ATI/AMD Driver problem w. Gigabyte HD 5870 (GV-R587UD-1GD)

[MrKvisler]

Hi Everyone!

I have been checking out this forum and all the others I could find in regards troubleshooting my Gigabyte Radeon HD 5870 GV-R587UD-1GD that I am having a weird problem with.  I hope your sharp minds that I have seen in action here on the forum can help me solve it, I really am stumped.  Normally I can figure out most problems myself since I am somewhat familiar with troubleshooting and putting together systems but this one eludes me...

The issue is this:

Bought said card as an upgrade to my system on which I have no problem running my old Gigabyte Radeon HD 4870 GV-R487-512H-B with any driver.

With the new card I can't run any driver from ATI/AMD because it results in game crashes, artifacts, stripes and texture glitches and low framerates.  I can however run the regular windows driver (I uninstall all ATI/AMD software) with higher framerate and no glitches etc.  I have run Furmark and it has been stable for hours with the windows driver but with the ATI/AMD it's choppy and gets low framerates (I didn't even try to run it for a longer time since the result was worse).  I have no idea of how well the framerate should be in Furmark but I got between 25-30 running fullscreen 1920x1200 at 8xMSAA and the temp averaged 70 degrees celsius (which is what I have read is normal for the card) with the windows driver.

I have upgraded the BIOS on the card to F8 since the card would black out the desktop with F7 and it has not done that since.  I have tried installing the latest ATI/AMD driver, the old 10.12 that I had lying around from before the upgrade and the one that comes on the software disc with the new card.  I have tried only driver, only driver and ccc (since I have an audio card) and the whole kit.  Nothing runs well with the new card and all runs well with the old card...

Hope you guys have some good advice and I appreciate any feedback/input you can give me.  Hopefully I have overlooked something simple...  Oh and my system is running bone stock, nothing is overclocked.

Thank you for taking a look and let me know if there is any information you need from me and I'll provide it if I can!!

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.

The only thing you haven't mentioned in all of this or your signature is your PSU. What make/model and age is it?

Also I have just noticed that your motherboard has the older type 2.0 PCIE slot and whilst the newer cards should be backwards compatible there have been plenty of instances that seem to prove the reverse.

[MrKvisler]

Hi!  Thanks for your quick reply!

Updated sig with PSU info, about 4 years old.  System only runs in evenings when I am home from work, so no heavy use on the PSU.  I just started a game and let it sit just running and I got a BSOD :-(  Hadn't happened before today with the windows driver...  Oh I have also tested my RAM with Memtest86+ just to make sure it's good and it checked out ok.  And now I am running Prime95 to test the RAM and CPU as well just to make sure there is nothing else going on...

[Dark Mantis]

When you ran the Memtest86+  did you run it on the modules singularly and for at least ten loops each before moving on to the next one ?

[MrKvisler]

I ran it on all four at the same time.  The kicker is though that with my old card i can game for ever, it has never given me a BSOD ever, not even crashed to desktop...

Do you think I should run memetest on the sticks individually?

[Dark Mantis]

It is the recognised way of doing it. Also it is no good just thinking a few passes will do.

[MrKvisler]

I can definitely do it, can't hurt.  I'll let you know how it goes.

[Dark Mantis]

That's it. Does take a while to be fair but at least you can feel more sure of the memory's state afterwards.

[F5BJR]

*
Power consommation is 320 Watts ( old some 150 Watts i think )

Can you test with another power supply ?

Pierre


* Also found interessant to this page :

http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyte/38782-gv-r587ud-1gd-problems-2.html

[MrKvisler]

Ok, I'm back after a loooooot of testing.

@ F5BJR, thanks for the tips and I had already compared the power requirements of the cards and my current config together with the PSU is fine to handle the new card.  The difference is actually only 60 Watts (aprox. 320 vs. 380 under full load) which is much less than my current overhead on the system.  As far as the thread goes that is one of the threads that I already had looked through before posting here but thanks for looking around for me, I really appreciate the effort  

So here are the results of my further testing:

I have now run between 17-19 passes on all my memory sticks (ran the test overnight) and I only generated one error on one stick.  The error occured on pass number 15.  So since then I have updated the motherboard BIOS to the last non-beta (F8, improved memory performance) and retested that memory module and it ran 21 passes with no errors.

I have also run Prime95 with lots of RAM testing stable for 37 hours.  I feel at this point that my hardware is pretty solid.  What do you think?

Here's the kicker though, I have found information on the net that my motherboard has problems to run the full 8GB it's said to support!?!  So I pulled out 4GB of RAM and reinstalled the latest graphics card driver and it now runs just like the windows driver in Furmark.  So I have now played with the new driver and only 4GB and have had no BSOD but a couple of game crashes but that could be the game.

So... now I am going to throw in the full 8GB after updating the BIOS on the motherboard and see how that goes.

What are your thoughts?

[Dark Mantis]

Your memory seems to be perfectly alright then. As you say thorough testing takes a long time but it is worth doing. I wasn't aware of the 8GB issue but it wouldn't be the first time that the limit has turned out to be inaccurate.

[MrKvisler]

I just tried to run Prime95 (using lots of RAM) and it ran for 3h30min roughly without errors but I noticed that the RAM usage never went above 45%... any idea why?  Is there any way to increase the amount used? Or do you know of another test tool that runs in Windows that I could use?  I have only used Prime, Orthos and Memtest86+.  I haven't run Orthos in a while though...

[Dark Mantis]

I have just run it on my system and it uses about 55% of available memory.

[MrKvisler]

I just figured it out.  You have to run a "Custom" torture test where you set the RAM usage yourself.  There is a good article about Prime95 here (although old):

http://www.playtool.com/pages/prime95/prime95.html

Running it now using almost all my 8GB. Figured I'd leave a little overhead because the instructions says the system will start to use the pagefile otherwise. Solid as a rock so far...

[MrKvisler]

Hi Guys,

Ran Prime95 twice and have since gamed several times with only one crash to desktop which has happened before anyway so everything is running very well and stable 

Thanks for all the help!!