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System freezing, display driver stops responding

mog

mog

mog

Associate
Joined
17 May 2009
Posts
12
Hi everyone,

I've just recently built a new machine, but sadly, seem to be experiencing some kind of graphics related problem :(

Every so often, my machine "freezes" for a second or two and wont do anything before the screen goes blank. After a couple of seconds, my machine recovers, the display returns to normal and windows reports the following message:

"Display driver amdkmdap stopped responding and has successfully recovered."

This can happen while I'm playing a game, but also occurs when I'm just doing something simple - like checking/deleting emails in Thunderbird.

I've tried running memory tests, CPU stress tests, and 3DMark to hopefully give me some more information as to what might be wrong. They all seem to pass without any problems. I've even tried reverting back to older graphics drivers, but still the problem persists.

My system is as follows:

AMD Phenom II X4 3.4Ghz
Asus Crosshair V
MSI ATI Radeon HD 6870 OC HAWK 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express
Corsair 8GB (2 x 4GB) Vengeance DDR3 1600MHz

Everything is running at normal speed, and according to temperature checks etc nothing appears to be overheating or anything like that.

I was wondering if anyone had experienced something similar or would please be able to offer any advise on what I can do about resolving the problem?

Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

Kind regards
 
Try different ram if you have any.
If that's not an option try just one stick of ram, but different ram would really take it out of the equation.
 
I tried using a different PCI-e slot, but still got a display freeze this morning. I think the next thing is to try putting in my old graphics card and see if the problem goes away :s
 
I had this recntly with a 6970. I had tried OC'ed it with Sapphire Trixxx & aftera reboot Trixxx had resumed the OC which was obviously pushed a little too far. Afte I set it back to stock it worked fine.

Is the card sitting st full clocks when idle or has it lowered itself to whatever the 6800 series go down to?
 
Nuwidol said:
I had this recntly with a 6970. I had tried OC'ed it with Sapphire Trixxx & aftera reboot Trixxx had resumed the OC which was obviously pushed a little too far. Afte I set it back to stock it worked fine.

Is the card sitting st full clocks when idle or has it lowered itself to whatever the 6800 series go down to?
Click to expand...

Ahh, useful to know, thanks. I've not done anything to this card, so everything should be running at factory settings.

According to GPU-Z, the GPU clock core is running at 100MHz and the GPU memory is running at 150MHz. That seems rather low to me though, considering everything else says it should be running at 930MHz?

Of course I could be misunderstanding how it works. Maybe it's supposed to run at 100MHz when it's idle.
 
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I tried putting my old card in, but still noticed the system freezing and saying there's something wrong with the display driver. Since it seemed to make no difference, I went back to the new card.

About an hour ago the fans on the graphics card went really loud (as though they're running at full speed) and haven't gone back to normal.

I tried turning my machine off to see if that would sort it out, but it hasn't. *sigh* bloody thing is giving me a headache :(
 
Try upping the HT bus on the motherboard.

Randomly enough, that is what fixed my problems (I'm running a z68 setup though). GPU now stable @1ghz/2.2ghz.

Maybe try upping the PCI bus speed just a little, wouldn't recommend anything over 3% though. That's what it took to get mine stable (103 bclock)

Shot in the dark, hope it helps :)
 
Someone suggested that I take out one of the RAM modules, so I gave that a try. Since I went down to one 4GB stick, I don't think I've experienced the GFX freeze and display driver message.

What's really frustrating, is that I ran a memtest86+ overnight as soon as I built this new machine, which ran fine and didn't indicate any problems. This suggests that it is not the memory itself that is bad, but rather using both sticks of RAM at the same time is creating some kind of instability.

That's ridiculous though... I purposefully got 8GB of RAM so I could use it all; not so that I could use 4GB and keep the other 4GB module as a nice ornament or something.

Has anyone else experienced this?
 
mog said:
Someone suggested that I take out one of the RAM modules, so I gave that a try. Since I went down to one 4GB stick, I don't think I've experienced the GFX freeze and display driver message.
Click to expand...

try moving the current working memory module into the memory slot that the other memory was in and see if it still performs ok.
 
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