hd 6850 to hd 7850 2GB problem possible dead videocard

I've been running a Gigabyte motherboard ( Z68MA-D2H-B3 ) and a Gigabyte videocard ( GV-R685OC-1GD ) for over a year and I decided to upgrade the videocard. The card I chose was the Gigabyte GV-R785OC-2GD as I thought from everything I've read it would be a perfect upgrade.

So I pull out the old card and put the new card in with no problems at all. All the catalyst drivers ( 12.10 ) were installed and everything worked just fine with the new card for at least 7 - 8 hours. Then out of the blue my screen got all pixelated but recovered. It would do this for about 2 minutes then it would go away and everything would be fine. Then it started doing it again after about 5 minutes of working good. As it was late I decided to shut the computer down and go to sleep and see if I could figure out what was going wrong in the morning.

Morning comes and I start the computer up and I notice on the bios flash screen that comes up when you start the computer which tells you how to enter the bios and stuff like that had a bunch of white dots and just didn't look clear like it usually does. The Windows 7 swirly thing comes up alright and then instead of going to the log in screen all I got was a blank screen. So I restarted the computer and logged in using safe mode which worked good and I had no problems doing that at all. So I decided to restart the computer again but I got the same problem again. So I let the windows diagnostic repair thing run and all it came up with was "if you installed new hardware this could be the cause of the problem" or something to that degree.

So I took the new videocard out and re-installed my old trusty HD 6850 and everything works great again. Any suggestions?

If the display is messed up during the BIOS startup, that strongly suggests that the 7850 has hardware problems. (Windows and the Windows drivers aren't in play at that point.)

I guess that it's RMA time.

I manually uninstalled all the amd drivers and programs today and then re-installed the 12.10 drivers and HD7850. Everything seemed fine from playing some youtube videos to word processing and web surfing. About 2 hours ago I decided to play a game and after about an hour of playing nothing was out of the ordinary. But right after I exited the game I started getting the screen flicker/ artefacting again. Even when I restarted the computer to see if that would fix it the screen did the same thing when windows was loading. Could it be something with the 3D settings?

The model I'm running is set to 975MHz core and 1200MHz memory as a factory overclock when it is running. When idle I've watched the speed of the core clock go down to 300MHz. So it seems 300MHz core at idle and 975MHz when running something like a game.

Do you think I should try and increase the 2d clocks like some people suggest on other forums?

I actually had 1 driver crash recover in the whole mess and that was about 2 hours ago before I shut the computer down. I'm on my laptop right now.

Lusankya said:

I manually uninstalled all the amd drivers and programs today and then re-installed the 12.10 drivers and HD7850. Everything seemed fine from playing some youtube videos to word processing and web surfing. About 2 hours ago I decided to play a game and after about an hour of playing nothing was out of the ordinary. But right after I exited the game I started getting the screen flicker/ artefacting again. Even when I restarted the computer to see if that would fix it the screen did the same thing when windows was loading. Could it be something with the 3D settings?

I just don't get how when the problem starts happening when I do a computer restart the same problem comes up even before getting into the windows environment.