Very unstable GPU - ASUS R9 290 DC2OC

Discussion in 'Videocards - AMD Radeon Drivers Section' started by Rumbles, Sep 11, 2014.

  1. Rumbles

    Rumbles Guest

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    MSI GTX 970 GAMING
    Hello all,

    I have been stuck with this for some time, so I am hoping you can help me here. I've opened forum posts about this previously, but cannot link to them as I am new to this forum.

    Initially, I wanted to try the newer Catalyst drivers with Raptr so it could detect the drivers and allow auto config of game settings. Now I'm not so fussed with that however I have more annoying issues instead.

    Basically I bought this system around 2 months ago:

    ASUS Crosshair V Formula Z // 2101
    AMD FX-9590 ~4.7GHz
    ASUS R9 290 DC2OC 4GB DDR5
    Corsair AX1200i
    Corsair Vengance Pro RAM 16GB (CMY16GX3M2A2133C11)
    Corsair Carbide 400R
    Corsair 110i Water Cooler
    Samsung 850 Pro 256GB
    OCZ Vertex 3 120GB
    Sennheiser 363D with G4ME1

    Generally it was relatively stable, I have updated the BIOS on motherboard and GPU to the latest versions, I was using the Catalyst driver from ASUS.

    I installed 14.4 and my system went to a black screen before install completed, I rebooted and tried again, it installed but on reboot and login I get a black screen. Similar but worse with 14.7.

    I then emailed ASUS who told me to RMA the card, they said it should work with the latest drivers.

    Ebuyer, the suppliers stated they ran the card in their test rig for 4 hours on 13.12 drivers, using Fur Mark, no problems. I asked them to try with 14.4 drivers, they stated they couldn't get them to install, they didn't give me any more information than that. They did tell me that this issue would be with the drivers, not the card and to report it to AMD, which I did, I'm still waiting for a response.

    I got the card back yesterday, did a fresh install of Windows, updated Windows fully, I decided to try the 14.8 drivers from this website, after a reboot, I login, then get a black screen, waited 2 minutes, but nothing appeared. So I rebooted in to safe mode and used the Driver remover tool found on this website to remove Catalyst, I then installed the 13.12 drivers instead. Also, AMD had recommended I use the following hot fixes for my CPU, I have installed both kb 2645594 and kb 2646060.

    After I had downloaded GRiD Autosport I tried a game, while loading the first proper race (after the training race), the game drops to desktop, the music was still playing in the background, but the game will not display anything. I rebooted and when I get in to Windows I leave my PC downloading games while looking in to the issue. While doing this Windows keeps locking up for a few seconds, you then see a bubble in the bottom right saying the drivr has crashed and Windows has recovered.

    So I removed the driver again. This morning I tried installing the "Chipset driver" from ASUS, which is just a catalyst installer, I tried running Fur Mark with that installed and it wanted a newer version of the driver installing, so I used the 13.12 driver from ASUS. I load Fur Mark after a reboot and run the 15 minute benchmark test, I went away and when I came back, the display had gone black, I had to ctrl-alt-del to get Task manager open and killed off the display. I tried it again after a reboot, and my GPU temp rose to around 80 degrees C, then the display went black. I tried one more time, and (I only tested for 5 minutes, but that is longer than it lasted previously) and it was fine, GPU temp going up to 84 before I closed the benchmark (it didn't crash this time). I will try testing this further tomorrow night.

    At the moment I feel stuck, I cannot get my system to run stably even with just the recommended driver, and the later drivers from AMD won't even allow me to get in to Windows. I have been told by the supplier that my card is fine, but when I test my system with the same software I get a lot of crashes.

    Can anyone advise whether there is any tool I can use to find out what is causing my system to be unstable?

    Looking on the ASUS website for my motherboard & GPU there are loads of applications recommended, most seems to be bloatware, and someone on the ROG forum said that he didn't use any of it, just installed the latest Catalyst driver, using the same motherboard, but I suspect not quite the same r9 290 from ASUS as I have. The one piece of software I _HAVE_ to install is the network driver, as without the one on the CD I cannot even get my system to connect to the network, beyond that I have tried with just the newer and other versions of Catalyst, but my system is still unstable. Can anyone recommend what drivers I need to use with my system?

    Sorry for such a long post, thanks for any help.
     
  2. MojoW

    MojoW Member Guru

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    The suppliers should have tested it better because it's a well known issue(black screen).
    I have a 290 that has exactly the same problem and it's in RMA as we speak because my supplier knows of this problem and had multiple RMA's with the same problem.
    It's a coincidence that we have the exact same problem as black screen problems occur on different moments with different cards.

    Good luck!
     
  3. Rumbles

    Rumbles Guest

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    Thanks for the reply, now that I've RMAed the card and they have said there is no fault what else can I do? ASUS are completely hopeless regarding support, AMD have been offering some assistance but now have stopped replying. The card is basically useless at the moment, I can barely play for 5 minutes without getting system crashes.
     
  4. 51cent

    51cent Member

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    Sapp. R9 290X Tri-X
    delete pls
     
    Last edited: Sep 11, 2014

  5. MerolaC

    MerolaC Ancient Guru

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  6. Wagnard

    Wagnard Ancient Guru

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    Try sending an email to cl-jolene@asus.com (ASUS Customer Loyalty)

    I had a good experience with the "CL" team with a router issue from Asus in the past for RMA were their usual support team would fail.
     
  7. Rumbles

    Rumbles Guest

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    Thanks Wagnard and MerolaC, Ill try that Driver now and see where I get to, I might try that email addy as a last resort if I get nowhere this weekend! Appreciate the help, at this point I feel like I'm introducing my head to a brick wall a lot....
     
  8. Rumbles

    Rumbles Guest

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    So I made some progress last night, I believe the issue I have been having with the 13.12 driver stemmed from my RAM. I had it set to it's rated speed (2133), with the timings set manually in the motherboard, I also tried having the timings to auto, the system would crash regularly on all the drivers I tried. However, when I dropped it to 1866MHz I had no issues, so I guess I'll stick the the JEDEC timings for now and see if I can return it and replace with some AMD Radeon RAM in the future.

    Regardless of RAM timings I still can't get any of the 14.x drivers to run stably on my system. At best I can reboot in to Windows and have 2-3 minutes before I get a black screen and have to reboot. Even the drivers recommended by MerolaC cause black screen. I have tried 14.4, 14.7 and 14.8 and none will work. Back to 13.12 and my system seems stable again.

    I received an email back from AMD today and they stated the following about the tests done by ebuyer:

    "Further, they acknowledge card doesn't work on 14.4 driver, whereas its working for all other consumers using R9 290."

    From some of the forum posts I have read it seems like this is pure bull as I have seen loads of forum posts complaining about unstable drivers for the last year. Am I right there?

    Thanks for the help...
     
  9. Rumbles

    Rumbles Guest

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    Or at least I thought I had made progress, the next thing I did was try to run assassins creed IV which crashed and required a reboot. Trying Treexy Driver Fusion now to see if that will fix it, but I'm not hopeful
     
  10. Rumbles

    Rumbles Guest

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    Driver Fusion found loads of out of date drivers, but updating it hasn't helped at all. I am still getting driver crashes in Windows desktop, I've tried the 13.251/14.4/14.8 drivers, none of which are stable.

    I have also emailed the ASUS rep mentioned earlier, I'll wait to see what they say.
     

  11. schilperoordbas

    schilperoordbas Member Guru

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    It seems like you've already tried a lot.

    You've updated the GPU VBIOS to VBIOS 2014/06/13, right?

    http://www.asus.com/Graphics_Cards/R9290DC2OC4GD5/HelpDesk_Download/

    That's the latest one I can find under Others/Windows 8.1 x64.

    14.4 are the latest official drivers and 14.7 Beta seems to have been introduced to resolve issues with the R9 290 series and a few others.

    http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/latest-catalyst-windows-beta.aspx
    14.7 RC3 DL: http://www2.ati.com/drivers/beta/amd-catalyst-14.7-rc3-windows-aug12.exe

    That's the page I found from AMD.

    I guess you've already tried them from reading your post, if nothing helps, it's probably a bad card (probably it) or it interferes with something in your system (which is highly unlikely).
     
    Last edited: Sep 13, 2014
  12. Rumbles

    Rumbles Guest

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    Yeah I've updated my VBIOS (and tried reflashing it with the BIOS on tech powerup site today - that didn't fix or make it worse so I went back to the latest VBIOS on ASUS site) then I've started trying some of other drivers listed.

    I've been using the 13.11 Catalyst from guru 3d archives for the last few hours, and I haven't had any driver crashes, even though I've played 3 different games, often my game will crash out when leaving a game, or if I play a 2nd game, but I've played AC4, GRID Autosport and Tomb Raider, all without issue.

    I'm going to keep using these drivers for a while. I'd rather not risk losing a stable config, as I am not 100% certain it's not something corrupting the drivers on install. I've had relative stability before, only to be unable to get it back after trying a different driver and the trying to go back to the same version I had installed, even by reinstalling Windows.

    I wasn't aware they were trying to fix issues with the r9 290 series with those drivers, I thought there were just improvements. Thanks for the link
     
  13. superzeus

    superzeus Master Guru

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    Personally i use to be an AMD fan , but i get some problems whit AMD cards my last card was the mighty 5970 but i change to Nvidia and i get better perfomance and better product overall so maibe is good idea to change and give atry to another brand, after all the problems you have maibe isa good idea, i am not against to AMD tought just i think Nvidia is better .
     
  14. schilperoordbas

    schilperoordbas Member Guru

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    The issues solved in those drivers (14.7 RC3) might not be relevant to the problems you're experiencing though, but since you don't have the same unstability with the 13.11 Catalyst drivers and you feel comfortable using those, I suggest keep using those until better stable drivers appear for the card. If you might experience heavy unstability in the future, even with 13.11, and no future driver fixes it, then you should think about RMA-ing the card.
     
    Last edited: Sep 14, 2014
  15. A35SE

    A35SE Guest

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    ASUS R9 290
    So, I share a very similar problem with the black screens on 14.4+ drivers.

    Here's what I've found:

    1. The system will remain stable if you keep the RAM pinned at 1250 (normal running clock rate) as would be achieved when running multiple displays. The side effect of this would be that the card would eat about 70 watts more than it should, all day long...

    2. I ran a test with a single display (allowing the RAM to clock down to 150) and set GPU-Z to log in 100ms increments, I found that on "some" crashes, it would set the GPU clock AND RAM clocks both to 1250 in the split second before the crash... Far beyond what the GPU can handle.. This wasn't observed on ALL crashes, but it makes sense..

    3. This doesn't seem to happen on the 13 series driver.

    4. It is totally, 10000%, stable when fully stressed. It'll run FurMark all day long.. and then crash on the desktop afterwards.

    5. (edited for this) I have the PC running through an APC Battery backup which displays the total watts in use, when the system black screens, it will jump about 140watts and stay there until the system is switched off..

    I'm not an expert so I can't interpret this much beyond logic, it seems to me that the drivers handle the clock speed and are messing it up somewhere in the low power states.

    PS: I had very good results by down-clocking the RAM to something the GPU could handle if it happened to receive the same clock-rate, like 1050, I know it's far from optimal but may aid in pin-pointing the issue.
     
    Last edited: Sep 14, 2014

  16. Boing7898

    Boing7898 Guest

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    GPU:
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    I have the same exact issue. I couldn't use any driver past 13.12 because of black screens or freezes.
    I found a "workaround" to run newer drivers though. You have to set MSI Afterburner to disable Powerplay. Making the clocks fixed with no fluctuations, I get no freezes or black screens.
    To do this, I changed the overclocking mode to "without PowerPlay support" and changed the memory clock to 1310, just to make Afterburner take control of the clocks and make them stable.
    It kinda sucks though, because it's always running in 3D clocks with higher temps and power consumption, but at least it works.

    By the way, I've had this issue since I've bought the card, which is in June. When I finished building my new rig, I installed 14.4 drivers which were working with no problem. I go to try BF4 and as soon as I switch to Mantle API, it freezes and then all the problems started happening.
    I've wrote to Sapphire and they told me it's a driver issue, I've now also wrote a 400+ driver report to AMD, hoping they could fix it.
     
  17. Rumbles

    Rumbles Guest

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    Thanks for your response Boing! I'll try this afterburner fix now as I have just ripped those drivers out. AC4 started getting very crashy again, but in a different way, seems the game was crashing rather than the graphics driver this time.

    The way you describe the issue with BF4 sounds familiar, I don't remember having any problems when I first used the card with the 13.251 driver from ASUS, I then installed 14.4 and tried Mantle in BF4, since then I've had no end of problems, whether I am on 13x or 14x drivers.

    I'll let you know if the Afterburner suggestion helped at all.
     
  18. Rumbles

    Rumbles Guest

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    I've tried setting it to use without power play support, I was able to play AC4 for a while without any issue, but as soon as I left the game back to desktop my machine hung (ctrl-alt-del gave no response, had to hard reset the PC).

    I then tried under clocking my GPU in MSI Afterburner and as soon as I hit apply the machine hung, overclocking to the memory rate you mentioned also caused it to hang.

    I just tried setting UnOfficialOverlockingMethod = 1 in the config file, but the logs produced are still showing the GPU and Memory clocks scaling (still have without power play support turned on).

    Just going to try the 14.7 RC3 driver and see if that is any better....
     
  19. Wagnard

    Wagnard Ancient Guru

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    You could also try the application I made "Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU)". Its a cleaner similar to driver fusion.

    http://www.wagnardmobile.com
     
  20. Turanis

    Turanis Guest

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    Last edited: Sep 14, 2014

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