card is not OC'ed, running stock clock.

Also Anyone else with this card and have the fan slightly rubbing against something inside the housing while it spins? It goes away if you tap the card or pull the card upwards, and it does it when the fan spins at a higher seed on restart.

Thanks

Sevan

I had a Sapphire 6870 ( sold it ) it clocked extremely well and the fan at 50% was darn near silent.
In the short time I had the card I found the 10.11 drivers to be very good for gaming and overclocking.

I ran the card at 975/1100 stock volts and cooler with no issues

OCnewbee · Feb 4, 2011

Grnfinger said:
I had a Sapphire 6870 ( sold it ) it clocked extremely well and the fan at 50% was darn near silent.
In the short time I had the card I found the 10.11 drivers to be very good for gaming and overclocking.

I ran the card at 975/1100 stock volts and cooler with no issues

Good to know, just removed 11.1 and ran driversweeper in safe mode, now trying to replicate problem via win 7 driver. If no problem shows up I will try the 10.12 driver.

OCnewbee · Feb 5, 2011

Late night update;

After removing 11.1 river and running Driversweepr in safe mode ran with windows 7 driver for a good two hours with out a single hick rock solid. Then I updated chipset driver off gigabytes site and tried cat11.1 once again, within the first 30 min of having re-installed cat11.1 this happened?

and then a few minutes later walla

Followed by a solid black screen, the PC was still running normally just no display. I a thinking it is a driver issue so far, seeing that it will only happen with the cat 11.1 driver and not with the win 7 driver. No time to try an older driver and see if it will do the same as cat 11.1. any thought? Should I be trying something else?

Kohta · Feb 5, 2011

OCnewbee said:
Late night update;

After removing 11.1 river and running Driversweepr in safe mode ran with windows 7 driver for a good two hours with out a single hick rock solid. Then I updated chipset driver off gigabytes site and tried cat11.1 once again, within the first 30 min of having re-installed cat11.1 this happened?

Followed by a solid black screen, the PC was still running normally just no display. I a thinking it is a driver issue so far, seeing that it will only happen with the cat 11.1 driver and not with the win 7 driver. No time to try an older driver and see if it will do the same as cat 11.1. any thought? Should I be trying something else?

This has happend on my Radeon HD 5970's since i owned them a year ago, it's due to the 2D clocks idling at very low speeds, i have yet to find a driver to fix it, i just keep gritting my teeth, telling myself i have the best GPU, and try to deal with it, i'm not far away from getting a Nvidia to be honest, iv'e almost had enough of this after a year of crashing 3-4 times per hour, it's very hard to overclock because this card will freeze my PC eventually, only remedy i have found, is to run a game or a youtube video(paused) 24/7,

Grnfinger · Feb 5, 2011

OCnewbee said:
Late night update;

After removing 11.1 river and running Driversweepr in safe mode ran with windows 7 driver for a good two hours with out a single hick rock solid. Then I updated chipset driver off gigabytes site and tried cat11.1 once again, within the first 30 min of having re-installed cat11.1 this happened?

Followed by a solid black screen, the PC was still running normally just no display. I a thinking it is a driver issue so far, seeing that it will only happen with the cat 11.1 driver and not with the win 7 driver. No time to try an older driver and see if it will do the same as cat 11.1. any thought? Should I be trying something else?

try 10.11, been a lot of complaints with 11.1
Have you tried the 11.1 hot fix if not give it a go
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst111aHotfix.aspx

Kohta said:
This has happend on my Radeon HD 5970's since i owned them a year ago, it's due to the 2D clocks idling at very low speeds, i have yet to find a driver to fix it, i just keep gritting my teeth, telling myself i have the best GPU, and try to deal with it, i'm not far away from getting a Nvidia to be honest, iv'e almost had enough of this after a year of crashing 3-4 times per hour, it's very hard to overclock because this card will freeze my PC eventually, only remedy i have found, is to run a game or a youtube video(paused) 24/7,

Allow me to solve your 5970 problems

I own the same card and had the exact same issues, once I applied this fix it has NEVER happened again. I would highly recommend doing the fix it will unleash the beast that your card is.

This fix will work on any 5970, just follow the instructions and your set
http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=130736&highlight=5970

OCnewbee · Feb 5, 2011

Grnfinger said:
try 10.11, been a lot of complaints with 11.1
Have you tried the 11.1 hot fix if not give it a go
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst111aHotfix.aspx

No I have not tried the Cat 11.1 HF yet just down loaded it. But even with the Cat8.3 driver that came on the Saphire disk it still crashed.But late last night i uninstalled 8.3 and let the windows driver run the card over night and when I came back to it this morning it was still running, I know this because i left some folders open and they were still open when i came back. Now im starting to wonder if it is the physical card itself? I will wipe the drivers clean yet again and try the 11.1 HF, then repeat with the 10.12 if it happens no matter what with any ATI driver looks like the card is gonna get RMA'd.....................FML first time ever building a PC and having to RMA anything! O well i guess I couldn't dodge that bullet for ever.

Grnfinger · Feb 5, 2011

it does suck when new parts arrive defective.

Hopefully your with in the time frame for direct replacement from the store and wont have to rma with Sapphire if the card turns out to be defective.

OCnewbee · Feb 5, 2011

Grnfinger said:
it does suck when new parts arrive defective.

Hopefully your with in the time frame for direct replacement from the store and wont have to rma with Sapphire if the card turns out to be defective.

Just received everything last Wednesday 2/3 from newegg.

Kohta · Feb 5, 2011

Grnfinger said:
try 10.11, been a lot of complaints with 11.1
Have you tried the 11.1 hot fix if not give it a go
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst111aHotfix.aspx

Allow me to solve your 5970 problems

I own the same card and had the exact same issues, once I applied this fix it has NEVER happened again. I would highly recommend doing the fix it will unleash the beast that your card is.

This fix will work on any 5970, just follow the instructions and your set
http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=130736&highlight=5970

read through all of that, seems simple enough, i plan on getting 2 koolance 5970 blocks and $300-$400 radiator from them as well, just curious, while it is on air, do you think it would be ok using the 1000/1300 1.35v VDDC | 1.25v VDDCI? i don't like the idea of flashing the bios more than i have to this time. (Sorry for jacking your thread for a moment, i didn't want to start a whole new one over this one question.)

Currently it runs pretty cool, iv'e taken both of them apart and applied Arctic Silver, ran furmark for alittle over 6 hours and the max temp was 60c with custom fan controls.

OCnewbee · Feb 5, 2011

Well even with the cat11.1a hot fix it still crashes, but i don't get the dashes it just freezes the screen and the restarts the driver, and repeats till screen goes black. Now for v10 then im convinced it is the physical card and not the drivers, but if it is the physical card why does it not crash on the windows 7 driver? Not once, i can run it all day at 1600x1200max windows 7 64bit driver? Go figure.

Kohta · Feb 5, 2011

My wife has a 6870, and she hasn't changed her driver since 10.12 (where it says it doesn't fully support it) and her frame rates are as good as my 5970 in most games, Final Fantasy XIv for one looks phenominal, she's never had a crash.

OCnewbee · Feb 5, 2011

Check this out, i decided to view the driversweeper closer and found this.

Now on the specs it says AMD890fx north and AMD SB850 south, could the nvidia chipset be causing the issue? Should I wipe those clean or leave them?

Grnfinger · Feb 5, 2011

OCnewbee said:
Check this out, i decided to view the driversweeper closer and found this.

Now on the specs it says AMD890fx north and AMD SB850 south, could the nvidia chipset be causing the issue? Should I wipe those clean or leave them?

Hmm tough call you could remove them and let Win7 take care of the chipset to see how it plays...
Have you called Sapphire to see what there opinion is?

Kohta said:
read through all of that, seems simple enough, i plan on getting 2 koolance 5970 blocks and $300-$400 radiator from them as well, just curious, while it is on air, do you think it would be ok using the 1000/1300 1.35v VDDC | 1.25v VDDCI? i don't like the idea of flashing the bios more than i have to this time. (Sorry for jacking your thread for a moment, i didn't want to start a whole new one over this one question.)

Currently it runs pretty cool, iv'e taken both of them apart and applied Arctic Silver, ran furmark for alittle over 6 hours and the max temp was 60c with custom fan controls.

I'm running a Koolance block and temps are stellar... you will be able to run the 900/1200 profile on air easy, it will allow for 950/1250 before you'll top out... I'd put the card under water b4 I would try the 1000/1300 profile...1.35 is a lot of volts

I've flashed the card twice now, and currently using the 900/1200 profile with these temps using the Koolance block

OCnewbee · Feb 6, 2011

Grnfinger said:
Hmm tough call you could remove them and let Win7 take care of the chipset to see how it plays...
Have you called Sapphire to see what there opinion is?

I called AMD on friday but i was not near my computer and i didn't know what the BSOD said, I tried the 11.1a again but this time it crashed way sooner then before and gave me the BSOD!

What do you think the BSOD says?

Grnfinger · Feb 6, 2011

No idea what the BSOD code means, google was little help..

Do you have a spare/old HDD
If you do, install a fresh OS and see if the problem is still there...

One time you get artifacts, another time it hard locks, another time it BSOD
I'd try that and if your still having issues than I'd return it to the egg for a exchange

I popped mine right in, went from 10.4 right up to 10.11, no driver sweeper used just used CCC uninstall then I installed 10.11

OCnewbee · Feb 6, 2011

Grnfinger said:
No idea what the BSOD code means, google was little help..

Do you have a spare/old HDD
If you do, install a fresh OS and see if the problem is still there...

One time you get artifacts, another time it hard locks, another time it BSOD
I'd try that and if your still having issues than I'd return it to the egg for a exchange

I popped mine right in, went from 10.4 right up to 10.11, no driver sweeper used just used CCC uninstall then I installed 10.11

Yes I do have a spare 250gb HDD but not a solid state, Currently the OS is on the SSD 120gb, But I will give it a shot on the standard HD and see what happens.

OCnewbee · Feb 7, 2011

Ok, format the 250GB HDD re-installed windows 7 64bit did all the updates to get windows current installed the driver of the CD and still got the dashes and the crashing. Gonna give AMD a call at 6am PST to see what they say. Could it be the power supply? Its a corsair 750watt psu, I have both 6pin pugs connected. The funny thing is in CCC in the AMD overdrive temps are at 42 0 load and fan at 23 when the crashes happen, doesn't look like the card is overheating at all.

SOLVED Driver keeps crashing on Saphire 6870

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