Hi guys. so i recently bought the XFX ATI 6970HD and it's been causing me grief ever since. when i stress the graphics with a game for instance, sooner or later my video freezes up, sound repeats the last second or so, the i see a split second of snow before my screens turns to black and the turns back to normal. it can also do this, when just sitting idle on desktop, though not as often. Weird thing is that it seems to run a lot more stable when playing multiplayer, for some reason, but the problem is still there. i've tried rolling back drivers..went from the current version and am now all the way back 10.5 i've tried underclocking the graphics card, overclocking the power output, and nothing seems to do the trick, and i can't find anything online anywhere, that describes my problem. please help
Could be a powerplay issue or a bad unit. Try running a benchamrk like uigine heaven for an hour or so at stock clocks and see if it's stable, if it is then it's likely a software powerplay issue and you could diagnose it using something like msi afterburner to turn powerplay off (unofficial overclocking mod 2) and see if that fixes it. oh, and wrong section, btw. This section is for nvidia cards.
thanks for the reply. i'll try the benchmark, but what do you mean by powerplay issue? oh and sorry for the wrong section thing..i'm brand new to forums..you learn as long as you live, right?
so i ran the benchmark a few times and there was no sign of any fault.. everything ran smoothly at top settings. no issues found.
Is it new or 2nd hand? What card did you have before? Have you tried using the secondary bios? These "games" (plural) you mention .....wouldn't happen to be only one game (singular) called BF3?
it was new when i bought it which was somewhere close to september/november, last year i had a nvidia 9800gtx before that and it worked without problems, it was just getting outdated. i don't know what the secondary bios is?
^What games? BF3? Should be a switch next to the CF bridge to switch over to second BIOS. Might be hard to see as it's roughly the size of an atom. Prob irrelevant if the card is new.
no the games i'm referring to is bf3 which works way better on mp then sp, oddly, and then there's skyrim, Grid, mass effect 1,2 and 3..lately i've bought NFS:the run and wargame: european escalation, and when screen freezes up on those 2, they crash, so i need ctrl+alt+del out of it.
Hmmm well if the old card worked great then logic says the cause is directly or indirectly related to your new card. Is it a factory OC'd version? What drivers did u install originally? Did you run driver sweeper etc before installing new ones Sorry for all the questions...
but in reality it does not seem to matter what is running since i've even seen the same problem while playing chess titans and even just watching a video or browsing the web...basically it can happen anytime, it's just a lot more frequent when playing a graphically demanding game.
i think it's factory oc'd..the only changes i've made is in ccc and after realizing it did'nt do anything positive, settings were reset to defaults. i formatted my pc, before installing the drivers so sweeping for old drivers should'nt have been necessary.
I think you should test the PSU 12v rail under load to eliminate that as the cause. In particular check for any ripple. Then I would check the CPU load, At 3.0Ghz in BF3 and Skyrim I bet that CPU is nearly fully loaded... maybe just enough vdroop to make it crash?
could the problem maybe be related to having ddr3 ram sticks while the graphics card is carrying gddr5 ?
No, definitely not. You can check the 12v rail with AIDA64 or OCCT (prob the best). Test your ram as well with memtest86+....
all power values are within acceptable range, running very smoothly with little to no spikes... 12v values are hovering between 12,15 - 12,19
also ran a gpu test where the 12v values are a little more bouncy but still ok..between 12.05 - 12.17...average is about 12.11