Radeon 5xxx Instabililty/Corruption Issue

[swaaye]

I got my replacement finally. Same notebook. No problems with Catalyst 10.3 on this machine.

It's actually my 2nd replacement too. The prior replacement had a defective LCD with a blue vertical line. Uhg.

 

[Malo]

Built a new PC for my bro-in-law's woman and she had this issue with grey lines on her 5770 XTX XXX Edition, running on an H55 chipset. I swapped hers with my own Gigabyte 5770 and seems to be ok so far for both of us (running mine on a P35-DQ6). Put it down to some weird combination of drivers/chips/brands.

 

[Florin]

Built a new PC for my bro-in-law's woman and she had this issue with grey lines on her 5770 XTX XXX Edition, running on an H55 chipset. I swapped hers with my own Gigabyte 5770 and seems to be ok so far for both of us (running mine on a P35-DQ6). Put it down to some weird combination of drivers/chips/brands.

From following various topics on this issue, I've gotten the strong impression that factory overclocked cards seem to be more likely to be affected by it than generic cards. But this may be due to an above average presence of these devices in general, or in particular among the kinds of people who read technical forums.

I was hesitant at first to purchase an HD5XXX card based on the seemingly widespread occurrence of this problem, but so far my 5850 has performed flawlessly. I must say that if I were affected similarly to some of the people in this topic and others like it, I would've long ago returned the unit for a swap.

 

[sethk]

I get the issue on my desktop 5870 when my PC has blanked the screen due to inactivity, I remote desktop connect to the PC, then disconnect. Dual monitor setup.

When I try and use the PC locally the first screen is usually just blank, the second monitor shows horizontal lines. If I move the cursor to the second screen, I can see horizontal lines moving where the cursor should be. Switching resolutions (I have it macrod) will fix the issue. Not sure if this the same issue being described above. Windows 7 x64, x58 mobo, latest dets.

Of some interest - I have had no issues with my mobility 5830 to date, although that is a different GPU.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Hmmm, something I haven't thought of trying but might if I get some time. Since I run a dual monitor setup (30" landscape and 24" portrait), I'm wondering if that might be exacerbating the problem. Less than 3 weeks to go before I'm off to Japan for 3 months and so much to do before then. Will have to make some time to test that out though.

Seeing sethk's post and then thinking about how it's been mentioned that synchronizing the memory (or whatever it was) in dual monitor setups is why idle clocks are so much higher for core and memory, suddenly make me wonder if this is making the issue worse or the root cause of it on my system when coming out of sleep mode.

Regards,
SB

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Well I think I finally fixed all my problems with grey screen when using a 3D application (including UVD) when coming out of sleep.

In power management (BIOS) there's an option on my MB for HPET (High Precision Event Timer), enable that, then enable 64 bit mode (I have Win7 x64).

So far so good, going on 3 days now with heavy 3D game useage after coming out of sleep and not a glitch in sight. Hopefully I didn't just jinx myself and this really did fix all my issues.

Regards,
SB

 

[Lightman]

I had very rare - once in a week or less - GSOD issues with stock memory setting on my card using ASUS TOP BIOS. Much more often in Dirt2 though!

Recently I've connected secondary display and to sort out issues with flickering I've upgraded Sapphire HD5870 to the latest Sapphire BIOS. I've lost my 1.2GHz core clocks, but now card is rock solid with no GSOD for over 2 weeks!

For people experiencing GSODs mostly when GDDR5 is clocked higher I would suggest to flash their cards.

PS. On my old TOP BIOS I could run card 24/7 stable with mem @1100MHz. Good test for those trying to figure out what's wrong with their card.

 

[CarstenS]

On my combo (HD5870/3007WFP) I've only seen very rare glitches, once or twice a week maybe. Never had a crash or somehow abnormally colored screen (blue, black, grey, whatever) unless i used paint's fill tool on a full screen picture. ;D

 

[Silent_Buddha]

On my combo (HD5870/3007WFP) I've only seen very rare glitches, once or twice a week maybe. Never had a crash or somehow abnormally colored screen (blue, black, grey, whatever) unless i used paint's fill tool on a full screen picture. ;D

Yeah, fairly uncommon problem, but for me it looks like that one MB BIOS setting has completely fixed all my issues.

5 days down with some heavy 3D gaming apps pushing the card and not a glitch in sight.

So, very happy now that I'm once again able to use sleep mode. Hibernate was a decent work around, but it's sooooo darn slow compared to instant on sleep mode.

I'm wondering if that setting would have fixed my issues a few months ago, but didn't even think to look in that area until I saw Psycho's post above.

Regards,
SB

 

[nate240]

In power management (BIOS) there's an option on my MB for HPET (High Precision Event Timer), enable that, then enable 64 bit mode (I have Win7 x64).

So my mobo is the Abit IP35 pro, and from what I can find searching online it doesn't have this option... If I was to install windows 7 32 (instead of 64 that I'm currently on) would that likely solve the issue? Not really wanting to buy a new mobo due to this. I never had this issue with my 8800gt... Believe it or not, this one issue has been frustrating enough that I wouldn't hesitate to go back to nvidia (next time). I've had all ati cards ever since the Radeon LE (except for the 8800gt).

 

[wishiknew]

Can't help you nate240 but I remember on my gigabyte p35, the high precision timer defaults to on but defaults to 32 instead of 64 bit mode.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

So my mobo is the Abit IP35 pro, and from what I can find searching online it doesn't have this option... If I was to install windows 7 32 (instead of 64 that I'm currently on) would that likely solve the issue? Not really wanting to buy a new mobo due to this. I never had this issue with my 8800gt... Believe it or not, this one issue has been frustrating enough that I wouldn't hesitate to go back to nvidia (next time). I've had all ati cards ever since the Radeon LE (except for the 8800gt).

Not sure mate. If you have an extra spare HD or can make a partition to dual boot, it might be worth testing 32 bit windows to see if the problem goes away.

Or do like I did for a while, see if Hibernate will alleviate all or most of the problems. If you are having problems not related to coming out of sleep mode then you probably have deeper issues than HPET.

As I've noted before BIOS revisions for my MB as well as updated drivers fixed most of the problems. All I had left was the issue with grey screening in 3D applicaitons after coming out of sleep mode. And setting HPET to 64 bit solved that in my case. Although I must note that I have no idea if HPET is related to sleep mode or not.

There's always a chance that there's some BIOS incompatibility with regards to Cypress on your MB that this won't address. Then again, all the BIOS updates for my MB were to address MB stability issues (DDR3 memory) not related to Cypress. So, I really can't say.

Regards,
SB

 

[nate240]

I know that the grey screening & issues coming out of sleep got a lot better after I flashed to the newest bios, but they still haven't gone away. I've never had issues in 3d mode, only 2d (unless of course everything is '3d' now since it's windows 7).

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Should get to bed but my last posting prompted me to look up HPET...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Precision_Event_Timer

Some interesting notes to take away from it. It is incorrectly implemented in most MBs according to that.

For MS operating systems, only Vista and higher can even see HPET to use it. XP (well SP2 can see it, but can't use it) cannot see it, and I'm guessing there aren't many cases of XP users having grey screen problems.

It's definitely involved in far more than just sleep mode.

This bit I found quite interesting.

The HPET can produce periodic interrupts at a much higher resolution than the RTC and is often used to synchronize multimedia streams, providing smooth playback and reducing the need to use other timestamp calculations such as an x86 CPU's RDTSC instruction.

As some of the earlier BIOS revisions for my MB were to address multimedia playback in Vista/Windows 7. In other words, "fixing" HPET support on the MB.

I don't have time to do it right now, but might be worth trying to google if it's possible to disable HPET support in Win7.

I'm going to take a guess and say your MB is one of the ones that incorrectly sets/supports HPET. Additionally considering when it was released, it was probably set to 32-bit by default. So, trying Win7 32 bit is certainly another possibility.

Regards,
SB

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Well, damn, looks like not completely solved. Just a lot better. Got grey screen again, but at least this time it went almost 9 days without. Blast...

Regards,
SB

 

[stef]

It seems that GSOD (one related to sleep mode) mostly plagues cards with Hynix memory (memory timings). At least that is what Sapphire fixes if you report the problem. And they specifically ask you what memory your card uses.

 

[stef]

so, the solution is to ask your vendor for a BIOS fix, or you do it on your own - edit the BIOS, adjust 2D memory clock and voltage to be same as in 3D.

 

[Albuquerque]

I finally had this happen to me over the weekend...

I use MSI's afterburner utility to run my card at 950/1150 at 1.115v. I played Just Cause 2 probably six hours straight at these settings, exited to the desktop, and decided to do some websurfing. I went into MSI's utility, hit the Reset button to allow the card to slow down to idle speed correctly, and hit apply.

Bam. GSOD.

I've done this more times than I can count, but never had it die on me until then. I don't really consider it a problem, because I was already tweaking on the card outside of supported specs. Still, thought it was an interesting thought that resetting factory clocks and voltages would cause it

 

[caveman-jim]

Try dropping the clocks first, then dropping the voltage after the clocks have changed.

 

[Albuquerque]

Try dropping the clocks first, then dropping the voltage after the clocks have changed.

It functioned as-expected so many dozens of times before that, and then so many dozens of times after that particular event that I don't even care to troubleshoot it. It's a "non issue" in my mind.