My (horrible) experience with the new 14.4 drivers.

[Erick Aguilar]

Hello.

So with the release of the new AMD drivers came some degree of excitement as AMD was doing so well lately with drivers and my card (R9 280X by XFX)

Well... not quite. Soon after installing the new 14.4 driver after removing the previous 14.3 driver, my monitors would spaz out during Skyrim runs and later trigger a x116 bluescreen. I decided to use AMD's new ''clean uninstall utility'' but the same issue persisted.

I uninstalled again and decided to go back to the previous drivers, only to find myself encountering an ntoskrnl.exe BSOD during the installation of the previous drivers, and a failed install for some driver components. I removed and attempted again, but some components continued to fail their installation. I didn't think it was a big deal since the components were the HDMI Audio, but a more serious one was the SATA controller.

Not only that, something caused my graphics card to downclock massively from a Core Clock of 100 to 500 and Memory Clock from 1500 to 750. I managed to set it back to normal through MSI Afterburner and thought my problems were fixed. Well, no. Again, playing skyrim now with the old drivers it seems stable until the screens started spazing out, not leading to a bluescreen, but just quickly flashing as if video signal was screwed up and quickly recovered, but this is just too horrible to experience in game.

This is just too overwhelming considering not a single issue was present with this card until these drivers were installed. In short, I do not know if it was just a big coincidence, but this driver seems to have corrupted the performance of my card in a way I had never experienced.

If someone is encountering similar situations, please do not hesitate to reply, specially if you have been able to find a fix for this situation.

Thank you for your time.

 

[madcratebuilder]

So far 14.4 has played well with my asus r9 280x. Not a single hiccup and I've picked up a few FPS's.

 

[OvenMaster]

Last night, I upgraded my AMD chipset drivers. Before I did, a little voice told me to make a fresh Macrium Reflect image.
Good thing I did. When I rebooted after installing the drivers, no matter what I tried, my PC hung on the Windows splash screen. Never did that to me after a chipset driver upgrade in all my life on any other AMD board I'd ever owned.
25 minutes for a Macrium image restore and I was back in bidness.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. No more updates for me.

 

[Erick Aguilar]

Last night, I upgraded my AMD chipset drivers. Before I did, a little voice told me to make a fresh Macrium Reflect image.
Good thing I did. When I rebooted after installing the drivers, no matter what I tried, my PC hung on the Windows splash screen. Never did that to me after a chipset driver upgrade in all my life on any other AMD board I'd ever owned.
25 minutes for a Macrium image restore and I was back in bidness.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. No more updates for me.

Yeah, that seems like a good idea I let pass. At this point I do not know if this failed install was just a coincidence with the day my card decided to go bad, or if the driver did cause something, I do not get any crashes when performing normal activities, but I do get screen corruption when playing games (loading up the GPU past 80%)

 

[OvenMaster]

Here's the reason the graphics drivers failed on some AMD-chipset boards: AHCI components.
AMD Radeon? Video Card Drivers
and
http://www.techpowerup.com/200535/a...4-whql-reposts-it-with-a-cautionary-note.html
As luck would have it, I have an SB710 southbridge.