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ATI HD4870 Display driver restarting/crashing

Inazuma

Inazuma

Inazuma

Soldato
Joined
9 Jun 2006
Posts
4,227
Location
Purgatory
Alright fellas,
My cousin has an ATI HD4870 installed with a Vista 64-bit machine. About 2-4 times a week he will get a problem where his screen will suddenly flash black a few times and eventually BSOD. Sometimes when it feels slightly more merciful it'll flash black only once and show a "display driver not working" error. This happens even without him playing games or videos. Is there anything he can do to stop this?

Some other details:
He has a dual monitor setup.
4GB ram and Q6600.
 
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I had the exact problem with my 4850. Disabling Vista's Aero fixed it for me.

Alternatively tell him to try increasing the fan speed on his graphics card using ATI CCC or use Rivatuner or install an older driver if he has the latest already.
 
Is is a sapphire card? Some of their 4850/4870 cards needed a bios update (bios and tutorial available on the sapphire website) to fix an issue that can sometimes cause it to crash when downclocking whilst not at full load. The crash shows as either BSOD, vertical lines of different colours, system restart with no error code or a driver failed/recovered message.
 
Geckovich said:
Is is a sapphire card? Some of their 4850/4870 cards needed a bios update (bios and tutorial available on the sapphire website) to fix an issue that can sometimes cause it to crash when downclocking whilst not at full load. The crash shows as either BSOD, vertical lines of different colours, system restart with no error code or a driver failed/recovered message.
Click to expand...

Oh I think I may need that, my card occasionally does all those things :)

I cant seem to load the website, do you have a link to the relevant page? Thanks
 
Sapphire page seems to be down at the min. One less than ideal way to sort it is to use rivatuner to force your clock speeds to defaults (or slight OC if you prefer) on system start up. Apparently this also works to stop the downclocking issue.

I'll have a look about my backups to see if I kept the BIOS file, though I doubt I would have as it's generally something you only intend on doing once.

Once the Sapphire site gets itself sorted I recommend you use winflash to flash the BIOS on the card as it is a lot less of a hassle than the way they recommend. Winflash can be found here:

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1122/Winflash_2.0.1.2.html

Mods, what are the rules on posting external links?
 
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I was getting freezes in GTA IV where the screen would freeze with chequered blocks across it, sometimes it would blue screen and other times get strange colours all over the display with corrupted text, updated the bios on my card as forgot to do since getting it back from RMA seemed to fix it though by the time i had uninstalled and reinstalled things it was too late to give the game a proper thashing :(
 
could some1 do an idiots guide to DOS flashing with the sapphire one? its a bit vague.

something along the lines of do this, type that do this etc. =P
 
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