Anybody having problems with their HD4870?

[LightningRider]

Suddenly, it seems my COD4 game crashes every 10-15 minutes. Sometimes I get the message saying the driver recovered and restarted itself. Other times, the screen goes completely black and I have to force restart (no BSOD though).

The card is not overheating, load temps are around 65C, idle 50C at 40% fan.

It just started doing it today... I don't know what's the matter with it. Hoping it's just a driver issue that ATi will fix soon...

 

[chizow]

Are you overclocking at all? Even the slightest bit that is 100% stable in other games or stress tests can throw off COD4. I found this to be the case with an 8800GT and 8800GTX as well.

This was actually quite common with the 8800GT and COD4...but of course certain people just wanted to blame it on NV drivers as if TDR errors were vendor-specific.....

 

[bob4432]

i am having an issue w/ a 3850 it is the asus version w/ the big ass heatsink - it will crash on cohf (the game that came w/ the card), crysis and cod4. i have run it o/c'd and then at stock speeds both w/ the random reboots, and this is on a machine that hasn't ever been unstable. in fact this last week i have had more computer crashes w/ this certain machine than i have probably had in the last 5yrs from all the computers i have built since then. before this the machine ran extremely stable w/ a x1800xt 256. wtf. i have only had this card a bit over a month, because i can't return it to newegg...so off to asus it is going.

fwiw, it does seem to happen more w/ the new 8.7c than it did before, but this card is hardly stable...

 

[LightningRider]

Not OCing at all. It's weird. I uninstalled the driver and reinstalled it yesterday because I was getting Visual C++ errors in the CCC. After reinstalling everything worked perfectly for the rest of the night.

Get home tonight, after a 13 hour work day. Fire up some COD4 and within 20 minutes I get a black screen again and have to force reboot. Restarted... played some more... nothing.

This is starting to aggrivate me. I hope I didn't make the wrong decision in going with ATi. Never had this kind of stuff with nVidia drivers.

 

[RaulF]

Yup i have the same issue, i am runing vista 64 bit, it was actually also happening with my 1950Pro and it just got worse with the 4870. So i am RMA and getting a GTX260. Since i have a Nvidia card in my laptop and i have no issues whatsoever. I get teh same the driver crash and has recovered.

But since the 4870 my computer will crash and lock up that i have to reboot it. No OC here either.

 

[Krynj]

I don't wanna be 'that guy', but. Get rid of Vista. You will probably notice a lot less game crashes.

<flame suit armed>

 

[bob4432]

running xp sp3 here....

 

[Krynj]

The other 2 guys are running Vista. I was partially joking though.

 

[LightningRider]

I'm not getting rid of Vista. Never had this problem on nVidia cards.

 

[chizow]

The irony in this instance about getting rid of Vista is that a similar crash in XP would most likely result in a BSOD. Vista 64 is far and away more stable than XP has ever been for me, some of the hoops you have to jump through to even install XP nowadays just seem so antiquated (135GB limit, USB 2.0 device support, chipset/raid drivers etc....).

How about CPU/FSB/RAM, any overclocking there? I know its not a popular fix but it may help troubleshoot. I'd try removing one of your RAM sticks, adjusting timings, or increasing voltage. Many of the early TDR errors were ultimately RAM/FSB problems. They fixed a lot of the problems by hot fixing out the virtualization of the frame buffer in system memory, but Vista is definitely still less tolerant of any RAM instabilities compared to XP imo.

 

[jamesbond007]

What kind of power supplies are you guys running? I just came from a 7950GT OC 256MB to an ASUS Radeon HD4870 and...wow...what a lovely upgrade that was!

LightningRider, what are your northbridge and southbridge temps? Mine went up a bit since I installed the card and applied an overclock to my CPU. I'm using the latest ATi Catalyst (8.7?? I think...) and everything seems to run tip-top.

My system specs:
ASUS Rampage Formula Motherboard
Intel Q9450 (2.66GHz, 12MB L2 stock) running 3.2GHz
ASUS Radeon 4870
8GB (4x2GB) G.Skill PC8500 DDR2 1066MHz
WD Raptor-X 150GB
Antec Case (forget which model, but it has 2x92mm in front with 120mm exhaust)
Antec 550W power supply
Windows XP x64 right now, soon to be Vista x64 Ultimate

The card is not overheating, load temps are around 65C, idle 50C at 40% fan.

Do you have a third party cooler installed? If so, did it come with RAM sinks?

~Travis

 

[fpsdean]

Originally posted by: RaulF
Yup i have the same issue, i am runing vista 64 bit, it was actually also happening with my 1950Pro and it just got worse with the 4870. So i am RMA and getting a GTX260. Since i have a Nvidia card in my laptop and i have no issues whatsoever. I get teh same the driver crash and has recovered.

But since the 4870 my computer will crash and lock up that i have to reboot it. No OC here either.

Forget playing CoD4 on Nvidia - I can't even make it through a level!

ATI releases drivers every month (where nvidia every year or whenever new cards come out but they still don't update drivers for old cards when that happens).... next driver should fix it.

 

[fpsdean]

Originally posted by: chizow
The irony in this instance about getting rid of Vista is that a similar crash in XP would most likely result in a BSOD. Vista 64 is far and away more stable than XP has ever been for me, some of the hoops you have to jump through to even install XP nowadays just seem so antiquated (135GB limit, USB 2.0 device support, chipset/raid drivers etc....).

How about CPU/FSB/RAM, any overclocking there? I know its not a popular fix but it may help troubleshoot. I'd try removing one of your RAM sticks, adjusting timings, or increasing voltage. Many of the early TDR errors were ultimately RAM/FSB problems. They fixed a lot of the problems by hot fixing out the virtualization of the frame buffer in system memory, but Vista is definitely still less tolerant of any RAM instabilities compared to XP imo.

The one, and ONLY scenario where Vista is more stable is with video related driver crashes, Vista usually doesn't blue screen or freeze but says "your driver failed", but it still forces you to reboot for your 3d to work after that... XP just freezes.

However there's a lot more complaints with the current ATI drivers in Vista than XP.

 

[shangshang]

Originally posted by: fpsdean


The one, and ONLY scenario where Vista is more stable is with video related driver crashes, Vista usually doesn't blue screen or freeze but says "your driver failed", but it still forces you to reboot for your 3d to work after that... XP just freezes.

However there's a lot more complaints with the current ATI drivers in Vista than XP.

This is an unsubstantiated claim.

Personally I've had much more problem with the ATI drivers bombing under XP SP2, SP3 than I am with Vista 32bit now.

 

[shangshang]

Originally posted by: FetusCakeMix
I don't wanna be 'that guy', but. Get rid of Vista. You will probably notice a lot less game crashes.

<flame suit armed>

Nah. Vista32 is better XP in gaming if you have a Quad and 4GB RAM. Next wave or games will pretty much all have DX10. People on XP will going to miss out on the eye candy visual, which kind of defeats the point of buying a fast video card like so many in here do.

 

[cm123]

Originally posted by: shangshang

Originally posted by: FetusCakeMix
I don't wanna be 'that guy', but. Get rid of Vista. You will probably notice a lot less game crashes.

<flame suit armed>

Nah. Vista32 is better XP in gaming if you have a Quad and 4GB RAM. Next wave or games will pretty much all have DX10. People on XP will going to miss out on the eye candy visual, which kind of defeats the point of buying a fast video card like so many in here do.

while I actually like working with vista more than xp - when talking cod4 and even cod5 which is dx9 still - I run couple of systems, 1 w/vista32, another w/vista64, and 2 with xp, never have had problems with install nor crashing of cod4 w/xp, lots of crashes with vista32 and some with vista64 - you'll find actually good amount of people having errors w/vista and cod (mostly those playing mod maps)....

also xp does better with pings and performance (sure not by too much, however some) with cod4 as with still few games.

that all being said, yep in time as games start to hit w/dx10 (like project origin/new fear) and such, xp people will be missing out... of course then comes the question of are going to look to the new games (other than likes of cod5 and others going dx9 yet) or no.

thinking about it, its so sad we even have any case at all for xp given its 10+ years old!

 

[Denithor]

Originally posted by: cm123
thinking about it, its so sad we even have any case at all for xp given its 10+ years old!

I find that it makes perfect sense that many people are still using XP happily after all these years. The OS itself has evolved over time, it's certainly not the same POS that was released 8 or 9 years ago. That, and XP is much less demanding from a hardware POV so it runs better on older equipment.

Now, I've run both 32-bit XP and 64-bit Vista (Ultimate) and haven't seen any differences at all in game stability. At the moment I'm running XP SP3 (contrary to my sig) because I was having some trouble getting the new F@H GPU client to run properly on Vista.

I found exactly two cases where Vista was better than XP.

1) Certain games. DX10. End of comment.
2) F@H GPU client, under Vista (when it would run) only used 7-8% of one of my e8400 cores. Same setup with XP ties up 100% of one core to push the GPU client. So it looks like Vista is better optimized to manage multicore computing than XP.

 

[stevozilik]

Hi everybody,

I'm having same issues with HD4870 - crashing. If I'm lucky OS manages to recover the driver, sometimes I need to restart the computer. This has nothing to do with the OS. I first experienced that on Vista 64, so I've reinstalled to XP (32) and had exactly same scenario (playing Grid or Stalker), so now I'm back on Vista . If I manually override the GPU fan speed to >40% , it helps and I don't get those errors. I've been testing the system stability for about 40 hours with various programs (Memtest86+, Prime95) and except GPU the system is perfectly stable. I was playing COD 4 for an hour yesterday W/O any problems, though it was with fan up to 40%. I'm gonna try to set automatic fan speed to see whether it will crash, I believe it will big time

anyway I thinking of sending the GPU back and getting a replacement...

 

[Mem]

Originally posted by: LightningRider
Suddenly, it seems my COD4 game crashes every 10-15 minutes. Sometimes I get the message saying the driver recovered and restarted itself. Other times, the screen goes completely black and I have to force restart (no BSOD though).

The card is not overheating, load temps are around 65C, idle 50C at 40% fan.

It just started doing it today... I don't know what's the matter with it. Hoping it's just a driver issue that ATi will fix soon...

I don't have COD4 however I don't have any issues with my Gigabyte 4870 and Vista x64 in gaming,have you installed lastest DX9.0C(for Vista as well as XP).

DX9.0C link(June 2008) .
I would test your card with FurMark since it stresses the card more then any game and has a stability test option plus gives you GPU temps at the same time.

FurMark,if it passes FurMark(give it a good hour or two) then I would say maybe a driver issue or something else.
Let us know how it does on FurMark.


Btw I just leave my 4870 on default fan speed(Automatic) with no fan speed profile hack in CCC,never had any issues so no reason for me to change fan speed.

 

[Aikouka]

Originally posted by: LightningRider
I'm not getting rid of Vista. Never had this problem on nVidia cards.

I have and in fact I bought an ATi card (HD 4870) yesterday so I can finally get rid of this issue... or maybe I'll just get more of it .

I had contact with some of the guys at nVidia to try to resolve the issues that I've been having, but to no avail. My issues seem to arise only when you have two applications using DirectX layers up at once (I also use dual monitors). This can include a game (in my case, World of Warcraft) and a video (via MPC) or simply two WoW applications loaded at once. It actually seemed to be a little less finicky after I turned off Aero (and my Vista looks like a shaved poodle now ), but I still had a "Bad Pool Call" BSOD 2 days ago.

I may try and resume talks (heh, sounds like some sort of diplomatic mission) with 'em and see if the dump files may be able to help. One of the reasons I bought the 4870 was so I could get a faster card (than my 8800GTX) and it will let me send back my GTX to EVGA without paying for an Advance RMA (which is what you have to do if you don't register within 30 days).

Originally posted by: chizow
The irony in this instance about getting rid of Vista is that a similar crash in XP would most likely result in a BSOD. Vista 64 is far and away more stable than XP has ever been for me, some of the hoops you have to jump through to even install XP nowadays just seem so antiquated (135GB limit, USB 2.0 device support, chipset/raid drivers etc....).

Vista doesn't do much in this regard to be honest. When the drivers start crashing, Vista tries to fix it, but whatever's wrong with them seems to just perpetuate through the "new instance" of the driver and they just crash again... and again... and again. Eventually, Vista just stops and throws up a BSOD. You can stop this by simply hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL, clicking "Start Task manager" and attempting to close the offending applications or just hit ALT+F4 on them (usually I find you still need to do CTRL+ALT+DEL to get this to work right). But the only problem is, you cannot play any games after you stop the driver crashing or it will simply crash again. One time, I saved my computer from crashing while running two WoWs at once and even starting up the simple chess game in Vista caused it to crash (and I was able to close the game to avoid the system going down).

 

[LightningRider]

Well sorry I didn't read this thread earlier but I have some news:

Sold my HD4870 and got an eVGA GTX280 SuperClocked. Fire up COD4, randomly every 5-10 minutes or so (sometimes more). The game freezes, or hangs. Only way to resolve it is by CTRL + ALT + DLT and then click cancel and go back to the game. The game continues normally. After a while of doing this, video corruption results in the game (weird colors and artifacts). Shutting down the game does nothing to fix the problem, the corruption is present on the desktop too. Restarting the system fixes the issue. Temps are never exceeding 85C under load so I'm pretty sure it's not that. Sometimes I receive the message "The display driver stopped responding and recovered"

Seems like this is a MS Vista issue and not an ATi or nVidia issue by itself. Stupid me for having sold my HD4870. Oh well at least I do have a GTX 280... Now if only someone would get a fix for this this issue...

 

[Mem]

Originally posted by: LightningRider
Well sorry I didn't read this thread earlier but I have some news:

Sold my HD4870 and got an eVGA GTX280 SuperClocked. Fire up COD4, randomly every 5-10 minutes or so (sometimes more). The game freezes, or hangs. Only way to resolve it is by CTRL + ALT + DLT and then click cancel and go back to the game. The game continues normally. After a while of doing this, video corruption results in the game (weird colors and artifacts). Shutting down the game does nothing to fix the problem, the corruption is present on the desktop too. Restarting the system fixes the issue. Temps are never exceeding 85C under load so I'm pretty sure it's not that. Sometimes I receive the message "The display driver stopped responding and recovered".

Seems like this is a MS Vista issue and not an ATi or nVidia issue by itself. Stupid me for having sold my HD4870. Oh well at least I do have a GTX 280... Now if only someone would get a fix for this this issue...

Temps can be misleading,I had a 7800GT that never got above 65c even under load ,it would lockup with some games only and usual "driver stopped responding and recovered message" in the end it was the Factory OC on the card that I tracked down the cause too (had same problem in XP and Vista so was not an OS issue),simple underclock fixed my issues,since then I have learned it is easy to point the finger but always harder to find the real cause.


I'm still not convinced its a Vista issue.

 

[LightningRider]

I'll try downclocking it to what a normal GTX280 should be tonight but it doesn't seem to happen in other games. Only COD4.

I'm hoping to point the blame on drivers because I don't want to RMA it. But I don't honestly believe there's anything wrong with the card... If downclocking fixes it though, then I might have to. Going to have to test other games more too.