Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: Vinkman on May 10, 2011, 08:13:56 AM
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Lately when playing the game, my screen goes Black for 3 to 4 seconds and then comes back. No frame rate hit, no detail setting changing. [It's not a pulling Gs blackout of anything associated with modelled game play]. Checked temps and they are running around 40c. I just have no idea what it is. Sometime I can go hours before it acts up, and sometimes it starts happening right away. Sometime the blackouts are 15 minutes apart, sometimes they 3 minutes apart.
I'm running Win7 64 bit with Sapphire 5970 with the latest drivers. Got the card in Dec.
Anyone ever experience this or know what it might be?
Thanks. :salute
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Which version of the drivers are you running? Techspot is reporting that AMD released both an off-cycle driver release and a hotfix to address recent driver bugs:
http://www.techspot.com/news/43708-amd-releases-catalyst-115-drivers-115a-hotfix.html (http://www.techspot.com/news/43708-amd-releases-catalyst-115-drivers-115a-hotfix.html)
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Lately when playing the game, my screen goes Black for 3 to 4 seconds and then comes back. No frame rate hit, no detail setting changing. [It's not a pulling Gs blackout of anything associated with modelled game play]. Checked temps and they are running around 40c. I just have no idea what it is. Sometime I can go hours before it acts up, and sometimes it starts happening right away. Sometime the blackouts are 15 minutes apart, sometimes they 3 minutes apart.
I'm running Win7 64 bit with Sapphire 5970 with the latest drivers. Got the card in Dec.
Anyone ever experience this or know what it might be?
Thanks. :salute
Sounds like your display driver is crashing and reset, shows as black screen for a couple seconds.
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Sounds like your display driver is crashing and reset, shows as black screen for a couple seconds.
This might be true. I recall getting an issue watching some Fox News vids where it would die and I would get a meassage saying "Your video driver has failed and been succeessfully recovered."
I will check the driver version that Bino mentioned. Perhaps there's a driver issue.
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Which version of the drivers are you running? Techspot is reporting that AMD released both an off-cycle driver release and a hotfix to address recent driver bugs:
http://www.techspot.com/news/43708-amd-releases-catalyst-115-drivers-115a-hotfix.html (http://www.techspot.com/news/43708-amd-releases-catalyst-115-drivers-115a-hotfix.html)
Thanks Bino, I read through this and the video driver crash during video payback is a symptom I'v eexperienced as well, I will try it when I get home later. :salute
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And I thought it was me messing with my overclock. I've been getting the same thing (black screen) with no rhyme or reason since the last couple of patches. Only happened a couple of times but it hasn't done that in a long long while. When it happens mine doesn't come back after a few secs. I can do a ctrl/alt/del, end process and get back in OK tho.
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I had that exact same thing a few months ago, drove me crazy trying to figure it out. Weird thing is it only happened at the monitor's default resolution. I checked card, temps, everything, couldn't fix it.
Someone told me it was probably the monitor but that didn't seem right as the monitor was fine at other resolutions. But I got a new one and bang, problem went away.
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Could be an iffy cap in the monitor also. When they go out 'some' monitors can tell you through the diagnostics and others just blink the power switch at you. Its not hard to fix if thats the problem you just match up caps and replace them (being careful not to touch the large one that every board has). Humble has a post on how to fix it in this forum a couple years back.
Flakey memory can do it also. When I see things like this I generally take the GPU apart and retreat the thermal areas with new compound. If that doesnt fix the problem I know there could very well be swollen caps in the monitor.
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I get that but my situation was it happened a few times out of the blue several patches--months ago, went away completely and now in the last week or so it's happened again a couple of times out of the blue. I don't know if it's AH that's the issue or not just sayin it'd happened to me too.
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I get that but my situation was it happened a few times out of the blue several patches--months ago, went away completely and now in the last week or so it's happened again a couple of times out of the blue. I don't know if it's AH that's the issue or not just sayin it'd happened to me too.
I downloaded and installed the latest catalyst sofware but it made no difference. I will try to send a help ticket in to AMD tonight.
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Is your power supply powerful enough for the new card? Your card might be drained from power and malfunction erratically.
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Is your power supply powerful enough for the new card? Your card might be drained from power and malfunction erratically.
It's rated to be high enough. Trying to remember [not at home to check] what the watt rating is. I think it's 850watts, perhaps 1000watts. I remember it was big enough. This is a new problem that started a month or so ago so the Power suply card combo was fine for 5 months or so. It seems to be worse since the patch.
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Just remember its hardly ever the total watts of the PSU that matters. You want to keep in mind the load you have placed on each line and make sure you never go beyond its rated capacity. I would say keep it down to 75% of its rated capacity or less depending on the quality of PSU. Make sure you know the specs on each device attached and what its maximum draw is so that you can plan accordingly. If you dont already know you are operating in spec or not then you have homework to do.
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With an ATI card those black outs are caused by VPU crashing and recovering. This is usually caused by one of four things 1) out dated drivers 2) insufficient power 3) heating issues 4) defective video card. It's going to take some trouble shooting to pin down the exact cause but now at least you have a starting point to start eliminating some potential causes.
ack-ack
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Well I haven't updated my video drivers in a while which is unlike me. I have downloaded the new catalyst hotifx for AGP drivers and will go through that process when I get a chance. The power thing might possibly be a factor. Running a 750w PSU which oughta be enough I'd think. I did recently get a CM-690II Advanced case and there's a lot more fans on that than my older no-name-slightly-modified-to-stick-another-fan-or-two case did. Cools a TON better tho. Maybe I'm skating on the edge of not enough power to run the video card with all the fans. I'll try ditching a fan or two and see if the black screen issue goes away. Heat's prolly not it. I have a Zalman VF-1000 cooler on the card and it works great. Rarely get above 54c at full load in Kombuster although I do OC it at 800/900. All I could get without modifying the bios on it. I've had this card(HIS HD4670 AGP) since they came out with it so it's a couple of years old. I guess that's geriatric by today's hardware standards. But I love tweaking my old school hoopty box. :D At some point I'll be REALLY forced to upgrade but that wont be until the next graphics bump happens here. Or I come into money. Kids in college so that's not likely.
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With an ATI card those black outs are caused by VPU crashing and recovering. This is usually caused by one of four things 1) out dated drivers 2) insufficient power 3) heating issues 4) defective video card. It's going to take some trouble shooting to pin down the exact cause but now at least you have a starting point to start eliminating some potential causes.
ack-ack
Thanks Ack. The power thing has me curious because lately I've noticed a problem in the house with lights dimming everytime something comes on (microwave for example). Voltage supply to the house being an issue didn't occur to me until just now. I'v been meaning to have the power company out to see what is up. Better make it a priority. :salute
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Well I haven't updated my video drivers in a while which is unlike me. I have downloaded the new catalyst hotifx for AGP drivers and will go through that process when I get a chance. The power thing might possibly be a factor. Running a 750w PSU which oughta be enough I'd think. I did recently get a CM-690II Advanced case and there's a lot more fans on that than my older no-name-slightly-modified-to-stick-another-fan-or-two case did. Cools a TON better tho. Maybe I'm skating on the edge of not enough power to run the video card with all the fans. I'll try ditching a fan or two and see if the black screen issue goes away. Heat's prolly not it. I have a Zalman VF-1000 cooler on the card and it works great. Rarely get above 54c at full load in Kombuster although I do OC it at 800/900. All I could get without modifying the bios on it. I've had this card(HIS HD4670 AGP) since they came out with it so it's a couple of years old. I guess that's geriatric by today's hardware standards. But I love tweaking my old school hoopty box. :D At some point I'll be REALLY forced to upgrade but that wont be until the next graphics bump happens here. Or I come into money. Kids in college so that's not likely.
I wouldn't install the most current ATI AGP hot fix drivers. There is a bad issue from versions 10.2 to 11.4 that cause your computer to get a BSOD when installing the WDM drivers and go into an endless rebooting cycle unless you boot into safe mode. I'm using the 10.1 drivers on the old machine that I'm using an ATI 4670 AGP card, that's probably the most stable driver for AGP based ATI cards.
ack-ack
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I wouldn't install the most current ATI AGP hot fix drivers. There is a bad issue from versions 10.2 to 11.4 that cause your computer to get a BSOD when installing the WDM drivers and go into an endless rebooting cycle unless you boot into safe mode. I'm using the 10.1 drivers on the old machine that I'm using an ATI 4670 AGP card, that's probably the most stable driver for AGP based ATI cards.
ack-ack
I loaded the news version fo the drivers, but not the hot fix. Didn't solve the problem. I wonder if I can still find a copy of the 10.2 drivers?
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I loaded the news version fo the drivers, but not the hot fix. Didn't solve the problem. I wonder if I can still find a copy of the 10.2 drivers?
all the older drivers are still available on the ATI website. Bottom of the download page.
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I'd regularly updated the AGP Hotfix drivers for a while without a problem since I've had the card, however been a bit lax in recent months. Like I said, no issues. Certainly no BSOD issues. I'm currently running Catalyst AGP Hotfix driver v10.10. (6.14.10.7131 according to Everest). Newest ones out are v11.5. I have v11.4 on my desktop. I'm still running XP32 Pro. Perhaps it's a Vista/7 issue?
I found the Catalyst v10.1 AGP Hotfix on the German AMD forums. I've kept several versions on my external drive but that one wasn't one of them apparently. They were kinda hard to find--unless you wanted to go through some 3rd party-- and that wasnt' happening! The official AMD Catalyst download site doesn't go back that far. Now I'm finding some problems described on some forums with the installer with v10.1. I see a workaround but I'm reluctant to fiddle with it. If it ain't broke yaknow....
Be advised those reading this, we're discussing the AGP drivers** NOT the PCI/PCIe drivers**. They're different. You can only use the AGP Hotfix drivers for an ATI AGP card. The other ones will not recognize an AGP card.
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I'd regularly updated the AGP Hotfix drivers for a while without a problem since I've had the card, however been a bit lax in recent months. Like I said, no issues. Certainly no BSOD issues. I'm currently running Catalyst AGP Hotfix driver v10.10. (6.14.10.7131 according to Everest). Newest ones out are v11.5. I have v11.4 on my desktop. I'm still running XP32 Pro. Perhaps it's a Vista/7 issue?
I found the Catalyst v10.1 AGP Hotfix on the German AMD forums. I've kept several versions on my external drive but that one wasn't one of them apparently. They were kinda hard to find--unless you wanted to go through some 3rd party-- and that wasnt' happening! The official AMD Catalyst download site doesn't go back that far. Now I'm finding some problems described on some forums with the installer with v10.1. I see a workaround but I'm reluctant to fiddle with it. If it ain't broke yaknow....
Be advised those reading this, we're discussing the AGP drivers** NOT the PCI/PCIe drivers**. They're different. You can only use the AGP Hotfix drivers for an ATI AGP card. The other ones will not recognize an AGP card.
My card is PCIe
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Hi All,
Now my vid card isn't an ATI card but this may be revelant.
I got a EVGA GTX 560ti SC vid card & i would get what y'all are describing--most of the time my screen would pause for 1-2 secs then resume but on occassion would BSOD. When I would check my vid card in Afterburner I could see that the card was downclocking during gameplay--thought drivers so I installed the latest drivers (270.61's)--no change. Put the 266.66's back in--no change. I pulled the vid card's HSF & put some OCZ Freeze on it which dropped the load temps 10*C on the vid card but I still got the pauses/BSOD's. I have a PC P&C Silencer 750W PSU w/ 60A 12v single rail--holding steady on power. I have a Intel C2D E8600 OC'd to 4.0 Ghz (bumped FSB to 1600 w/ no voltage increase) & never had an issue in the past. Ran Memtest on both DIMMS--both checked out w/ flying colors. Checked HDD's--both checked out OK. I would recheck Afterburner periodically & would start to see the mem usage of the vid card drop along w/ the GPU/mem downclocks then recover along w/ the clocks as well---hmmmmmmmm.
I shut down my A/V (Kapersky) & Win Defender thinking this was the culprit--no change. My EVGA GTX 470 SC vid card ran just fine when I had it in this box before (ran it on 266.66's). I was at the end of my wits today & was gonna swap out vid cards & call EVGA for an RMA on the 560 when I got a whim to go into BIOS & put CPU back to stock clocks--rebooted box & went flying--all ran beautifully--absolutely no issues at all. Hmmmmmmm..........
That got me to thinking so I went back into the mobo (EVGA 780i FTW) BIOS & got to looking around & found where I had set the CPU FSB voltage from the AUTO set & locked it at 1.25v (this set was the highest green set) because the AUTO set would set the FSB voltage at 1.325v (which was red) when I set the FSB clocks up from 1333 to 1600 (to OC the CPU to 4.0 Ghz). I did this back when I had originally OC'd the 8600 to keep the mobo safe (in all green settings). I put this back in AUTO & let the mobo set the FSB voltage back to 1.325 & set the FSB clocks back to 1600 to get my 4.0 Ghz CPU speed back & rebooted my box & went up--all ran beautifully--no pauses/BSOD's--I got some stuttering on control inputs initially but I went into the vid card's drivers & set the prerendered frames setting to 0 & went back up--all cleared up & running beautifully! I am 1 HAPPY camper now!!! :D
It appeared that the FSB on my mobo just couldn't handle the bandwidth output of the 560ti SC at it's clock speed, controller inputs & game running on the CPU at the locked voltage set of 1.25v & would become unstable & cause the vid card to stumble so the vid card drivers would attempt to recover the card-when this was going on the bandwidth demand would drop so the CPU would recover along w/ the vid card & all was well again--until the FSB got overloaded again! When I put the mobo BIOS back in control the BIOS would adjust the power to suit the demand & voila! no issues!
You might check for this on y'all's setups as I can see the latest ATI vid cards (especially OC'd vid cards) can cause the same issues, especially on the older mobos (like mine). My 470 SC clocks at 625/1350/1701 stock, my 560Ti SC clocks at 900/1800/2108 stock--that's a BIG jump in GPU bandwidth output between the 2. The issue wasn't the PCI-E bus lanes, it was the FSB power/bandwidth between the CPU/mem/PCI-E bus (caused by me-- :ahand).
Hope this helps!
:salute
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Yeah I also noticed the same underclock thing going on with my card. I use MSI Afterburner to do my clocking and I think the problem started happening when I updated to v2.21? (I think it was) which might have been about the same time the new versions came out. Looking at that I could see my memory speed remained constant but my core clock would switch up and down repeatedly. It was literally all up or all down to default whether in 3d mode or not. I verified this in Everest too. I'm thinking this ain't normal and might cause bad things to happen. So I unintstalled it and then installed v1.6. Things are steady now and I haven't had any black screens in testing so far. Seems to have worked for me YMMV.
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Hi All,
Now my vid card isn't an ATI card but this may be revelant.
I got a EVGA GTX 560ti SC vid card & i would get what y'all are describing--most of the time my screen would pause for 1-2 secs then resume but on occassion would BSOD. When I would check my vid card in Afterburner I could see that the card was downclocking during gameplay--thought drivers so I installed the latest drivers (270.61's)--no change. Put the 266.66's back in--no change. I pulled the vid card's HSF & put some OCZ Freeze on it which dropped the load temps 10*C on the vid card but I still got the pauses/BSOD's. I have a PC P&C Silencer 750W PSU w/ 60A 12v single rail--holding steady on power. I have a Intel C2D E8600 OC'd to 4.0 Ghz (bumped FSB to 1600 w/ no voltage increase) & never had an issue in the past. Ran Memtest on both DIMMS--both checked out w/ flying colors. Checked HDD's--both checked out OK. I would recheck Afterburner periodically & would start to see the mem usage of the vid card drop along w/ the GPU/mem downclocks then recover along w/ the clocks as well---hmmmmmmmm.
I shut down my A/V (Kapersky) & Win Defender thinking this was the culprit--no change. My EVGA GTX 470 SC vid card ran just fine when I had it in this box before (ran it on 266.66's). I was at the end of my wits today & was gonna swap out vid cards & call EVGA for an RMA on the 560 when I got a whim to go into BIOS & put CPU back to stock clocks--rebooted box & went flying--all ran beautifully--absolutely no issues at all. Hmmmmmmm..........
That got me to thinking so I went back into the mobo (EVGA 780i FTW) BIOS & got to looking around & found where I had set the CPU FSB voltage from the AUTO set & locked it at 1.25v (this set was the highest green set) because the AUTO set would set the FSB voltage at 1.325v (which was red) when I set the FSB clocks up from 1333 to 1600 (to OC the CPU to 4.0 Ghz). I did this back when I had originally OC'd the 8600 to keep the mobo safe (in all green settings). I put this back in AUTO & let the mobo set the FSB voltage back to 1.325 & set the FSB clocks back to 1600 to get my 4.0 Ghz CPU speed back & rebooted my box & went up--all ran beautifully--no pauses/BSOD's--I got some stuttering on control inputs initially but I went into the vid card's drivers & set the prerendered frames setting to 0 & went back up--all cleared up & running beautifully! I am 1 HAPPY camper now!!! :D
It appeared that the FSB on my mobo just couldn't handle the bandwidth output of the 560ti SC at it's clock speed, controller inputs & game running on the CPU at the locked voltage set of 1.25v & would become unstable & cause the vid card to stumble so the vid card drivers would attempt to recover the card-when this was going on the bandwidth demand would drop so the CPU would recover along w/ the vid card & all was well again--until the FSB got overloaded again! When I put the mobo BIOS back in control the BIOS would adjust the power to suit the demand & voila! no issues!
You might check for this on y'all's setups as I can see the latest ATI vid cards (especially OC'd vid cards) can cause the same issues, especially on the older mobos (like mine). My 470 SC clocks at 625/1350/1701 stock, my 560Ti SC clocks at 900/1800/2108 stock--that's a BIG jump in GPU bandwidth output between the 2. The issue wasn't the PCI-E bus lanes, it was the FSB power/bandwidth between the CPU/mem/PCI-E bus (caused by me-- :ahand).
Hope this helps!
:salute
Geez, I understood some of that! lol How do I check the FBS Power/bandwith in win7 64 bit?
Also I have a wireless keyboard & mouse which I added a few months ago, and Three CH proliferies and a TrackIR all running off the USB ports. Would those contribute to Mobo bandwith/power issues?
Thanks,
Vinkman
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I downloaded and reverted back to v10.12 of the Catalyst drivers and no more issues. Weird. :salute