I just put in a new graphics card (msi ati radeon hd 6850 cyclone power edition) and it keeps crashing. I seemed to have done everything right, but I did encounter a few problems and I am guessing one of these caused it.

I uninstalled the old g card (radeon hd 4650) driver by going into device manager and uninstalling it there, then instead of rebooting I just shut it down and put in the new g card. I thought that was the correct thing to do, but could remnants of the old driver still be there?

After putting in the new g card which seemed to go into place fine. The power cable confused me slightly, but I had some of the right cables inside the case which connected directly to the power supply (600w) so I used one of them which fitted in fine.

When I turned on the computer it started in the low resolution which it is supposed to from what I've read, I went to click on the cd drive (which had the driver cd in) and it said that it was not accessible. It then told me that I had o restart to implement the changes I'd made (i'd not made any changes since uninstalling the old g cards drivers), I restarted because it semed the only thing to do.

After the restart it came up in 1920 res (the res I usually use) and seemed be working which was strange since i'd installed no new drivers. In device manager it said I was using a hd 6850 card and that the driver for it was working fine. I thought this was odd, so I booted cpu-z to look at it. In cpu-z it said the card was running on 100mhz and 150mhz memory. This, obviously is not what it is meant to be.

I tried running a game and it crashed. I then tried to install the correct driver and it didn't seem to do anything. (that was the one on the disk). And I tried to uninstall the driver windows had put on seemingly automatically but it came up with a blank screen. Safe-mode then wouldn't boot, it just hung (maybe coincidentally?). Now I'm back on windows as I was before with 1920 resolution. CPU Z no longer says it's running at 100mhz, it says it's running at 600mhz and 550mhz memory. It flashed up with this one time before, but seems to be staying this time. The weird thing about this is that although this is not the clock speed the new card should be running at, I believe this is the clock speed my old card ran at...

I know computers, but I don't have much experience with hardware and this is the first g card i've installed so I could use some help. I understand that things are obviously wrong, but I don't really know how to fix them, especially if it's because of the power cable (this looks right, but I didn't use the wires in the box, just one of the free cables inside the box with pci-e written on it that fit.)

The card is almost definitely in the correct slot by the way because I put it in the same place my old card was in. And I'm using windows 7.

ok point 1 - just like modern CPU's, Graphics card core and memory speeds change depending on what they are doing. This is a power saving feature so don't fret about slow clock speeds when you are simply sitting in windows, it's meant to be like that.

point 2 - please be more specific about your PSU, there is a strong chance that issues relating to a new graphics card upgrade could be caused by an under-rated PSU (make and model please)

point 3 - please get the latest drivers from AMD's website, they are much less likely to cause compatibility issues that would cause a game to crash

Okay, I didn't know that, my old graphics card always stayed at a constant clock speed.
My PSU:

corsair
TX650W (I got this wrong in the previous post, it's 650w, not 600w)
Model: CMPSU-650TX

I looked around and it seemed that 650w was enough to support the new graphics card...?

Also CCC isn't opening at the moment for some reason.

I looked at my voltages on speed fan and there could be a problem:

+3.3V = 3.36V
+5V = 5.13V
+12V = 1.92V

The last one is way off, it should be around 12V shouldn't it? Might that mean a hardware problem? or is something just not set right?

that model PSU should be fine and tbh I don't believe that voltage because you would be experiencing a lot more than just an unstable graphics card if that was right.

you might be able to check the voltage in your motherboard BIOS.

if you havent already get the latest version of the AMD catalyst drivers & try them. Also to remove the game itself from the equation you could try running one of the numerous free graphics card benchmarks such as heaven or furmark.

I'd be a little worried that you have a software issue if CCC itself doesnt seem to be working right so it may be that you need to clean and reinstall the drivers

I reinstalled all the drivers and am pretty certain that's all set right, with the newest drivers and CCC which is now working.

Speed-fan and SiSoftware both say that voltage, but from what I've been reading the system shouldn't even turn on if that's correct and at the moment it's pretty much working as usual apart from if I try and do anything graphically intense.

I tried using heaven and when I tried it seemed to die. It came up with a blank screen and the only thing I could do was kill it and reboot.

I also changed the 6 pin cable as I had two free, but it's exactly the same with both.

I looked in the BIOS and the voltages are actually fine:

+3.3V = 3.36V
+5V = 5.134V
+12V = 12.239V

I also noted down the other voltages. There are two columns, one in white and one in yellow that you can select so I'll put both:

CPU: 1.3 or 1.25625
QPI: 1.150V or 'auto'
IOH Core: 1.1 or 1.24
DRAM 1.5 or 1.64

I reinstalled heaven and it didn't give me a blank screen. Instead it started loading the dragon, filling it with colour and part way through that it crashed (came up with a coloured (light blue) screen) and I had to restart.

At the moment it's pretty stable when I'm just using the desktop, but anything graphically intense it dies on.

I managed to play skyrim for about an hour on it. It played brilliantly, like it's meant to. After about an hour it died. And the last two times I've tried it since it's got to the menu screen and then has died as it's trying to get into the game proper.

this is more than a little wierd. I'd seriously recommend a full reinstall, there could be underlying stability/software issues that would make it nigh on impossible to narrow down the realy source of the problem.

have you checked the temperatures in the system? whilst I dont think that these are the issue (otherwise things would work normally when the system first powers up) it's worth making sure that there aren't any additional issues to worry about.

Yea, I was thinking a full reinstall, it's just so much hastle, but I'm starting to think I've got no other options. I've done some reading up on similar problems and I think windows might be shutting the display off when it thinks there's a problem. By full re-installation are you saying a full re-installation of the drivers or of the whole os? Because I'm starting to think the whole os since I had to reinstall the drivers a few times in the beginning and it never seemed to solve the problem. Or possibly I should re-install the drivers to an earlier version (I'm using catalyst 11.10 at the moment).

The temperatures are fine I think. I can run the MSI kombustor no problem at normal (1260 res) and extreme (1920) and it generally doesn't go much past 55C (which is okay I think...?). When I'm just browsing the desktop speedfan says the GPU runs at around 32C.

Very weirdly, which I would have thought just suggests it's something software related even more is that it's died all three times I've run the heaven benchmark test.

I also played counter strike source for about an hour last night and it was stable for that time and then crashed again.

Pale Shaza said:

Yea, I was thinking a full reinstall, it's just so much hastle

Click to expand...

Whole OS...and it's not as much hassle as removing the card, arranging an RMA, sending it back to the reseller and running the risk of being charged a testing fee and the card returned to you when they cannot replicate the issue. tbh i tend to do it at least once every six months.

It's definitely worth doing it. If nothing else, you'll end up with a system that's less bogged down by crap.

55c? cool! (pun intended )
the card can handle nearly double that before it fails although I wouldnt recommend putting it to the test.

if some things fail instantly and others run for a while first then i think a reinstall is absolutely required.

I've reinstalled the os and no problems so far, although I haven't played any games. The only strange thing is that my clock speed seems to be all over the place, it's ranging from about 2Ghz to 3Ghz on cpu-z where it's usually a stable 3.4Ghz. The system seems to be running fine now, it was quite slow when I first booted it though and cup-z said it was running at 1.5Ghz, I went into the bios and it said it had restored itself to the default clock due to a booting problem but it overclocked itself back to the usual 3.4Ghz.

CPU-z is now saying it's runing at 2Ghz.

The cpu is probably running lowers clocks to save power. My i7 is oced to 4.0ghz but it sits at 2.4ghz when the power is not needed. Run a game or something cpu intensive and your clocks should jump up to 3.4ghz

It did seem to be working okayish. CSS was playing, but skyrim was freezing when I loaded it. But suddenly when I start my games the display goes blank and I have to force restart. What the hell am I doing wrong!?

you might not be doing anything wrong, how about you tell us what the full system specifications are, any overclocks? history of the system? (i.e. new build/old parts etc)

Right, here are the specs, just ask if there's anything more you need:

Computer: Titan Goliath (bought from Overclockers almost 2 years ago)

Motherboard: Gigabyte EX58-UD3R
Processor: Intel core i7 920 @ 2.67Ghz (overclocked to 3.4Ghz, it was overclocked when I bought it)
Memory: DDR3 6GB
(new)Graphics card: msi ati radeon hd 6850 cyclone power edition
(old)Graphics card: Radeon HD 4650
power: corsair, TX650W (I got this wrong in the previous post, it's 650w, not 600w), Model: CMPSU-650TX

This new graphics card is the only piece of hardware i've ever changed in the computer, everything else is what it originally came with. I cleaned a lot of the dust out of the case a few weeks ago so it's not particularly dusty in there anymore, although I wasn't hugely thorough, I just cleaned it up a bit.

I installed the g card using an antistatic wristband and was very careful, so there is no reason it could have been damaged when I was putting it in.

Try removing the overclock entirely

Could removing the card and putting it back in possibly solve the issues?

At the moment my games are running for the most part, but if I minimise them and then maximise it causes the display to crash (go blank, not coloured) and often when loading a save whilst in game it'll do the same.

Also I read that I may need to update my motherboard chipset drivers because it could be causing me some problems. I've never had them updated to the best of my knowledge, could old chipset drivers be the cause of the problem?

remove the CPU OC and update the motehrboard BIOS - once done go into the BIOS and load defaults, save, boot into windows and install the latest chipset drivers.

minimising games causes no end of issues for a lot of people, me included, some continue to work fine, other flat out refuse to carry on workin, others end up with graphical glitches and stuttering. Battlefield 3 for example crashes 50% of the time so I try to avoid doing this as much as possible.

To remove the cpu overclock do I go to 'optimized defaults' in the bios?

Currently my cpu stats look like this:

When I restore it to optimised defaults it looks like this:

That's running at the right clock speed for the i7 920, but I don't know what the rest of that means, so is this the right thing to do to remove the OC?