Dual Display's causing crash

[DerekZ06]

Today I added a second monitor to my pc, now it randomly crashes. The displays show a random color or combination of colors when it crashes leaving me to believe the GPU doesn't like pushing this many pixels or something. The crash seems to happen when there is GPU accelerated video or 3d objects being rendered, it doesn't matter what monitor has the gpu accelerated program on it.

Here is a picture of it working:

And of a crash:

The vertical monitor is 1680 x 1050 and the horizontal monitor is 1920 x 1200. The laptop is an entirely different computer, the error on it's screen reads, "Master failed to respond."

The event viewer for the desktop gives:

The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly.

- <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
- <System>
  <Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-Power" Guid="{331C3B3A-2005-44C2-AC5E-77220C37D6B4}" /> 
  <EventID>41</EventID> 
  <Version>2</Version> 
  <Level>1</Level> 
  <Task>63</Task> 
  <Opcode>0</Opcode> 
  <Keywords>0x8000000000000002</Keywords> 
  <TimeCreated SystemTime="2012-03-21T05:07:54.156250000Z" /> 
  <EventRecordID>238903</EventRecordID> 
  <Correlation /> 
  <Execution ProcessID="4" ThreadID="8" /> 
  <Channel>System</Channel> 
  <Computer>Derek-PC</Computer> 
  <Security UserID="S-1-5-18" /> 
  </System>
- <EventData>
  <Data Name="BugcheckCode">0</Data> 
  <Data Name="BugcheckParameter1">0x0</Data> 
  <Data Name="BugcheckParameter2">0x0</Data> 
  <Data Name="BugcheckParameter3">0x0</Data> 
  <Data Name="BugcheckParameter4">0x0</Data> 
  <Data Name="SleepInProgress">false</Data> 
  <Data Name="PowerButtonTimestamp">0</Data> 
  </EventData>
  </Event>



The previous system shutdown at 12:06:06 AM on &#8206;3/&#8206;21/&#8206;2012 was unexpected.

- <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
- <System>
  <Provider Name="EventLog" /> 
  <EventID Qualifiers="32768">6008</EventID> 
  <Level>2</Level> 
  <Task>0</Task> 
  <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords> 
  <TimeCreated SystemTime="2012-03-21T05:08:03.000000000Z" /> 
  <EventRecordID>238899</EventRecordID> 
  <Channel>System</Channel> 
  <Computer>Derek-PC</Computer> 
  <Security /> 
  </System>
- <EventData>
  <Data>12:06:06 AM</Data> 
  <Data>&#8206;3/&#8206;21/&#8206;2012</Data> 
  <Data /> 
  <Data /> 
  <Data>744</Data> 
  <Data /> 
  <Data /> 
  <Binary>DC07030003001500000006000600D401DC07030003001500050006000600D4013C0000003C000000000000000000000000000000000000000100000000000000</Binary> 
  </EventData>
  </Event>

The computer's hardware:

ASROCK P43DE P43 RT
Core 2 Quad Q6600
AMD Radeon HD4850 512MB
8GB ram (2GB x 4 sticks)
Creative X-Fi

EDIT: A Youtube video always causes a crash.

 

[warlicrox1394]

its a no-brainer
obviously ur g-card
4850 is ancient
u can afford 2 monitors get a better gfx card might i suggest the excellent AMD Radeon HD 7850

 

[Puppies04]

Remove all GPU drivers and reinstall the latest ones fresh.

 

[DerekZ06]

I think I've figured it out, it was adobe flash. I turned off hardware acceleration in flash and now it has yet to crash.

@warlicrox1394, the 4850 may be ancient but it gets the job done. Back when I purchased it I played some games but now not so much. I'd hate to have to purchase a new gpu. It would likely be some mid range card with lots of vram, proper silent cooling, and very high reliability with little maintenance - this 4850 is very prone to clogging up with dust. That 7850 is to much and to expensive IMO.

 

[denis280]

Remove all GPU drivers and reinstall the latest ones fresh.

I agree with Puppies. a fresh install will do the trick

 

[DerekZ06]

An update.

Since getting dual display's the gpu temp went from low 60's C average to 69-72C. It would no longer transition to lower power states of 160mhz and 500mhz modes, instead staying in max performance mode at 680mhz.

At 69C the fan speed was 36%, at 72C the fan speed went to 46%. This was very annoying as it consistently switched back and fourth between an almost inaudible 36% and an audible 46% about twice a minute.

I went into Radeon Bios Editor to set PWM ramp on, add some hysteresis, and clock the gpu back down to 625mhz. *Side note, I found it odd PWM ramp and hysteresis weren't set as I could swear I configured them before, but that was several years ago.

Anyway I couldn't get RBE to flash the bios as it kept throwing out errors about mismatches. Also, my first attempt to analyze the card caused screen artifacting followed by a crash a minute later as I tried to power off the system safely via the now appearing and disappearing, start button. After some more investigating, I found that the bios check-sum and SSID on the card did not match the check-sum and SSID of the original bios I had made a backup of several years ago. I assumed partial corruption was the cause and so I created a dos boot disk containing ati flash. The card was finally flash-able with:

atiflash -unlockrom 0
atiflash -f -fs -fp -p 0 MSI4850Original.bin                
atiflash -t 0

The -unlockrom, -fs, and -fp were necessary because otherwise, atiflash gave 0FL01 as an error code.

I booted back into windows and everything is now peachy and adobe flash's hardware acceleration is no longer causing issues.

Sure was a weird problem with a weird cause, hope someone googling down the road finds this helpful.

There was no need to re-install or fresh install any drivers. I'm also glad I don't have to buy a new graphics card, this one's adequate and what I really need to increase the computers speed is an SSD.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Hmm, corrupt BIOS? Interesting.

 

[DerekZ06]

I thought so as well.

My best guess is when it was last flashed years ago, there may have been a slight anomaly that maybe caused a single bit to be inverted. And that corrupt section of code must have dealt with dual monitors and something Adobe Flash calls upon. I could play Dirt 3 fine with dual monitors, I couldn't play Adobe Flash videos or Flash 3d content reliably.