Issues with Radeon R7-265 (MSI make) and recent drivers

[such_science_wo]

I recently built a new desktop with a MSI Radeon R7-265 GPU. Everything was working fine for the first few days, until suddenly the graphics drivers gave out. Under medium load (playing a game, but nothing intense, and all temperatures <55C), the GPU froze up after about 1 hour. On restart, the machine starts fine, but displays a bunch of red blotches on the screen (not dead pixels, more like 20x20 px red blotches), and intermittently flickers larger rectangles of noise in random areas of the screen. Also every minute or so the OS displays a "Display driver has crashed and recovered" error message.


Currently, I am blaming the drivers rather than the hardware because removing all the ATI drivers and leaving it in straight Microsoft Basic Display Adapter mode seems to fix everything. Also, the issues only appear at the Windows login screen - the BIOS screen is fine. However, even after doing a full driver removal (with driver sweeper, registry cleaning, etc), and reinstalling the latest graphics drivers from MSI (13.251), the issue comes back.


Does this sound like I've somehow managed to bork my GPU? Or is it more likely a driver issue? I am not sure what diagnostics I could run beyond playing around with the drivers further.
I can return the card in the next week, so if it seems like its a hardware problem, I would rather do that.


OS: Windows 8.1
Build:

• ASRock Z97 Extreme4 motherboard
• Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz
• MSI R7-265 2GD5-OC GPU
• Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB DDR3-1600 RAM
• Cooler Master 212 EVO CPU cooler
• Corsair CX430M 430 Watt PSU
• Crucial M500 Series 240GB SATA SSD
• Seagate Barracuda 7200 1TB SATA

Nothing is overclocked (beyond factory overclocking on the GPU), so Im fairly sure I didn't screw up anything there.


Thank you for reading, and any advice you could give!

 

[96Firebird]

Use the latest drivers from AMD's page...

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download

 

[such_science_wo]

I tried those before trying the MSI drivers, but with the same result. It seems that actually the only consistently working version was whatever the OS installed by default in the very beginning, although I did not test those under load before updating, so it might have just been luck

 

[brandonb]

The only time I've seen red blotches that are like 20x20px was due to artifacts from faulty hardware. Not saying drivers couldn't be the issue, but the two times I've had hardware problems, it would give me a similar experience as yours.

One reason why it may not happen with the basic display driver, is because I believe the basic display adapter is handled in software (In other words: The CPU)... Rather than the GPU, but I could be wrong.

I'd swap out the card if you can return it. It wouldn't hurt... If you have the same problem with a new card with the driver, then you know it's something else.

 

[such_science_wo]

I guess I'll try exchanging it tomorrow. I can't imagine what I could have done to damage it, so I suppose it could just be a manufacturing flaw. Thanks for the advice!

 

[3DVagabond]

Sounds like hardware.