Saved my 5770?

[Pete.Dakota]

Had a scare last night. Accidentally whacked up my 5770's memory clock speed using MSI afterburner too high. Immediate full screen artefact, occasional flickers of desktop remnants, but for the most part a useless card.

Every reboot lasted about 15 seconds on desktop before the same full screen vertical bars appeared. Figured I'd probably damaged the VRAM, perhaps permanently. Of course I went troubleshooting, isolating, working out what the problem had to be rather than guessing and chucking the card. Figured a BIOS flash was my last-ditch attempt at revival if the problem was software based.

Using safe mode (which worked, curiously still through the GPU) I downloaded WinFlash and the latest Powercolor 5770 BIOS. But then I had problems. I couldn't run WinFlash in safe mode; I couldn't run in normal as the GPU failed; and if I tried to use onboard, the mobo still detected a working graphics card upon boot and tried to send the video signal through it, which of course didn't work.

15 seconds to work with on the desktop before the GPU failed. It took about 5 attempts to learn and speed up the process, but I was able to Start>Device Manager> Display and disable the graphics card before the artefacts appeared and the interface became useless. Sat nervously for a few seconds to see if my display would pick up the signal coming from the onboard cable, expecting "Monitor going to sleep", the out-of-native reassuring fuzzy pixel desktop flashed up.

Ran WinFlash, new BIOS, reboot, fixed card. No problems... thus far. Been gaming all day and it's perfectly fine. Is my card fixed? Or could there still be damage?

 

[bigjimmyauk]

cool story bro but why not just have set afterburner to reset to defaults after restart would have saved you a lot of hassle

 

[B1ng]

Correct me if i'm wrong here, but to my knowledge turning the values of your GPU up too high simply destabilizes it, in your case to the point of rebooting.

Had an experience with a 4870 in the past which I swapped in for a 4890, and the clock speeds for some reason changed despite a fresh install to the old clock speeds, which were much higher for the 4890. After seeing the screen start to artefact, naturally you soil yourself first and then try and solve the issue!

I simply changed the clock and memory speeds in Catalyst and all then seemed well.

 

[Pete.Dakota]

This was the first thing I tried. But even settings the clocks as low as I could using both MSI and CCC, the card still threw up artefacts. Why I was so scared!

 

[B1ng]

Set them to the default values for the card. Too low is just as unstable as too high.

 

[Pete.Dakota]

Set them to the default values for the card. Too low is just as unstable as too high.

Really? Never heard that before.

 

[SirCanealot]

Really? Never heard that before.

My old 4870 would crash if I set the memory too low

Which sucked, since DDR5 uses less power when underclocked... Saved about 30w on idle underclocking the memory, haha...

The 5770 is designed to clock down to 150mhz on the memory when idle though, so... maybe it's a bit different for that...