HD7970, X58 and Catalyst 13.11 beta 9.4 - not compatible?

[dkm777]

Hi guys,

I'm sure you're starting to notice a pattern - my HD7970 is acting up. Again . Anyway, I'm running a Sapphire HD7970 GHz Edition Vapor-X 3GB in a GA-X58A-UD5 board and to be honest it has never been very stable - BSODs, pale grey screens, sometimes with vertical stripes, random PC restarts. I blamed just about everything - Sapphire build quality, AMD drivers, Intel chipset drivers, my power company and so on.
But when using Cat. 13.11 beta 9.4 things went really nasty I just pulled the card and dropped a lowly HD7770 in there. If the problem was AMD beta drivers then surely the same problems would crop up quickly? Not really. My Asus HD7770 DC was rock stable even when overclocked to the max and running just about anything imaginable (DX9, DX11, OpenGL, OpenCL). And most importantly - whenever there was a problem (OC too high, game or app buggy) the driver would recover gracefully without locking up the whole PC.
Now this got me thinking - what if I'm experiencing M/B incompatibility? Some of you may know that a 7970 can put quite a strain on the PCIe bus when running certain apps, like distributed computing clients or coin miners. A guaranteed way to make my system crash is to run one of these buggers - no more than five minutes and BOOM. Is this theory plausible? That the X58 IOH cannot cope with the bandwidth requirements of a 7970? If I have time this evening I'm putting the 7970 into another rig with a different chipset and see how it goes. If it turns out to be stable the I guess I'm SOL .

 

[MeldarthX]

I'd say its not the chipset persay; but possibly a faulting PCI-E slot? MBs can go bad; or end up going bad; do you have another PCI-E slot to test to see if it does the same thing?

Could be too much current got pulled through PCI-E and now sensitive to pulling that much power; with a much less powerful card its fine.......Are you running the latest bios for the board? *more than likely*

 

[Bubbleawsome]

I am running p55 on my 870 (I think) and it can handle a 7970. I'm only limited by PCI-e 2.0 bandwidth.

 

[dkm777]

Thing is though there used to be a GTX570 in there - that b*atch also pulls quite some power. That's actually a good idea - going to put the 570 back, overclock it for great justice and see how it goes. If the same things happen then a PCIe slot going bad is very likely. Which is a very sad proposition - I'm not really in a position to upgrade such a system, nor do I need to. But if the 7970 misbehaves even in a different board then RMA time it is. Can't wait to go home and get cracking.

 

[MeldarthX]

best way to do it; eliminate the mb and then test 7970 in another board....if it does it there then its the 7970

 

[Spjut]

Back when the HD 7000 was new, there were reports of some motherboards needing an updated BIOS in order to work correctly with those cards. Perhaps your problem could be related to that.

 

[dkm777]

After preliminary testing it looks like my GA-X58A-UD5 is to blame. I left the other rig to fold on 7970 overnight and nothing - no hangs, no errors. And the GTX570 that I put in the Gigabyte rig is also acting up, maybe even worse than the 7970 did. Unfortunately there are no new BIOS'es for GA-X58A-UD5. But all (=my very expensive Gulftown) is not lost - I still have a spare LGA1366 mobo in storage. It's an Asus Sabertooth X58 and it does have a new BIOS available. Maybe I'll have better luck with that.