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6950 Vertical Lines Crash

shanestatham

shanestatham

shanestatham

Associate
Joined
25 Oct 2011
Posts
677
Im stuck and wondered if you could help:

Radeon 6950 (Stock no clock etc)
AMD Phenom II x 4 3.30 (stock)
8 Gig ram
Windows 7
550W Power Supply

Drivers for CCC 13.2 beta (was on 13.1 same issues)

Im getting crashing in games even on title screens. Most recent examples being Tomb Raider and Resident Evil 6....hell i didnt even get to play any of resident evil due to crash on intro screen.

After reading a lot there were 2 schools of thought.......Overheating or PSU not providing enough amps?

The PSU i have has been suffient to play Crysis 3, Dead Space, BF3 etc.

So why the issue now?

I played tomb raider at Ultimate settings earlier but with fan set to 70% on GPU and i was able to play without a crash.

I dont want the fan blaring out at me while i game or watch videos so can i cool silently?

Is there anything else i could try? Is the PSU too weak? If i have to spend money i will but this rig should handle these games.

Oh and i did put Tomb Raider on LOW settings with Fan at Auto and it crashed aswell. :(
 
If it's working with the fan set to 70% then it'll have nothing to do with your PSU.

550w is more than enough to power what you have, also, it's not quite clear what you have and haven't had crashing issues with.

Is it just Tomb Raider and Resident Evil 6, or are they just the latest, and other games crash too?
 
Crysis 2 did a long time ago.....recently nothing! Everything has worked fine.

Again just tried Resident Evil 6 with Fan a little lower at about 60% and again fine.

When set to Auto just crashes at random intervals.

I really don't want my PC sounding like Apollo space shuttle taking off everytime i fancy playing a game.

Can i water cool the GPU? would watercooling help the system as a whole?
 
what are the gpu temps? crashing with lines and multi coloured screens points to gpu memory failing or overheating

you can test by downclocking the gpu memory by 200mhz and try with games
 
GPU temps hover around 75 - 80

I knocked the Memory clock from 1300 to 1000 this caused the game to really stutter! Like the screen would stop for a m/s then continue for a second and repeat. So i knocked up the clock to 1100 and crashed after 10 mins.

Really dont know what to do :( Overclockers wont help understandably because i no longer have a receipt...i guess this will teach me a lesson....but still sucks to have paid £200 for a card which doesnt work after 1.5 years :(

Has been crashing even with fan set to 70% now too.....urgh

Anyone else got any tips?
 
have you removed the cooler/heatsink and cleaned all the fins out and re applied some new thermal paste? that might help
 
yep gpu,it could be clogged up with crud and dried out thermal paste

I have no idea about amd pc's but it wouldn't help to add a touch more northbridge voltage
 
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PSU is XFX Pro 550W

Ive cleaned out all the PC, not much but a bit of dust and stuff.

The CPU thermal paste was DRY! like dry mud! So i cleaned that and applied some fresh paste....ill be honest ive not done it before im afraid i may have applied too much....i just put a blob in the centre and pressed the coller down to hopefully spread it out.

I then took apart the GPU and the paste on that was kind of sticky but not really dry....i took it off cleaned it and reapplied fresh paste.

Put everything back in so ill post some results.....would you advise of anything i should do like a stress test maybe with heaven or furmark?

Edit: I also flicked the shader switch to turn the GPU into a 6970 :) as its a TOXIC 6950
 
Ok just benched Heaven......Crashed after 2 mins

reduced mem clock from 1300 to 1100....crash.

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I used to get this all the time with my old 5870. It was the OC on the VRAM that was causing the crash. I sorted it out by flashing the card to the latest BIOS which cured the issue. It was never a happy clocker though.
 
Well you've unlocked it to a 6970 which will draw a tad more power and cause it to run hotter, but it sounds like the cooling to be honest. Remove the heatsink and give it a good clean out. Also, you you have good airflow in your case? You'll see a big difference with a decent intake and exhaust fan. Try setting your BIOS switch back to default and see how it runs @ 6950 spec.

EDIT: Try altering the PowerTune settings.
 
Ive put back to stock.

Im thinking of having a search for latest bios for stock 6950 see what that brings.

I dont know what power tune is...ill have a look. edit**** ive set power to 20% see what that does.

I did clean out my PC earlier, also cleaned old dried Thermal Paste and reapplied new stuff.

I personally think its just too damn hot. Would a water cooling system cure this? but thats only for CPU isnt it?
 
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You can water cool GPUs but I wouldn't bother with yours personally as its an older card. You can make your own custom fan profile with something like MSI Afterburner. How did you unlock your card? Just that one way is to just flash a 6970 BIOS which isn't recommended as the memory timings are off and it'll eventually kill your card. The other method is to use Radeon BIOS Editor to unlock the extra shaders using your stock BIOS which is what I've done on both of my cards without any issue.
 
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