Processor: Athlon II X4 620 Deneb RB-C2
Motherboard: ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO w/BIOS 2105
Memory Modules: 4 * 8 GB AMD Performance Series 1866 MHz
- also tested with 2 * 2 GB GSkill Ripjaws 1333 MHz
Hard Disk: Samsung SpinPoint F3 1 TB HD103SJ
Power Supply: Cooler Master Extreme Power Plus 460W
Video Card: Integrated Radeon 4200 (From AMD 785G Chipset), with a 128 MB DDR3 Sideport
- also got a pair of undervolted Sapphire Radeon 5770 FLEXs, that spended 1 year and half nearly 24/7 mining BitCoins with the above power supply
Monitors: Samsung SyncMaster 932N+ and SyncMaster P2370H
OS: Windows XP SP3 (A 3 years old install that I absolutely not intend to replace. Still extremely clean, as it boots up with just 14 Processes)
I have had for at least more than a year (That's when I started to notice it, could be there from earlier) a very weird issue with the integrated GPU during heavy 2D load. What usually happens is that the screen initially freezes while the cursor responds for a few more seconds, and ocassionaly the machine beeps when this happens (Same type of beep that when you press too many Keyboard keys simultaneously). Finally, it fully freezes, some more seconds later the Monitor loses signal, and some more seconds later the machine resets. This behaviator seems to be reproducible via three methods:
* The default Windows Image Visor. When opening a big image file in a folder and rapidly switching left and right to alternate between a pic and the next, it seems to happen often, but not always.
* On the CMD console, when using an application that goes on an almost infinite loop printing text and/or numbers at lightspeed (Example: When testing a recently compiled application from a C training exercise, that multiplies X number with Y number, Z times. If Z is 1000000000000, it will do it that amount of times as fast as it can, literally flooding the console screen). Consistently and repeatable.
* Using Tom's 2D Bench, with the "direct drawing to visible device" option, on the second test that draws lines it consistently crashes like two seconds after starting that test. Consistently and repeatable, actually, the best tool for this job I suppose.
The crash is a bit different than the other two, because sometimes it fills half of the screen or so with a color, or draws some screen-wide lines that bypass the square where they should be drawed, etc. For what I tested today, behaviator seems to change slighty with different Catalyst versions.
From the Hardware side, I tried a whole bunch of different BIOS option. Underclocking the default 500 MHz IGP to 200, overclocking to 600, using as GPU Framebuffer only the Sideport, only UMA (Shared system memory) or both. It happened on all of them. Finally, decided to disable the IGP and fire Tom's 2D using one of my 5770, that passed it flawlessly. This issue was annoying, but as I knew what to NOT do to crash the IGP, I could simply avoid it. So basically, I have isolated the issue to something IGP related, because everything else seems to work as intended...
There was one exception, through. Around 1-3 times per week of having the machine running 24/7, I have a random freeze/lockup that can happen on pretty much any condition, be it while the machine is in use, or during Idle, after I go to sleep and wake up to find that the clock froze hours ago. Due to the absolute randomness of it, I never bothered hunting it, knowing that for every stupid option or Driver I could change, there was nothing that I could do to consistently reproduce the freeze to figure out if a fix worked or not.
What I do recall of these freezes, is that they started to happen after adding the second 5770. This machine ran for at least a year with just the IGP, then after I got my first 5770, I had a record 50 day uptime using the 4200 as main GPU while the single 5770 was exclusively used for Bitcoin mining (This way I could get 100% of the GPU MHash/s, AND didn't had any type of lag neither on Desktop, nor playing games. Indeed, I had the same IGP performance, but that was intended).
I considered these freezes normal due to the nature of my setup. You always see people complaining about some Driver issue on typical machines, and my IGP + 2 GPU setup is anything but typical, so it made sense that was less tested, or less stable. Even WXP could be responsible of these freezes, as I had to apply a workaround to actually make WXP run with all the 3 GPU successfully to begin with (Booting with the two 5770 disabled from Device Manager, then enable them again).
This was until yesterday I decided to plug in another Monitor, so now I have the two Monitors mentioned above, while the 5770s were disabled from the Device Manager. Tried to play for some hours to try to get used to having two Desktops before making things more complex enabling the 5770s for Bitcoin mining...
Result? 3 freezes on around 6 hours while on use. At this point now the freezes start to make sense: Looks like having to drive two screens puts a huge enough 2D load even while on the Desktop to make these freezes happen more often, and they seem to precisely point to the IGP or the Drivers. So now I have decided to finally try to fix the IGP freezes.
After physically removing the 5770s, and leaving just the IGP, Tom's 2D still crashes the exact same way. Uninstalled the Catalyst Drivers, and suddently it passes with WXP standard VGA Drivers (Possibily because all the work is being done by the CPU with no GPU acceleration). Tried with several versions of Catalyst (Check this list, it can't be newer than 12.1, because I need OpenCL on WXP. Or a way to use two different Drivers vesions simultaneously, for the 4200 and the 5770s), and all the ones that I tested crashes crashes, through on slighty different ways. Also tried changing in the Device Manager from a Radeon 4200 to 3200, and it lasted slighty longer while on the line test.
Any ideas about what I can try to fix the IGP 2D issues? Help me make my Frankenstein stable.
Motherboard: ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO w/BIOS 2105
Memory Modules: 4 * 8 GB AMD Performance Series 1866 MHz
- also tested with 2 * 2 GB GSkill Ripjaws 1333 MHz
Hard Disk: Samsung SpinPoint F3 1 TB HD103SJ
Power Supply: Cooler Master Extreme Power Plus 460W
Video Card: Integrated Radeon 4200 (From AMD 785G Chipset), with a 128 MB DDR3 Sideport
- also got a pair of undervolted Sapphire Radeon 5770 FLEXs, that spended 1 year and half nearly 24/7 mining BitCoins with the above power supply
Monitors: Samsung SyncMaster 932N+ and SyncMaster P2370H
OS: Windows XP SP3 (A 3 years old install that I absolutely not intend to replace. Still extremely clean, as it boots up with just 14 Processes)
I have had for at least more than a year (That's when I started to notice it, could be there from earlier) a very weird issue with the integrated GPU during heavy 2D load. What usually happens is that the screen initially freezes while the cursor responds for a few more seconds, and ocassionaly the machine beeps when this happens (Same type of beep that when you press too many Keyboard keys simultaneously). Finally, it fully freezes, some more seconds later the Monitor loses signal, and some more seconds later the machine resets. This behaviator seems to be reproducible via three methods:
* The default Windows Image Visor. When opening a big image file in a folder and rapidly switching left and right to alternate between a pic and the next, it seems to happen often, but not always.
* On the CMD console, when using an application that goes on an almost infinite loop printing text and/or numbers at lightspeed (Example: When testing a recently compiled application from a C training exercise, that multiplies X number with Y number, Z times. If Z is 1000000000000, it will do it that amount of times as fast as it can, literally flooding the console screen). Consistently and repeatable.
* Using Tom's 2D Bench, with the "direct drawing to visible device" option, on the second test that draws lines it consistently crashes like two seconds after starting that test. Consistently and repeatable, actually, the best tool for this job I suppose.
The crash is a bit different than the other two, because sometimes it fills half of the screen or so with a color, or draws some screen-wide lines that bypass the square where they should be drawed, etc. For what I tested today, behaviator seems to change slighty with different Catalyst versions.
From the Hardware side, I tried a whole bunch of different BIOS option. Underclocking the default 500 MHz IGP to 200, overclocking to 600, using as GPU Framebuffer only the Sideport, only UMA (Shared system memory) or both. It happened on all of them. Finally, decided to disable the IGP and fire Tom's 2D using one of my 5770, that passed it flawlessly. This issue was annoying, but as I knew what to NOT do to crash the IGP, I could simply avoid it. So basically, I have isolated the issue to something IGP related, because everything else seems to work as intended...
There was one exception, through. Around 1-3 times per week of having the machine running 24/7, I have a random freeze/lockup that can happen on pretty much any condition, be it while the machine is in use, or during Idle, after I go to sleep and wake up to find that the clock froze hours ago. Due to the absolute randomness of it, I never bothered hunting it, knowing that for every stupid option or Driver I could change, there was nothing that I could do to consistently reproduce the freeze to figure out if a fix worked or not.
What I do recall of these freezes, is that they started to happen after adding the second 5770. This machine ran for at least a year with just the IGP, then after I got my first 5770, I had a record 50 day uptime using the 4200 as main GPU while the single 5770 was exclusively used for Bitcoin mining (This way I could get 100% of the GPU MHash/s, AND didn't had any type of lag neither on Desktop, nor playing games. Indeed, I had the same IGP performance, but that was intended).
I considered these freezes normal due to the nature of my setup. You always see people complaining about some Driver issue on typical machines, and my IGP + 2 GPU setup is anything but typical, so it made sense that was less tested, or less stable. Even WXP could be responsible of these freezes, as I had to apply a workaround to actually make WXP run with all the 3 GPU successfully to begin with (Booting with the two 5770 disabled from Device Manager, then enable them again).
This was until yesterday I decided to plug in another Monitor, so now I have the two Monitors mentioned above, while the 5770s were disabled from the Device Manager. Tried to play for some hours to try to get used to having two Desktops before making things more complex enabling the 5770s for Bitcoin mining...
Result? 3 freezes on around 6 hours while on use. At this point now the freezes start to make sense: Looks like having to drive two screens puts a huge enough 2D load even while on the Desktop to make these freezes happen more often, and they seem to precisely point to the IGP or the Drivers. So now I have decided to finally try to fix the IGP freezes.
After physically removing the 5770s, and leaving just the IGP, Tom's 2D still crashes the exact same way. Uninstalled the Catalyst Drivers, and suddently it passes with WXP standard VGA Drivers (Possibily because all the work is being done by the CPU with no GPU acceleration). Tried with several versions of Catalyst (Check this list, it can't be newer than 12.1, because I need OpenCL on WXP. Or a way to use two different Drivers vesions simultaneously, for the 4200 and the 5770s), and all the ones that I tested crashes crashes, through on slighty different ways. Also tried changing in the Device Manager from a Radeon 4200 to 3200, and it lasted slighty longer while on the line test.
Any ideas about what I can try to fix the IGP 2D issues? Help me make my Frankenstein stable.
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