Solved Suddenly cannot play games on Radeon HD 6850

[Sindetta]

Alright, this is a somewhat long story, but I feel that all of this information may be relevant to the problem. The events are listed in chronological order.

1. Everything is fine. I have no problems with anything.

2. I buy Magicka, a game on Steam, at the behest of a friend.

3. We play for 6 hours straight, no problems.

4. I turn off my computer.

5. The next day, I update AMD Vision Control Center to version 11.8.

6. I don't play anything that day but I experience strange graphical errors. My memory is a little foggy, but I'm 75% sure that this as after I had updated.

7. Errors included a strange screen flickering that I can only describe as a constant screen tearing effect on my desktop. Then there was this odd mirroring effect. It was like my screen was split down the middle and then swapped. My screen also went black randomly twice, at which point I had to hard shutdown do to unresponsiveness. Upon restarting my computer both times, Windows detected nothing wrong. No error messages, nothing.

8. The Problems seemed to stop abruptly.

9. Tried to play Magicka the next day.

10. Played for 2 minutes before the screen went all black or white and my entire system locked up.

11. Tried to play several times and each time I met with the same results.

12. Reinstalled Magicka. Problem Persists.

13. Reinstalled Graphics Card. Problem persists.

14. Reinstalled Steam. Problem Persists.

15. Attempted to play another game to check the scope of the problem. I loaded up Portal 2 and at the end of the camera tutorial where the player is prompted to sleep, my screen went black and the sound started skipping. Mind you, I've played the game to completion with absolutely no problems before.

Now I'm completely stumped. Please, any and all help is very much appreciated, I can provide a dxdiag if it would be beneficial in any way.

 

[Zepher]

did you install the older drivers? you mention "reinstalled graphics card" but did you use the 11.8 driver or an earlier version.

 

[Sindetta]

Yes, I used the default drivers, (Version 11.6) That came on my installation disk.

 

[Sindetta]

/patience

 

[Schroff87]

You said, all black/white screen ... could you take a picture of that screen with a camera? What is the event in event viewer? Code 43?

 

[Sindetta]

Well, I mean that the screen either goes black or white. One or the other, not both.

And how can I access the event viewer?

 

[Schroff87]

Open start menu and type event viewer, click it when it shows up in the left panel of the start menu/

 

[Sindetta]

Alright, I just checked and It says at all of the points where I got the error, and I shutdown my pc, I got Code 41. Now, I'm not sure if that's the code for me doing a hard shutdown, or the code for what my pc did.

 

[Schroff87]

From Microsoft KB,"Windows successfully loaded the device driver for this hardware but cannot find the hardware device. (Code 41)" Explanation of error codes generated by Device Manager in Windows XP Professional [Scroll down 3/4th of the page]

Likely that the card had problems with temperatures due to prolonged use. Try it in another PC if possible.

 

[Sindetta]

From Microsoft KB,"Windows successfully loaded the device driver for this hardware but cannot find the hardware device. (Code 41)" Explanation of error codes generated by Device Manager in Windows XP Professional [Scroll down 3/4th of the page]

Likely that the card had problems with temperatures due to prolonged use. Try it in another PC if possible.

I can't do that. but I can swap in my old Gfx card for a moment to see if I run into the same problems. I'll report back momentarily. Until then, I guess I'll assume the worse and see how I'd go about RMAing the card...

 

[Schroff87]

I had a 4870 until last year, I had made two simple profiles in CCC itself "game" & "idle" with fixed fan speeds so as to not be dependent on the terrible auto-speed which used to make my card run at almost 80 degrees while gaming. Do something like that when you get a replacement or if your card works again.

 

[Schroff87]

Oh btw was Magicka that good fun .. 6 hours? Gift me an extra copy on steam if you bought the pack

 

[Sindetta]

From Microsoft KB,"Windows successfully loaded the device driver for this hardware but cannot find the hardware device. (Code 41)" Explanation of error codes generated by Device Manager in Windows XP Professional [Scroll down 3/4th of the page]

Likely that the card had problems with temperatures due to prolonged use. Try it in another PC if possible.

I can't do that. but I can swap in my old Gfx card for a moment to see if I run into the same problems. I'll report back momentarily. Until then, I guess I'll assume the worse and see how I'd go about RMAing the card...

So, it's definitely the card.I've contacted PowerColor about getting a new one. I guess I can consider this issue resolved. Still a little bitter, though

 

[Schroff87]

Good luck with the RMA!