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AMD 5850 BSDO & crashing had enough

Dr Lodge

Dr Lodge

Dr Lodge

Associate
Joined
15 Feb 2010
Posts
19
I've had my AMD 5850 card for 3 years and been putting up with my Windows 7 machine going BSOD from time to time, typically a min or two after booting. This weekend my 7 year old was watchin videos on youtube and the PC kept freezing. I *think* its the 5850 causing the problem as I've read a fair bit about this card causing stability issues. All drivers are updated and I've had enough. So grateful for your thoughts on what I should do
- is it really the 5850 causing these stability issues? I've run memtest and everything checks out ok
- if I upgraded to something like a 5950 or 5970 what are my chances of running into this issue again, what card should I go for?

Motherboard is Gigabyte GA-X58-UD5 running i7-920 processor, 3x2GB RAM.
 
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Thanks, will try that.

Thinking the GTX 670 might be better, as I need to drive 3 monitors. 2 are DVI, one is VGA (via KVM switch to allow for other PCs). My existing DP-> DVI adapter will work with this GTX card, but the AMD cards now come with 2 mDP ports which means 2 more adapters.
 
its probably memory related,esp from a cold boot

what dram voltage are you using and qpi/vtt voltage? for qpi/vtt id set to 1.35v and dram can be either 1.5v or 1.66v you need to look on the sticks to see what its rated at
 
Update: disabled flash hard acceleration, and upped the qpi/vtt voltage from its default of 1.175 to 1.235 then up to around 1.35. Also upped DRAM voltage from 1.5 to 1.6. So far so good, its stable. However I notice something weird.

I have 3x2GB memory installed, but windows is show 6GB but only 4GB usable. Looking in the BIOS, the memory in slots 1 & 3 are enabled, but not slot 5. There seems to be no BIOS setting to change this and googling doesn't show any solution except when the motherboard is duff.

I also updated the m/b BIOS from F10 to F13 (latest) and now it cycles a few times on booting after it says "Detecting DRAM size..." and I can't get it to boot the memtest ISO image that I burned to CD. ARGH!!!
 
Phew, sorted the memory capacity issue. Took the modules out, swapped them around and replaced. Now I get 6Gb...now to see if my PC remains stable.
 
It was probably not enough qpi/vtt,1.175v seems abit low even for stock clocks,post back on how you get on
 
Thats an interesting and unique CPU you're running there.

My experience, 99% of crashes where the BSOD screen points to the graphics card driver... are unstable systems, as probably shown here. That goes for AMD and Nvidia.

99% of devices, you're talking about minor drivers, Nvidia/AMD drivers are large, and need so many fixes for so many games and are pretty much the most complex device in the system, when you have an unstable system the most used, most complex and most critical driver is the GPU driver.

A massive, ridiculous, huge portion of graphics driver crashes(both BSOD's and the driver has stopped responding style situation which recovers) are unstable systems. AMD and even Nvidia get a bad rap here, people see the driver name on the BSOD and assume graphics card.
 
drunkenmaster said:
Thats an interesting and unique CPU you're running there.

My experience, 99% of crashes where the BSOD screen points to the graphics card driver... are unstable systems, as probably shown here. That goes for AMD and Nvidia.

99% of devices, you're talking about minor drivers, Nvidia/AMD drivers are large, and need so many fixes for so many games and are pretty much the most complex device in the system, when you have an unstable system the most used, most complex and most critical driver is the GPU driver.

A massive, ridiculous, huge portion of graphics driver crashes(both BSOD's and the driver has stopped responding style situation which recovers) are unstable systems. AMD and even Nvidia get a bad rap here, people see the driver name on the BSOD and assume graphics card.
Click to expand...

This guy speaks sense :cool:
 
Dr Lodge said:
Update: disabled flash hard acceleration, and upped the qpi/vtt voltage from its default of 1.175 to 1.235 then up to around 1.35. Also upped DRAM voltage from 1.5 to 1.6. So far so good, its stable. However I notice something weird.

I have 3x2GB memory installed, but windows is show 6GB but only 4GB usable. Looking in the BIOS, the memory in slots 1 & 3 are enabled, but not slot 5. There seems to be no BIOS setting to change this and googling doesn't show any solution except when the motherboard is duff.

I also updated the m/b BIOS from F10 to F13 (latest) and now it cycles a few times on booting after it says "Detecting DRAM size..." and I can't get it to boot the memtest ISO image that I burned to CD. ARGH!!!
Click to expand...

I think one of you memory modules may be on its way out.

This happened to me too, I had 6 x 2gb modules installed on an X58 system. At first windows would show only 8 or 10gb installed intermitantly and sometime the full 12 gbs. After a while 2 sticks of memory failed completely.

This was the memory I was using

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=496&Itemid=67&limit=1&limitstart=1

I was a bit upset.:(
 
Thanks for the info, I had another BSOD last night so something is still amiss. I've had this problem since the PC was new 3 years ago so I'm tempted to think its not due to the memory being on its way out - its always been like this and I've just lived with it.

The DRAM voltage can probably go another notch higher, this is my memory [linked removed]

OCZ 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz/PC3-12800 Reaper Triple Channel Kit CL7 1.65V

and as its rated at 1.65. DRAM=1.5 was clearly too low.

Reckon I'll monitor the situation for a while and see how it behaves.

Another annoying issue is that since I upgraded the BIOS last night, I can no longer get the damn PC to boot off CD in order to run memtest. There's a boot order in the BIOS, but also another boot order (with HDD set to "+" default) when I hit F12 on booting. Making CDROM a priority in either/both doesn't make any difference.

God I hate technology sometimes.
 
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psu should be fine,if your rams rated at 1.65v it will be 1.66v in gigabyte bios

still reckon its memory setting/voltage not right

also set system performance enhance to standard as it will loosen the secondary ram timings
 
Update: Fixed the DVD drive not being detected problem, by reverting to an older BIOS, F13 -> F12. Still getting BSOD but have disabled auto restart so I can see the error codes.

Last BSOD happened after I had downloaded the BIOS exe file then double clicked on it to open :-z
 
on my old 5850, I got BSOD pointing to the driver fairly often, and spent months moaning about AMD's rubbish drivers, until one day I took my PC to a LAN at a friends house, plugged it in, and heard an electrical fizz/buzzing noise (without even starting the computer). I looked inside my case and saw lightning! My PSU had given up the ghost.
I replaced it with a corsair HX850, after which I NEVER had so much as a 'driver stopped responding' with that card again (apart from some over zealous clock attemts just before I replaced it :p )

What brand/model/wattage of PSU do you have?
 
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