PC freezing/Black screen after installing new Sapphire HD6850

[JD111]

Hi,
I bought a Sapphire HD6850 today, installed the latest 11.5 drivers ,

I started Mafia 2 , did the in game benchmark and right after the bench mark ended , my pc froze , i got a black screen and had to switch off the power to restart the system reset button doesnt work ,

After this i did a benchmark test with Kombuster and there was no freezing during the test , heres the result

Load/idle temp

After the test got over i again got the black screen , restarted the system by switching off the power , i did the kombuster test again and it again completed without any issues but the PC again froze after 3-4 minutes , i had to remove the card because it keeps freezing after 4-5 minutes.

My system i3 540 ( no overclock )
MSI H55-P33
2x2gb Corsair 1333mhz
Corsair CX400 PSU
Seagate 1 tb hdd
Sony DVD RW
2x Cooler Master Fans
This is a 4 month old PC , i dont have any problems with it , i use the onboard graphics , this freeze has happened once before few weeks back

The problem is similar to this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilD2649KNF8 but i get it when the pc is idle .
Someone here wrote that it is a Vbios issue http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=260&threadid=143833

I get a lot results with similar problems on google http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1577955
http://www.google.co.in/search?q=hd+6850+black+screen

Please help me in troubleshooting this.

 

[Elixer]

If the only way you can get monitor signal back is to power cycle your system (pressing reset on motherboard/case doesn't work) then the card is faulty. Nothing at all you can do to fix it.

RMA the card.

 

[JD111]

Its not just the monitor signal that goes out but the whole system stops responding , i have installed 11.4 drivers now and so far running for 45 minutes i have not had any freezing , earlier was freezing after 4-5 minutes.

 

[JD111]

I played mafia 2 for 45 minutes , there was no freezing , but it has started freezing again, has happened twice, nothing happens when i press the reset button but after about 2 minutes the pc restarts on its own.

 

[Elixer]

Its not just the monitor signal that goes out but the whole system stops responding , i have installed 11.4 drivers now and so far running for 45 minutes i have not had any freezing , earlier was freezing after 4-5 minutes.

Do you got another PSU to try ?

All I know is, if you are doing whatever, and then you lose monitor signal, and pressing the reset switch don't bring back the picture (but the system is still booting OK), and only a power cycle does, then the card has crashed because of voltage issues as shown in that vid.
RMA is the only option in that case.

 

[JD111]

I dont have another psu , i dont think its a psu problem because , it usually happens when the GPU is idle , it froze twice when i was writing this post , all i did was log into windows and opened firefox and was typing this post when it froze , had to go back to onboard GPU to complete this post.

Another thing i noticed after observing many freezes that i dont have to power cycle to restart the PC , when i press reset i dosent restart immediately like it should but every time i press reset after about 1-2 minutes it restarts , if i dont press reset it remains frozen, I will most probably RMA it , i will also try testing RAM with memtest .

 

[3DVagabond]

Something that AMD cards seem to be sensitive to is system RAM settings. Check that your system RAM is running at it's specified voltage and timings. Some mobo's don't get it right automatically. You want to make sure that everything is set correctly and up to date. Windows updates, game patches, mobo BIOS, voltages and clocks, etc.

Checking PSU is also good advice.

Since it's happened with 2 different driver revisions, I doubt it's driver related, but can't be sure. You might try the uninstall drivers in Windows, reboot into safe mode, driver sweep in safe mode, reboot into Windows, reinstall drivers, reboot into Windows ritual, just to be sure.

In the end if having everything set right and up to date doesn't help, you could have a defective card. Hopefully, if you have a problem, you bought it locally and can just walk in and get it taken care of. Having to ship stuff back is a PITA.

 

[JD111]

Something that AMD cards seem to be sensitive to is system RAM settings. Check that your system RAM is running at it's specified voltage and timings. Some mobo's don't get it right automatically. You want to make sure that everything is set correctly and up to date. Windows updates, game patches, mobo BIOS, voltages and clocks, etc.

I cleared CMOS so everything in bios was at default settings , checked RAM with memtest , no errors

Since it's happened with 2 different driver revisions, I doubt it's driver related, but can't be sure. You might try the uninstall drivers in Windows, reboot into safe mode, driver sweep in safe mode, reboot into Windows, reinstall drivers, reboot into Windows ritual, just to be sure.

I have XP /Win7 dualboot , earlier i was using Win7 now i tried running the card in XP with 11.4 drivers but it still froze , so driver isnt the issue

I will update the bios and check again

 

[JD111]

I got the card replaced , the new card has been running for 6 hrs without freezing , looks like my old card was faulty , thanks everyone for helping.