Random Black Screen Of Death

I apologise for a lack of updates, especially when the community here has so willing to help. Life has just gotten in the way of things recently.

In any case, in the last few hours, I've come across this page: Sapphire 5970 owners *all is fixed* - techPowerUp! Forums

I've followed the instructions and flashed my card with the Sapphire BIOS with the 735/1010 clock settings and I'll be damned - it seems to be working. I'm running the Furmark Burn in test at 1920x1200 with 8xAA and it has now been going for over 7 minutes. This used to crash almost immediately !!!.

I'll let you all know if it starts to show the same symptoms. But at the moment, this is really encouraging ! Anyone with the same issue as mine should take a look at this.

Sorry, false dawn. Was working ok with v12.3 drivers so then I attempted to update to 12.4 and it went to hell again

Try the 11.9 or earlier drivers. There have been some stability problems with normally stable systems using the newer drivers. I have an AMD HD 4850 in my desktop, and when I first installed the 12.3 drivers, they caused some freezing/lagging during videos when I moved my mouse. A restart resolved the problem, but others have not been as fortunate as I have.

See https://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-d...kmpag-sys.html

I may well do that tomorrow. I actually cleared everything with driver sweeper and went all the way back to 10.12 and that seems stable for the moment.

No, it's still randomly black screening, especially during games. I may as well go back up to current version drivers and keep trying to figure this out from there. I've gone back to the current version BIOS as well on the 5970 as well.

Alright, let us know if you need further troubleshooting. The steps you did sound like good steps to start.

I'm at a strange point at the moment. I've gotten to the point where running something like Furmark (see Jan 8) no longer black screens the PC but it will randomly black screen if I am playing a game. It seems to be far more stable if I have disabled Crossfire. So under CCC, I have created profiles for every game that I play with Crossfire disabled. So far, so good (famous last words).

What the drivers don't have is a way to just globally shut down Crossfire in one place. Does anyone know a fool proof way of doing this ? Crossfire is evil. Never again.

I also usually recommend people contact the graphics card manufacturer and motherboard manufacturer when Crossfire is found to be a culprit. It may be you need to RMA one or both cards, or it could be a motherboard conflict.

Either way, the motherboard and graphics card manufacturers may have more support and knowledge about the issue than we might.