sapphire radeon 4850 x2 BSOD

[dmens]

Got a brand new sapphire 4850 X2 card. Catalyst 8.11 does not even recognize the card, weird, so I went with the drivers that came with the card. It worked for about 8 hours before getting BSOD on boot.

Using vista 32-bit. Here's the error:

Attempt to reset the display driver and recover from timeout failed

Stop: 0x00000116 atikmdag.sys

Tried the following, none of which worked:
- Reinstalling the drivers that came with the card
- Reinstalling display driver only, no catalyst control panel
- 8.12 catalyst beta, both combinations above
- Reseating the card
- Swapping the power connections
- Putting a big floor fan into the open case

sapphire tech support is a big piece of shit, it said my motherboard is incompatible (abit IP35 Pro), or my case is too hot (coolermaster stacker 830 with lots of fans), or my power supply is inadequate (ocz gamerxstream 700W).

anyone else have this problem? im leaning towards going to fry's tomorrow and getting a gtx 280 after a day of frustration.

 

[LOUISSSSS]

try reinstalling windows? maybe ur driver uninstall wasn't thorough enough. did u run driver cleaner in safe mode? ccleaner? one BSOD could have already corrupted your OS and anything u do from then on without reinstalling may give u another BSOD even if you could have fixed it already.

p.s. 8.12 is supposed to be a MAJOR driver release that improves performance and stability. its coming any day now...

 

[dmens]

i suspected it was a hardware defect since the issue came out of the blue after 8 hours of operation. so i picked up a 4870 X2 at fry's and it worked fine, didn't even have to reinstall the drivers.

i guess Q&R is not so important in the GPU world. *snicker*