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is my graphics card broken?

bazmo

bazmo

bazmo

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Joined
6 Oct 2008
Posts
57
Hi, I'm having some serious problems with my pc and am trying to track down the source.

When playing games recently I have been getting the crash with error "Your display driver has stopped working and has been successfully restored".

Over the last few days however, the pc has simply been freezing up completely not even restoring the drivers - I have to hit the reset button.

I can replicate this everytime within about 1 minute by playing a UDK map, although it happens in other games as well.

I still have vista installed on another HD so I tried booting to this and again I get exactly the same problem... so I guess its not software or driver related, or a problem with my HD. I ran memtest for about an hour as well and didn't get any errors.

So basically, my question is - is my graphics card simply dead? or could this be something else?

Any insights much appreciated :)

Its an ATI 4870 btw

oh and just to add - the temp isn't ever going above about 55 degrees so its not overheating!
 
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If you video card was dead you wouldn't get a display and if it were dieing you would normally get screen artefacts and display corruption. It sounds like you might have a software conflict going on there in which case I would use the Windows restore feature and set your PC back to when this wasn't happening.

You might want to create another partition on your hard drive and install a clean copy of Vista on it along with the latest video card drivers and a couple of games and see if it still crashes this way it will rule in or out software issues. Also try running your card in another PC if possible.
 
thanks for the reply.

i don't think i made it very clear how my computer is partitioned..

I currently have 2 hard drives in the pc. I am currently running win7 on one and have vista installed on the other (left over from before I bought my new hd). The problem occurs both in win7 and vista, which are on different physical drives.

I was planning on doing a fresh install of win7 in the hope that it would fix the problem but seeing as it happens in vista aswell that seems pointless
 
bazmo said:
thanks for the reply.

i don't think i made it very clear how my computer is partitioned..

I currently have 2 hard drives in the pc. I am currently running win7 on one and have vista installed on the other (left over from before I bought my new hd). The problem occurs both in win7 and vista, which are on different physical drives.

I was planning on doing a fresh install of win7 in the hope that it would fix the problem but seeing as it happens in vista aswell that seems pointless
Click to expand...

In that case I suggest you run an app like the artefact scanning tool found in ATitools and see if this crashes you're driver/PC.

Does this happen in other games as well or just 'UDK', could be game related?
 
yeah it happens in other games as well, just not as regularly.

I'm now unable to install any drivers for my card. The ati installation just says disply driver install has failed. As such I can't run atitools?

if i try to install through device manager i get an error saying windows has found the driver but was unable to install it

This seems to be getting worse...
 
In my expeirence system restore, just causes more problems than it fixes.

It could be that you have some kind of conflict happening.

If you cant solve the problem, I would back up your data, and reinstall windows, after having reformated the hdd.

Use latest gpu drivers, make sure windows is fully uptodate, and try to minimise junk software on the computer...

Also as a test, if you have any overclcoks on cpu or gpu, revert to stock, so as to see if its the overclocks that are the issues...
 
All the above I agree with (besides the system restore), but before you return anything you really need to test your card out on another PC before you get it RMA'd because if they find it's not faulty you might cop some charges.
 
thanks for the replies. I loaded back into vista and have been running the atitool artifact thing for about 15minutes. So far everything seems fine, and its pushing the gpu a lot harder than other things that have been causing problems.

Unfortunately I have no way of testing the card in another machine

My problem at the moment is installing the drivers back onto Win7 (i removed them with driver sweeper). Has anyone had this problem before or have a clue how to fix it?

This is what I get when i try to install:

ATI Display Driver
Final Status: Fail
Version of Item: 8.771.0.0000
Size: 90 Mbytes
 
Arghh you used Driver Sweeper on W7 that probably explains why you have been getting problems. From what I've read Driver Sweeper hasn't been updated to run on W7 (or if it has you may have been using an older version) and deletes crucial system files that relate to the video card.

At this point do as opethdisciple suggests and do a clean install of W7 and should find it fixes your problems.
 
ok, yeah don't use driver sweeper on Win7 is definately good advice! Seems the only way to fix it is to do a fresh install.

Thing is though, once I've done a fresh install, I'm still going to have exactly the same problem that I started with! :(
 
I get the same problem when i overclock my gfx card too far and it overheats.

Make sure your card and fans are free from dust and and try cranking up the fan speed some.
 
so... backed everything up, reformatted the drive, reinstalled windows, intalled latest drivers, started a game.... computer completely freezes up!

nothing in the machine is overclocked, and like I said the temp on the graphics card isn't going past 60. So its definately not a heat problem or anything to do with overclocking.

Anyone got any other suggestions? This is driving me nuts now!
 
unfortunately the only other card I've got is an old nvidea 7900 (or something). I've already tried that in the machine but it just threw artifacts up all over the sreen after about 5 minutes. To be fair that graphics card has been sat in a box for the last 3 years or so, so I think its just broken
 
again i can't, unfortunately my friends aren't big gamers, thus they all have laptops.

I was planning on buying a new graphics card soon anyway, but was holding out for the 6xxx cards to be released. Still, I'd happily purchase a new one if it fixed my problems
 
ok i have a bit of an update on this and a further question...

first of all, i have kind of fixed the problem it seems. By using the ati overclock thing and turning everything down to the lowest settings the card seems to become stabls again (500mhz core and 475mhz memory)

The thing is though, as I've said before, the problem really shouldn't be temperature related because the card is never getting hotter than 55 (which i'm sure is within the limits it should be ok at). It also doesn't make it any more stable if I change the fan speed to 100%?

It's just struck me that maybe it could be a power supply problem, and it stops working when it has to supply more power. My PSU is a Corsair 650W modular btw.

Does this make any sense and it's likely the PSU, or is it almost certainly now a broken graphics card?

Thanks
 
another little question...

does anyone know what is normal (tolerable) for the VDDC phase temperatures (measured from GPU-Z)? These temps are going up past 120/130 - is that ok?
 
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