Sapphire HD 7870 OC crash with black screen and sound loop

Using the ghz edtion bios (switch 1) the image is frozen sometimes with sound loop buzz.

Standard bios (switch2) it is a black screen fans 100% sometimes with sound loop buzz. Screens do lose signal.

Running eyefinty seems speed up how fast the crashes happen. BF3 in eyefinty I can play for hrs with no crash. Sniper elite v2 causes the crashes more frequent for me me in eyefinty. Now running a single monitor in crossfire or trifire stuff is fine or I am not playing the games long enough to produce a crash.

 

Someone mentioned bios in a post before and it made me wonder if the cards bios can be flashed, my hard drives can be so you would think a vid card could be, though I suppose they arent in a data in port. And if this problem is somewhere in the bios could drivers actualy fix it if its a major screw up such as that temp sensor being faulty.

Soxy

 

In my situation i have gone back to official 12.7 beta and crashing occurs much less frequently and takes longer to crash compared to 12.8. This is of course in bf3 and World of tanks.

 

Have had this in place for one week now and have not seen a crash. This still isn't definitive as I haven't had the time to marathon game like I would want to and the only game I've been testing with is D3, but nonetheless, so far so good. For those still having this issue who have the onboard realtek chipset, try updating these drivers from the ASUS website. The generic ones installed by windows are a no-go, and unless you disable the device either though the bios or though device manager, the realtek drivers are still being loaded by windows on startup.

 

This is actually exactly what asder's July 19 beta driver release does. The crashes occur much less frequently but will occasionally still happen, plus the card's performance falls through the floor.

 

Well i reinstaled win complete with new drivers, yes and for relatek, and same story again.
It took lil bit longer to crash, but still
I went to store and changed card for 660ti, in few days ill get it

 

I have this issue myself sometimes...only happens when gaming and usually when its a cpu intensive game like bf3 or sleeping dogs. Def not a video card issue as it did it with my gtx 480 and now my gtx 680 as well. I believe it is actually my vrms overheating on my motherboard as I don't have adequate airflow around them due to watercooler on my cpu. Whenever this happens I touch my vrm heatsinks on mb an they are always scorching hot.

 

Hey everyone, thought it was about time I posted regarding this issue everyone is having with the hd7870. My first post, so here goes!

Been reading this thread on and off the past few days as I've recently built a new PC and have been using the Powercolor HD7870 PCS+ variant of the Sapphire hd7870 OC and have been getting the same dreaded black screen problem during gaming. Been pulling my hair out trying to figure out the problem. Being as that it's happening on so many different combinations of hardware setups that people have I decided to give in looking for a problem with the mb, memory, psu etc and concentrate on the gpu itself.

Last night, after playing with overclock settings it's possible I may have been able to tame this beast of a card simply by underclocking it. At stock it runs at 1150Mhz@1.271v, and I think 1250mhz for the memory.

Underclocking this to 1Ghz for both the gpu and memory and reducing the voltage to 1.2v seems to have stabilised the card and I haven't experienced any crashing yet after a few hours of gaming last night. Still getting good fps too, between 30-45fps on Crysis 2 1920 x 1200, dx11, high res textures on ultra. So far so good!

This may be different for the Sapphire variants of this card, but I think it's worth a try if people haven't already done so. I assume most of you have tried everything including underclocking so apologies if I'm going over old ground with this one.

I find it hard to believe they are shipping these cards with unstable clock settings, it could just be the types of hardware we're running these cards on also which the stock OC doesn't agree with. Or even a combination of that and unstable drivers that amd are releasing. Who knows what the real cause is. But underclocking certainly has worked for me so thought I'd share that here.

Hopefully this will work for those who haven't tried it. I'll continue testing this evening after work and see how it goes. Fingers crossed!

 

Hey people been following this thread since start as i to have a 7870 (Gigabyte OC).

Ive not had any issues as described so far, but would also like to post my gaming experince so far.
1) Skyrim (HD mods, many others mods as well) - Hours and hours of game play sometimes 10 or more continues.
2) Mass Effect 2 and 3, same as skyrim hours, many hours lol
3) Crysis 2 (HD tex, DX11 and Qmod) - Also hours and hours game play.
4) Sleeping Dogs, just got it and have 1st session almost 7 hours game play.

Only issue i had is when i was on 12.4, the screen would not wake up from sleep, but was resolved from 12.6, am now on 12.8.

The other thing that might be interesting is im using a dedicated sound card (Maya44) as im into music production, but still use the card for my games.
The rest:-
MSI Z77-G43
Intel I7 2700k (Stock 3.5 - 3.9)
Gskill DDR3 16G
MAYA44 MK
Win 7 64 Ultimate

All parts except sound card, was purchased May 2012 new. Im very happy with gaming as to date FPS etc etc and have not experienced any malfunction as yet.
One more note im from South Africa and not sure if batch of cards will make a diff.
spiZ

 

one week with my brother xfx 7870 playing all time diablo 3 and no black screen so far !!!!
now i think seriously that saphire 7870 has hardware or bios probleme and ther is no probleme with ati drivers
when i have my saphire hd 7870 every time i play diablo 3 i have a black screen , i tried underclocking the card overclocking change drivers beta or whql , i have this black screen all the time in diablo 3
now im waiting for my brother to confirm the black screen or with my saphire 7870

 

So I was also having the same problems.

2 Months ago, I bought a Sapphire 7870 OC Edition and experiencing blackscreens and computer freezes plus the annoying sound loops. It took me a will to figure out that the problems was my AMD card. (Replaced PSU and CPU Cooler). So I brought my card back to the retailer and they tested the card for a couple of days and they concluded that the card was faulty. So they gave me a new one and me was happy. till I got home...

Same problems... same rage...

So me back again at retailer explaining that I was still experiencing the same problem. So they let me pick a new graphicscard. This time I went for the an Asus AMD 7870 DirectCut edition. Got back home and...

Same problems... same rage...

But then I also remembered that I also did a bios update on my MB (Asus Rampage Gene III) to the latest version (1003) when I bought the first 7870. So I thought what the hell lets revert this back to the oldest version. (0404)

Till now I havent experienced any crashes within the first day test over 8 hours (most crashes happend within 15 to 60 minutes). I really am crossing my fingers on this one. I'll keep you all posted if I am experiencing crashes again or not

 

The more i read about this the more i begin to think its a hardware conflict..most of the people that are having these problems seem to be users with Asus motherboards. This is not an attack against asus btw! its just something Ive noticed. Im not having any issues with my Sapphire 7970 OC as yet, but still testing this new rig..seems all good at the moment though.

 

i replaced everything but my cpu and still have the same problem. my guess is that the compatibility problem is with certain chipsets. has anyone had this problem with 2 different chipsets? i am tempted to go buy a motherboard and cpu just to test it and then return them.

 

What MB do you have now?

 

Just as an update, I've been running for 8 days now black screen free after updating to 12.8, turning off AMD Optimized Tesselation and surface format optimization in CCC, and updating my realtek onboard sound drivers. This is the longest I've gone crash free since I got the card in May, and with stock catalyst drivers to boot. I'm going to have to agree with vengeful on this one, this seems to be a combination of a certain driver and hardware setup not liking each other.

 

one gigabyte mobo and one asus.

first rig:

SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition OC 2GB
AMD Athlon II X3 445 Rana 3.1GHz
Seagate Barracuda ST31000524AS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s
hec HP585D 585W ATX12V Power Supply
GIGABYTE GA-MA785GM-US2H AM3/AM2+/AM2
Kingston HyperX 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2

second rig:

SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition OC 2GB
AMD Athlon II X3 445 Rana 3.1GHz
Seagate Barracuda ST31000524AS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s
OCZ ZS Series 750W
ASUS M5A99X EVO AM3+
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB)

how have you been testing it? still just Diablo 3?

 

What kind of monitors and cables people using that are crashing?

 

Where in CCC to turn it off?
or is it new features in 12.8?

UPDATE: Found it in the "Gaming" Tab, i shall try it and feedback if what you said is true~~

But where can u update the Asus onboard audio drivers?
No audio updates noted from the asus official website >.<

 

Just reporting back to say I've had no issues since tweaking the clock settings. After a bit more research I found that the stock voltage seems to be incorrect (at least for my powercolor hd7870 anyway, not sure if its the same for the sapphire version)! It was running slightly lower than it should at 1.216v and should have been running at 1.218v.

I've been running at this voltage with cpu and memory at the stock speeds of 1150mhz and 1250mhz respectively with no crashing thus far. Getting a nice consistent 60fps on most games at max settings and 1080p on a 32inch monitor. I think the only game that ended up running at 30fps was crysis 2 dx11, ultra settings. I'm happy so far!

Anyway, not sure if setting the voltage to 1.218v will work for the sapphire cards? Should be totally fine to try it though. I'm curious though as to what the stock voltage is set to for the sapphire oc 7870?

Again, might be barking up the wrong tree with this, could all be down to my particular combination of hardware but it's worked for me so thought it was worth mentioning

P.S I got the voltages all mixed up when I first posted this, edited it.

 

I am still crashing like nobody's business~~
i did exact the same and unticked the optimization and also the updated the Realtek Audio Drivers~~

Tried run a few Diablo 3 matches!! it CRASHED!! at least 3 times today~~