I have an XFX 2Gb 7870, and was having huge problems with the frozen system + sound loop problem. I eventually uninstalled the 7870 and went back to my 5850. With the new beta drivers I decided to have a new go at the 7870. I did a complete driver sweeper uninstall, a 12.11b4 install without the sound driver, disabled the AC97 and ASUS HDAudio in BIOS, and installed my old ASUS Xonar DX. And I now play WoW under DX9. The crashes seemed to be gone (none after about 16 hours of play), the performance is better, but there are a few rendering artifacts. I got a couple of triangle sprays in WoW, and missing mob in Mass Effect 3. But that's way better than crashes.
And yet the evidence says otherwise. Scores of people have the identical behavior. The freeze + sound loop bug never occurred in Mass Effect 3, only WoW (software affects the bug's behavior). Driver changes have changed the bug's behavior. If that's a hardware bug, then it's most likely a hardware flaw and not fixable by RMA (replacement cards would have the same flaw). For it to be a defect in my particular card would be vanishingly rare.
Not really relevant. Problems with this as a diagnosis: Doesn't associate the bug with ATI 7* video cards Whole computer crashes, not just applications Doesn't mention the sound loop Doesn't associate the bug with certain games, as the game community has
