dj_ivocha on 8/3/2011 at 17:36
So, I have a GeForce 8800GT and in the last 1-2 months I've been getting the occasional garbled screen when playing games - a few times a day some... "layers"? of textures will flicker in and out of existence for a few seconds. For example, when playing League of Legends (isometric perspective) the underlying terrain will be just fine, but various units and structures and visual effects will randomly disappear and others will become garbled. A few seconds later everything is fine again, though occasionally I might have to alt-tab out and back in to get it fixed.
That's why I got two used Radeon 5870s (only need one but both were in a fairly cheap package together so I'll just resell one of them). I installed one of them and it's mostly working fine but occasionally, I suppose about as often as the problems with the 8800GT occurred, the screen will freeze completely (no garbling, everything just stops) for 4-6 seconds and then it starts working again and I get a message in Windows' taskbar that "Display driver AMD driver stopped responding and has successfully recovered". This has been happening for several weeks too now, but so far only in games and when watching a HD live stream in Firefox (flash player).
Normally I'd think the ATI card was buggered, except for the rather similar problems I had with the 8800GT. That I never got the "display driver recovered" message with that one is probably because the ATI driver is more aggressive in detecting supposed failures... or something.
Long story short, is there a way to look at some logs or something to try and isolate where exactly the problem occurs? I'd rather not just throw the dice and go buy a new video card/mainboard, only to find out it was actually the mainboard/video card's fault instead. I'm inclined to think it's a problem with the northbridge or maybe the system RAM but I'm not really certain. On top of that my PC is watercooled so it would be a major PITA to install a new mainboard, only to have the problem persist.
Renzatic on 8/3/2011 at 19:31
My first guess would be that you have a video driver conflict somewhere. When you installed the ATI cards, did you just do the bog standard uninstall from add/remove programs? If you did, then you probably have a couple of old driver files lying about causing your new cards to freak out on occasion.
What I suggest doing is grabbing (
http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/) this, uninstalling anything to do with video drivers in add/remove, ATI and Nvidia both, boot into safe mode, and run driversweeper a couple of times. That should get rid of all traces of your old drivers. After that, boot into Windows, and it should install a generic graphics card driver. Don't worry about that. From there, install whatever ATI drivers you like, and see how it goes from there.
My second guess would be that you have a heat problem. If wiping the drivers doesn't fix your problem, then you're probably running too hot, and it's causing your graphics card to flake out. I don't have a suggestion for a program you can use, but usually you can check out temps from either your bios, the Catalyst control panel, or whatever software came with your mobo if you've got a relatively high end one. If it's running above 90C, and idling at or around 70C, then you might have heat problems.
PigLick on 8/3/2011 at 23:47
I would say heat problems because I got the exact same error, removing the side of the case fixed it(at the time). I installed another fan and that seemed to do the trick.
Nameless Voice on 9/3/2011 at 19:06
I've seen that exact error a few times with my 8800GT. It always happened when I was playing TF2. TF2 would crash, the screen would switch to "no signal" mode, then after a few seconds it would turn back on and Windows would show that message.
It seems to have stopped happening now, as I haven't seen it in a while. My guess was that it was fixed, either in the latest nVidia drivers or in a patch for TF2.
And none of that is of any actual use to you. I'd agree with the suggestion of making sure that all the drivers are properly uninstalled / cleanly installed.
Ostriig on 11/3/2011 at 22:23
For what it's worth, I used to get that sort of error constantly with Neverwinter Nights 2 back in the day due to running a Beta driver. Once I switched to a WHQL release further down the line it all went away, so I'd also be suspecting driver faults before anything else.
dj_ivocha on 12/3/2011 at 16:24
Well, I did the driversweeper thing and then installed newer drivers than the last ones and the problem still persists, so it's neither driver conflict nor bad drivers. The GPU is also not getting THAT hot so as to cause those problems (IIRC 70 under load or something like that).
What might be getting too hot is the memory - the cards were apparently installed in an Alienware PC and while having the reference layout, they also have a second backplate of sorts that makes them even longer, so I simply can't fit them in my case. I removed it from the card I installed and while it obviously isn't used for cooling anything, it IS a few millimeters thick, so now the screws might be a bit too long and thus not able to get tightened enough to press the cooler to the RAM. I looked it over as best as I could and I don't think that's the case, but I can't completely discount it either. I'm looking for a cheap water block for the card now (which I'd have done anyway - my PC is water cooled after all) and after I install it, we'll see if anything changes.
But like I said in my first post, what really makes me suspicious is the fact that my GeForce also exhibited somewhat similar problems towards the end, so I'm really more inclined to think it's a motherboard problem.
