System lockups with new Radeon 5770

I recently got a 5770 as an upgrade to my 9500gt and I have been having lots of trouble. When I run games, they usually crash after 5-10 min. I have had this happen with Crysis and Mass Effect, though I was able to get Oblivion running for 20 min with no crash.

When the games crash, they lock up the whole system and I have to hit my reset button or turn the PSU off. I don't get a BSOD, just a solid color (or black) with vertical lines on it. Sometimes I will get some flickering before the crash. A couple times I had the game crash to the desktop with the "driver was not responding and has recovered" message.

I have tried to solve this by trying all the drivers for this card (the ones on the cd, the recommended one on the AMD page, and the beta) while making sure to uninstall the old drivers + run driver sweeper in safe mode. I also have updated my chipset to the 7/21 release and my BIOS to version 501.

When I take the card out and replace it with my 9500 gt all the problems go away. I want to figure out if somehow something in my system is messing with this before I go ahead and RMA it only to find out that the card was not the problem. I don't have a minidump, but I have alot of kernel dumps from when the system froze, so I am going to attach it (I don't know if it works the same as a minidump). Thanks!

If you have any mini dumps, you can zip and post in the crash section of the forums. Until then just hold up, someone will be along to help.

Have you tried running the system with just one stick of RAM?

Further investigation results:

With "suggested drivers" from amd.com, 8.66. W764bits and the system of the last post.

IDLE testing

Had GPU-Z to log everything it reads
idle GPU-core voltage = 0.95v (according to HWmonitor)

Total crashes:4
Initial time: 21:42:50 pm
Final time: 3:03:13 am

Time of crashes
1. 23:10:51
2. 23:11:49
3. 2:15:32
4. 2:50:22

Findings, during all of the crashes speed and temperature changed dramatically. Clock set at full speed and temperature making a jump from 45°c to 51°c in less than 30 seconds! sometimes even 1 second according GPU-z and in the 2nd crash going from 46 to 54 in one second too! All of them recover successfully and no BSOD or force shut down was necessary.

All of this crashes happened during idle and/or very low user input activity.

This is by no way a driver problem! but more of a firmware/hardware one. RMA your cards!!

That is something I found on the AMD forums.

It a graphics driver tdr timeout error. I don't think it's a card error from being defective.

Update your motherboard's chipset drivers and use the latest driver for the card and it should be alright.

If you've already done that, try using something like RivaTuner to set the fan speed to max. Also, run a room fan on the motherboard with the case open too, as a test. If it doesn't crash, system and/or card heat is the issue.

Also, you have some really old drivers on the system. Update them to latest possible or remove.

ASACPI ASACPI.sys Mon Oct 30 22:09:12 2006
RtNdPt60 RtNdPt60.sys Mon Dec 10 21:49:52 2007
secdrv secdrv.SYS Wed Sep 13 09:18:38 2006
GPU_Z GPU-Z.sys Mon Aug 06 10:47:00 2007

torrentg said:

It a graphics driver tdr timeout error. I don't think it's a card error from being defective.

Update your motherboard's chipset drivers and use the latest driver for the card and it should be alright.

If you've already done that, try using something like RivaTuner to set the fan speed to max. Also, run a room fan on the motherboard with the case open too, as a test. If it doesn't crash, system and/or card heat is the issue.

Also, you have some really old drivers on the system. Update them to latest possible or remove.

ASACPI ASACPI.sys Mon Oct 30 22:09:12 2006
RtNdPt60 RtNdPt60.sys Mon Dec 10 21:49:52 2007
secdrv secdrv.SYS Wed Sep 13 09:18:38 2006
GPU_Z GPU-Z.sys Mon Aug 06 10:47:00 2007

Thanks! I did update the chipset but it did not seem to help (latest was released 7/21, fishdoc helped me find them earlier :)). I tried the fan thing and it became more stable, but only with a room fan on max and the card fan on 100%. The gpu temp was not high for this card as it would crash at 67ish. I checked the cpu temp as well and it was not over 45 with the MB temp lower than that. The card sits over the southbridge heatsink, but I would think that everyone who got this MB and any GPU over 6 inches would then have a crash issue if that is what is overheating?

One question about the chipset drivers though, do I have to uninstall the old ones first? I looked but I don't know where they are or how to uninstall them, so I just updated over them. As for those last drivers you listed, I don't know where they are as I put this system together in Aug. I have an old HD in here for some extra storage, maybe they came from it?

Thanks again for the help :)

To me, 67 seems kind of high. Because I have 3850 AGP and when it's very highly overclocked (with fan on max) it only hits like 65 or so.

Your 5770 uses a lot smaller die process (40 nm compared to 3850's 55 nm) and its max board rower is only 86W, so temps should be lower due to that.

But then again, I dunno because I found this.