Hello all. I frequent this site quite often mostly for graphics driver related news and such but I have ran into an issue that I need a bit of assistance with. It started about a week ago. If I run my card under any kind of stress.. such as maximum graphics on pretty much any game, my PC monitor will flicker with artifacts for a moment and then inevitably crash. There are a few times I've gotten BSOD's from this, but it doesn't always provide a BSOD. I will include the dump of the last crash here. If I keep my graphics on low in BF4/Metro/Heroes and Generals etc, I have a good chance that I will not crash. It's definitely not temperature related as I have a close eye on that at most times. I have tried a different PSU because I assumed the card doesn't get enough power.. it helped for a day but it started again today. I have reset my GPU and CPU overclocks.. neither of which I really pushed too much. I went and replugged all my cables, I have tried several fixes that come up with google with fixing atikmdag.sys and dxgmms1.sys and none of those have helped. I have used driver cleaner and installed several drivers all the way back to 14.2 and nothing has helped. I dug a bit further into this issue and it seems to that a lot of the R9 290's seem to have similar issues.. sometimes when I reboot from a crash I will have faint flickering artifacts or lines across the screen and ill either crash again or if I ctrl alt del I can sometimes keep it from crashing. I have tried finding a new bios for the Gigabyte GV-R929WF3-4GD but there doesn't seem to be one. I have also tried doing the fix about replacing the atikmdag.sys in the driver folder of windows that I've seen suggested elsewhere. Long read, I know, but wanted to explain the problem in depth. Thanks for any help!! My motherboard is a Gigabyte H61M-S2-B3 ================================================== Filename : atikmdag.sys Address In Stack : atikmdag.sys+26c1e From Address : fffff880`0f016000 To Address : fffff880`0ffbf000 Size : 0x00fa9000 Time Stamp : 0x537ea85f Time String : 5/22/2014 8:46:07 PM Product Name : ATI Radeon Family File Description : ATI Radeon Kernel Mode Driver File Version : 8.01.01.1407 Company : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Full Path : C:\Windows\system32\drivers\atikmdag.sys ================================================== ================================================== Filename : dxgmms1.sys Address In Stack : dxgmms1.sys+8e34 From Address : fffff880`06f88000 To Address : fffff880`06fce000 Size : 0x00046000 Time Stamp : 0x5164dc13 Time String : 4/9/2013 10:27:15 PM Product Name : Microsoft® Windows® Operating System File Description : DirectX Graphics MMS File Version : 6.1.7601.18126 (win7sp1_gdr.130409-1534) Company : Microsoft Corporation Full Path : C:\Windows\system32\drivers\dxgmms1.sys ==================================================
So not to speak too quick or anything but I seem to somewhat have solved my problem by simply using an HDMI cable on my second monitor and not using DVI. I don't know whether the slot on the card is bad or if the cable is bad but this issue disappeared almost completely after using HDMI. Figure I'd update if someone else has this issue and wanted to try something else. Also I downloaded Trixx and upped my VDDC offset to 150.
Glad to hear you discovered a solution. If you feel like narrowing down the issue further, you could test with one of those DVI->HDMI adapters to see if the problem was the old DVI cable or the DVI input on the monitor. If it still exhibits the issue with the adapter, then its likely the DVI output on the GPU is on the fritz.
Yeah I tried an adapter and it still happened. I don't have another DVI cable laying around right now to test another cable. This is the first full day in a week where I haven't had any blue screens or lock ups so I'm really hoping that what I posted was truly the solution to my problem, time will tell. I have done a LOT of things trying to fix this and spent too much time trying to pinpoint the issue. This has been a major PITA and I bought myself a new PSU thinking that it might be the issue. Fingers crossed it's done.
Yeah I know how that wait can be. I once re-soldered a SMD capacitor on the back of a geforce 6800 and I had to test it for a week before I was convinced that I'd fixed it. At least testing it involved playing the original Far Cry a lot. Grinding memtest to find bad sticks is much worse, only a boring dos screen to watch. In any case, a glitchy DVI port is certainly grounds for an RMA if you want to go through the trouble. It could be an indicator of further problems to come if something like a bad voltage regulator is starting to damage components. It could also be as something as simple as a bad/loose conductor in the DVI connector which wouldn't really interfere with anything else on the card as long as you don't use it.
Yup! I'm likely going to RMA the card next week when my friend borrowing my old 7870 comes back from classes. I just need another card to tide me over while I wait for this card to come back from RMA. I'm going to still run a few tests to stress the components. My one other hunch that I had was my motherboard going bad. I did quite a lot of stress tests on my i7 to see if that was going bad.. but as with any hardware issue.. the issue may not show up in any tests until you play with it in real time playing games or photoshop etc. Either way I'm glad to be done with this because I was REALLY hoping it wasn't my 290 and after googling this issue I've seen quite a lot of the r9 series having similar issues.. so I'm hoping if anyone searches for the r9 290 bsod they will find this post.
