video issues across several cards

[Raswan]

My regular card is a sapphire 5870, had it for about two and a half years. In the last 2 months , starting about once per week and ending today with a total of 5 times, the screen has either a) frozen/artifacted/gone dark, which a restart fixes, or b) freezes for a moment and then gives me the old "a display driver has failed, and you have recovered" message.

I assumed this was the card beginning to go, and have been stretching it until I get a new one next week or so. But I finally got fed up with it, and put in a 5750 I had sitting in the drawer next to me, which I know to be good. Installed the drivers an hour ago, and in the last ten minutes it has crashed once and recovered from a driver failure once. What the actual frack is going on here?

Rest of the rig is in my sig.

Perhaps unrelatedly, or not, my CCC absolutely does not work. Hasn't on either gpu, not for months. Won't run no matter what I try. Just mentioning it in case it's a symptom as well.

Thanks for any help you can give. This is really beginning to piss me off.

 

[BrightCandle]

Do you have the machine overclocked or have done? Because there is a chance that one of the OS files has become corrupted at some point and you are now seeing the results of some classical bit rot related to a somewhat unstable overclock.

 

[Raswan]

Do you have the machine overclocked or have done? Because there is a chance that one of the OS files has become corrupted at some point and you are now seeing the results of some classical bit rot related to a somewhat unstable overclock.

Nothing overclocked, nope. I realize now the sig shows the video card was, but I've since returned it to stock.

Edit Just woke it up from sleep, and now I'm seeing BSODs. Any additional ideas?

 

[gradoman]

If you haven't tried a clean install of the OS and you have the time, maybe give that a shot first.

From there, I'd probably check the system memory and stability.

 

[VirtualLarry]

it does sound like a re-install would be nice.

 

[Raswan]

it does sound like a re-install would be nice.

Thanks guys. I'll give that a try first thing tomorrow. Any other suggestions?

 

[BrightCandle]

Sounds like a corrupt system to me, I have the same advice, reinstall.

 

[Raswan]

So I booted this morning with the old video card in, crashed in two minutes. Restarted in safe mode with networking, and it's been stable for ten minutes. Does this support the corrupted system theory?

 

[KingFatty]

Hmm, maybe there is a corrupted driver of *something* somewhere in the PC that is not loaded in safe mode. Could you try removing everything possible, then add things back one by one until you become unstable?

I think you've ruled out the video card by duplicating the problem with two different video cards. And you are stable with networking loaded, so that's ruled out.

What about RAM? Maybe you have a bad stick of RAM and perhaps when a driver happens to get loaded into that memory, you get problems? I dunno, maybe see if you can remove 1/2 the ram, avoid the problem, then put the other half in, and duplicate the problem?

 

[spat55]

Check HDD/SSD, RAM, CPU for errors, then reinstall windows if all these things turn out to not be the problem it is more than likely your PSU. Why hasn't anyone said PSU yet?

 

[Raswan]

Hmm, maybe there is a corrupted driver of *something* somewhere in the PC that is not loaded in safe mode. Could you try removing everything possible, then add things back one by one until you become unstable?

I think you've ruled out the video card by duplicating the problem with two different video cards. And you are stable with networking loaded, so that's ruled out.

What about RAM? Maybe you have a bad stick of RAM and perhaps when a driver happens to get loaded into that memory, you get problems? I dunno, maybe see if you can remove 1/2 the ram, avoid the problem, then put the other half in, and duplicate the problem?

I downloaded a deep driver cleaner and ran it, rebooted and reinstalled CCC and drivers. Display drivers crashed (though system recovered) once, about 5 minutes later, while I was fixing scaling in CCC, and has been fine since, for about 2 hours. Methinks it was a the bad driver. I'll run it the rest of the day and see what happens, and in the meantime run memtest. Thanks for the help everyone. This is the second AMD card that has plagued me in the last 3 years. Really thinking of going nvidia next time, even if it means getting a 770 instead of a r9280x

 

[spat55]

I downloaded a deep driver cleaner and ran it, rebooted and reinstalled CCC and drivers. Display drivers crashed (though system recovered) once, about 5 minutes later, while I was fixing scaling in CCC, and has been fine since, for about 2 hours. Methinks it was a the bad driver. I'll run it the rest of the day and see what happens, and in the meantime run memtest. Thanks for the help everyone. This is the second AMD card that has plagued me in the last 3 years. Really thinking of going nvidia next time, even if it means getting a 770 instead of a r9280x

TBH you wouldn't lose hardly any performance getting a GTX 770 over a R9 280x, but why not wait for 20nm as you have held out for a long time with just a HD 5870.

 

[Raswan]

TBH you wouldn't lose hardly any performance getting a GTX 770 over a R9 280x, but why not wait for 20nm as you have held out for a long time with just a HD 5870.

True, and the ~$20 price difference isn't worth the hassle too.

Have we gotten definitive dates on the 20nm yet? I guess I could be persuaded so long as it was relatively soon.

 

[darlasxm54]

looks pretty shady to me