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The famous Ati coloured striped screen of death

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Joined
14 Oct 2009
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1,680
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Silicon Valley, USA
Got my first one of these earlier - has it been established whether this is hardware or driver related yet?

Only wondering if I need to RMA the card, as its been excellent apart from one lockout.
 
Are you running at stock?
Ive experienced a bunch of them when overclocking the CPU in a system but the cards behaved normally without the overclock.
 
Yeah all at stock so far, only just put my system together. Was planning on doing the OC this week.

Running the 10.4 preview drivers, they seem pretty good- had no problems apart from one lockout striped screen playing dragon age.
 
i normaly get at least one every few days... but only when it comes out from sleep and i start a game before doing anything else...

not had one that has caused me to lose any data so i ant botherd
 
Yeah all at stock so far, only just put my system together. Was planning on doing the OC this week.

Running the 10.4 preview drivers, they seem pretty good- had no problems apart from one lockout striped screen playing dragon age.

When you say stock, you have made sure your ram has got the correct voltages and timings as per manufacturers spec yes?

My system is unstable at bios defaults and I have to manually set my ram up. Unstable ram or CPU can cause grey screens in my experience.
 
I hadn't seen one for months until I used the 10.5 betas. Went and tried the 10.4 and same result in having one or two per day.

I have gone back to 10.3 drivers for now as I never had one under them.

EDIT: This is with my 5850 over volted and overclocked.
 
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I've found that if you overclock your CPU to it's max on default voltage and up the CPU/NB Frequency till you can't post [put it on the frequency that worked beforehand], there's more or less a lack of problems when you come to overclocking the ATI 5000 cards.

Increasing voltages seem to create the cards to misbehave.
 
I get it every 2 mins or so and have sent off for RMA. Sad really :( (5870 VaporX)
 
So back to my original question - is the consensus that it is hardware or driver related?

There are people on AMD forums whose cards have done it with every single driver so probably hardware.

It's suspicious that AMD released a driver to "alleviate" the problem and have gone quiet ever since even though for many it didn't work.
 
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I suspect it is indeed hardware related but may well be triggered by driver or bios.

I must admit after having the problem for the first few weeks of owning the card and then never seeing it again for months until I installed the 10.5 betas, there does some to be a relationship between the drivers and it occuring.
 
I kind of expect the odd crash with PC gaming, and as its only happened once, im not too concerned as of yet. Its taken me a good 30 hours of gaming for 1 crash so I assume even if there is a fault the RMA wouldnt show anything.
 
It does seem to be a VRAM issue. There's a bloke who can reproduce the issue at will by overclocking his RAM.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnxNSi8YTZ0
However, it can be controlled by software, hence why we see positive results with drivers, BIOS changes etc. The problem seems to be in the way the software handles VRAM that is sensitive to changes in speed. So the Powerplay process can cause it, as can changing settings and clock speed.
 
Wow been very lucky have never suffured any of these problems, my rig is overclocked including the GPU(Sapp-5870 > 875 / 1250MHz Vapor setting's) I alway's keep my MOBO, GPU driver's upto date, Bios only updated once.

One thing l never do is install the driver's over each other, l use the built in un-installer in the ATI Catalyst set up, using the latest ATI 10.4 driver's again no problem's at all.
 
We have nearly the same rig, and I always used the uninstaller as well.
It seems to be a matter of luck.
 
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