Video locking up and even crashing the drivers

[Wheelzup]

I have a pair of ATI 3870's running in Crossfire and I have been having trouble with the most recent Catalyst drivers, they stop working my display goes black then comes back on with a message telling that my video driver had quite working and has recoverd on it's own. I'm running the 32 bit version of Vista Ultimate on an Abit IX38 Quad GT with a Core 2 Extreme QX6850 running at 3.6GHz and 4GB of OCZ Reaper memory.

I'm wondering if it's a heat issue or possibly something else like flakey drivers, it doesn't matter what game I'm playing since even Guild Wars causes the problem and even though I got through most of Crysis without any trouble but now that I'm on the carrier fighting that over-sized freeze monster it flat out crashes the game on me. I ran the optimal settings test and everything is set to minimum on it.

Should I try dropping back to the older 8.5 Catalyst drivers from the 8.6 that I'm running now? Any suggestions sure would help...

 

[Slugbait]

The video is not locking up and crashing the drivers...it's simply that the drivers are crashing. While it's no surprise that ATi drivers crash, I wonder if that is the issue...check the revision sheets for your mobo BIOS, there may be a new version specific for Crossfire that could resolve the issue.

Otherwise, you imply that there was no problem with previous drivers. If there was no crashing around with them, absolutely, go back, no-brainer. The latest drivers does not always mean the "best" drivers.

 

[Chiropteran]

I had the same problem with 8.6 on a laptop. I think it's just a problem with those drivers and certain setups.

 

[Wheelzup]

I went back to the 8.5 Catalyst drivers but it had little effect and Crysis continued to lock up so out of curiousity I went back and started the game over and so far it's running smooth as silk.

If it starts giving me fits when I get back to the "Reckoning" chapter I might yank an 8800XT that I have in a secondary system I have in another room to see how it does as a single GPU, I'm guessing that it's enough of a card to run the game.

 

[JPB]

Originally posted by: Wheelzup
I went back to the 8.5 Catalyst drivers but it had little effect and Crysis continued to lock up so out of curiousity I went back and started the game over and so far it's running smooth as silk.

If it starts giving me fits when I get back to the "Reckoning" chapter I might yank an 8800XT that I have in a secondary system I have in another room to see how it does as a single GPU, I'm guessing that it's enough of a card to run the game.