Frequent, Sporadic AMD Driver Crashes: Intel Z97, Win7 x64, R9 270X

I have been having issues with my AMD display driver crashing. Initially, I was convinced it was Google Chrome crashing it but, after problems continued when disabling hardware acceleration in Chrome or even when the process was not running, I decided it must be something else.

I used DDU to remove both the Intel HD and AMD drivers from within Safe Mode. After rebooting, the generic VGA driver was installed but, then I noticed there was a driver missing in Device Manager for "Video Controller". I'm still puzzled what driver this is. It sounded like it's my Intel HD driver, from searching online, but when I go to install it it said "this computer does not meet the minimum requirements for installing this software." I have an Intel Haswell Pentium G3258 with Intel HD graphics so I'm still confused where the disconnect was.

I proceeded to install the AMD drivers (ver. 14.9 WHQL), though I suspected it would not be able to find my card due to the missing Video Controller driver. I did, however, the install still failed for everything except the display driver and drag & drop transcoder. I do not know the cause of the installation failures. I rebooted and noticed that the "Video Controller" driver was no long appearing as missing its driver in Device Manager. Regardless, crashes persist.

I rebooted into safe mode and noticed when I started DDU this time that it was my PCI graphics card was installed improperly. I then scrubbed the AMD driver and the Intel HD one again (just for good measure, even though it was not reintalled at this point). Reboots between each uninstall. Still no change, crashes every few minutes and sometimes a reboot is even required to regain display output.

Last thing I tried was the same steps as the previous method, only I used the version 14.8 WHQL driver. it installed cleanly this time, but to no avail. I didn't have any issues for 2+ hours last night, but came home this evening to find I have no display output. I had to do a hard reboot on the machine.

Present time: I am still unable to get the Intel HD driver to install. I get the "this computer does not meet the minimum requirements for installing this software" error on installation for the following driver versions: 15.33.30.64.3958, 15.28.22.64.3517 and 15.36.64.3505 (last one was from the MB manufacturer's website). Only the generic VGA driver is installed and "Video Controller" appears nowhere in Device Manager.

Really, really stumped on this one.. usually DDU has done an excellent job of resolving any display driver issues I've had in the past. I'm about 2 days away from just doing a clean install, and that's only because I'm busy tomorrow.. at my wit's end with this one


Thanks, in advance, for any help

Jchap1590

I will do a clean installation of Windows over the weekend. something is obviously botched in this install.

still crashing on a clean install.. I guess it's a hardware problem

first I tried installing just the AMD driver.. crashes
then I tried also loading the Intel HD driver, which I was able to do with the graphics card power cable unplugged and my display plugged into the MB HDMI output.. still crashes

display driver crashes do not occur when booting with the Intel HD driver. I guess I will have to RMA the card, this is obviously not a software issue.

now this is kind of interesting.. I restored from a backup and went to remove the AMD driver so I can just use the on-board graphics for the time being. after I rebooted, I noticed my mini PCIe wireless network adapter is now unrecognized by the system.

any thoughts on that? maybe DDU is removing some files that don't actually pertain to my display driver, but files for my PCIe controller. that might also explain why the "Video Controller" driver was showing as missing, as mentioned previously.

I notice that there is a strange driver installed, "ALSysIO64.sys" with a path of "%userprofile%\appdata\local\temp\" which I find to be very suspicious. from reading here, this sounds like a virus infection but I have no idea why the crashes would persist on a clean install if that were the case,

still kinda confused..

Mark Phelps said:

The machine manufacturer would be me

OK, sorry -- my mistake, then. What you have is more than one graphics chip, not Hybrid graphics, and in that case, the AMD drivers should work without any problem.

I do know there was some confusion with the 14.9 drivers a AMD posted two different versions -- one for APUs and another for GPUs, and folks would accidentally try to install the wrong ones.

They have posted a 14.11.2 beta set of drivers, you might try those.

I had installed the latest Beta drivers (14.11.2) on the clean install I did last night

last thing I could think of..

flashed my MB BIOS with ver. 2108 (from ver. 2105) and installed the latest WHQL drivers (14.9) from AMD. so far no hiccups, but it's early to tell. if the BIOS was corrupted, it would make sense of why the crashes persisted on entirely different builds.

as an unexpected bonus, static overclocking is now functioning properly! previously I had to use ThrottleStop to get the clock static. of course, I had the BIOS set to default settings for troubleshooting purposes up until this point.

anyways, I will update in a few days with results.. fingers crossed until then!