|Resolved -> faulty video card| HD4850+Vista 64bit constantly locking up in games. Downgrade to XP?

Well, I just replaced it, but I was using the 2405 for a couple of weeks on the 4870 without issue. It's just a 1920x1200, 60Hz monitor, nothing unusual. It doesn't have HDCP, but I don't think that would matter at all. It might be something wrong with your specific monitor or card, but I had seemingly fine luck with a very similar combo.

Is there an easy way to totally remove drivers from Vista? I'm hoping that maybe there is conflict between the driver that came via Windows Update and the ATI. The reason I'm suspicious is that I've seen two different names for the driver on boot at the welcome screen depending on what I've been monkeying with - 4800 Radeon series or 4850 Radeon.

What I'd like to do now is start from scratch with no driver whatsoever other than generic VGA. The problem is that once the card is uninstalled via the control panel, it shows up again on boot, loads a driver, and upon reboot we're back at the blank screen.

I've read some articles about Vista's "driver store" and some rather involved steps to remove stored drivers. Is there an easier process other than system restore or reinstall?

RichyRambo wrote:

I've read some articles about Vista's "driver store" and some rather involved steps to remove stored drivers. Is there an easier process other than system restore or reinstall?

From your description, it does indeed sound like there might be a weird overlap of drivers going on.

Here's what you do:
1. Uninstall the driver from the control panel. You might also want to delete the main ATI folder as well. I don't know if it's necessary, but Nvidia tends to keep information of past drivers so it can revert to them. If you want to make sure it worked, open up Device Manager. It should say something about "Generic VGA". If it specifically mentions "ATI", then right click and choose uninstall, or if that's not available, disable.
2. Reboot in Safe Mode and run this program. After you select Analyse and the ATI Display options, it's a pretty safe bet that you can ask it to clean out anything it comes up with. If it gives you an error message about finding a file, just hit OK and hit the Clean button again until it's complete. You probably just deleted a file in your preliminary steps that it assumed would be there.
3. Now reboot again in regular mode. If you want to take an extra step here, you can manually remove your internet connection so that Windows Update won't beat you to the punch. It'll probably alert you that it found new hardware and ask to look for a driver for it, so cancel that, then install the driver yourself.

Yeah running a driver cleaner is always a good idea. I've had countless problems with Nvidia and ATI products in the past, the only sure fire way is to obliterate any previous trace of older/unsucessful driver attempts.

Thanks for the tips, been using Driver Sweeper and while that deletes it out of the registry and eliminates the files from the windows directory, it doesn't eliminate the stored driver. Here are some instructions I've found to totally remove the stored file.

My issue is that I don't even get a prompt to install the new hardware it just does it and then prompts for a reboot.

As to running on the VGA port, is there a loss in quality or is it so small that it would never be noticed?

RichyRambo wrote:

Thanks for the tips, been using Driver Sweeper and while that deletes it out of the registry and eliminates the files from the windows directory, it doesn't eliminate the stored driver. Here are some instructions I've found to totally remove the stored file.

My issue is that I don't even get a prompt to install the new hardware it just does it and then prompts for a reboot.

As to running on the VGA port, is there a loss in quality or is it so small that it would never be noticed?

I think it's anything above 1680x1050 that takes a hit in the bandwidth required to push those pixels. VGA is fine up until a point, but 1920x1200 on VGA is a no-no.

And Cleartype doesn't work that way. You really don't want to run in VGA mode if you don't have to.

Huh. I've been using Vista for over a year now and I have yet to experience any issues involving some kind of driver store, nor have I ever had it try and install an updated driver for software without asking me first. I must have inadvertently made a change or something, because I just checked and it's completely empty on my PC. I'm also using the Business edition so maybe that has something to do with it.

Well booted up this evening and was greeted by the black screen again. Where as before I was able to get ATI drivers loaded, this time around nothing. Hooked up an old CRT and the image was fine on it so it definitely is a conflict between the card and the monitor.

Currently its disabled and I'm running generic VGA. Of the dozen or systems I've built over the years this has been the absolute worst experience and the lack of support from ATI truly stunning.

I'll tinker with it again over the weekend once I cool down cause right now I want to fecking smash something. But I've a feeling I'll soon be shopping for a new Nvidia...

Did a new update come out for Vista just recently that jacked with people's video drivers? Seems to be the buzz as of late on other forums as well.

Here is a couple of posts I found that may help in some cases. Not a lot of information out there for these changes.

To disable automatic driver installation:
http://www.vistax64.com/vista-hardwa...

How to turn off Vista Driver Signing:
http://forums.techpowerup.com/showpo...

RichyRambo wrote:

Well booted up this evening and was greeted by the black screen again. Where as before I was able to get ATI drivers loaded, this time around nothing. Hooked up an old CRT and the image was fine on it so it definitely is a conflict between the card and the monitor.

Currently its disabled and I'm running generic VGA. Of the dozen or systems I've built over the years this has been the absolute worst experience and the lack of support from ATI truly stunning.

I'll tinker with it again over the weekend once I cool down cause right now I want to fecking smash something. But I've a feeling I'll soon be shopping for a new Nvidia...

uhh.. have you simply RMA'd the card yet?

About to, looking at some GeForces now. Should I stick with a 9800 GTX or spluge on GTX 260 Core 216?

*sigh* I swapped in a different monitor last night and it worked fine on the old CRT. But put a fork me in, I'm done with this one.

RichyRambo wrote:

About to, looking at some GeForces now. Should I stick with a 9800 GTX or spluge on GTX 260 Core 216?

*sigh* I swapped in a different monitor last night and it worked fine on the old CRT. But put a fork me in, I'm done with this one.

No..why not just get a new card? Sounds like its the dreaded timing issue.. and a new card might fix that.

Gotcha. I'll give it a shot, just got the RMA for it. Hopefully its a defect with this individual card and not the combination of this card series and monitor.

With my first-gen 2405, one of the first off the assembly lines, I had no problem on a Sapphire 4870, if that's any consolation.

Good to hear, hopefully its just a fluke. It was past 30 days on the card but they still issued an RMA for replacement so I'm happy. We'll see how it pans out next week, for now back to my 800XL.

Well it isn't a fluke. Got a new card RMA'd from NewEgg and the fecker is doing the same damn thing. So my combination of MB, monitor and OS just doesn't work with this particular card. ATI can suck it hard.

Yea! Booted up this morning to a fecking blank screen. Went into safe mode, scrubbed the drivers out with Driver Sweeper, boot again. Windows reinstalls a 4850 driver, rebooted, and blank screen. Went into safe mode again and disabled the card so I'm now using a generic VGA driver just so I can use my machine. And for the record ATI's forum support is crap. Unless I can fix it, this POS card is gonna be coming out soon...

System
Dell 2405FPW widescreen LCD
GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P ATX Intel Motherboard
CORSAIR DOMINATOR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz LGA 775 Quad-Core Processor
ATI Sapphire 4850 Video card (512mb)
WD Raptor 300gig HD
OCZ OCZ700MXSP 700W ATX12V V2.2 / EPS12V SLI Certified CrossFire Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply
OS - Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit

You know, Richy, that's a dual-rail power supply with 25 amps per rail. Check your manual and make sure you're running the mboard and video on separate rails. If they're on the same half of the supply, you could get exactly that symptom -- just not enough juice to run both.

If that doesn't help, and you have an easy way to try it, you might want to see about testing with a single-rail supply. The Corsair 650 is good -- 52A on one 12V rail.

I swapped my 4870 for an NVidia; OpenGL is a lot better, but I've crashed the machine a couple of times with NVidia drivers, and I never once did that with ATI. If you're using a single card, driving a single monitor, you may actually get better results with your ATI card, if you can figure out what the problem is. ATI starts to suck in multi-monitor and multi-card situations, as far as I could see from my fairly limited testing, but it actually seemed a little more stable in single-card single-monitor. And WoW ran fine for me... I got essentially identical results on both.

I'll check it out. However, if I hook the card up to a CRT it works fine. Gonna to try and borrow a different LCD and see if the problem repeats.

Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, probably not power supply.

I saw a guy on Ars Technica with the same problem -- was that you?

No, not me. BUT I just got it running - we see for how long. What I did
1) Booted to the blank screen
2) unplugged the power and DVI cable from 2405FPW
3) plugged in both to a borrowed LCD (a 17" Acer) and *boom* we have picture
4) In Catalyst under Digital Panel (DVI) 4 > Attributes checked "Reduce DVI frequency on high-resolution displays", "Alternate DVI Operational mode" already checked.
5) unplugged borrowed LCD and plugged in 2405FPW
6) Video achieved!

So far monitor and card are working through a restart and short shut-down.

No idea if it was the swapping that worked on just pulling the juice out of the 2405. Upon repowering the 2405 it came up with its own Dell logo which I have NEVER seen before and then went straight to my desktop.

God forbid if I update drivers or shut it off!

Well, just tried to run a slide show and the fecker went back to black screen. Upon reboot, back to the same problem - black screen and monitor goes into standby. Feck this, I'm done.

Eventually there's someone with the exact same problem as myself....

I'm getting the exact same lockups, with the sound continuing to play for a very short time in the background before a cold reboot...

I've not ever had the pc lock up while playing Left 4 Dead or the Sims 3 (don't shoot me for playing the sims!!!)
However, while playing Counterstrike source, it's guranteed to happen a couple of times a week.
Star Wars Galaxies it happens 3 or 4 times each gaming session (very annoying!)
Fallout 3 is unplayable, it happens every few minutes in that (so it isn't just old games it happens in )

I've tried a number of things, updating drivers, rolling them back, closing tasks in the background, turning the fan speed up etc etc, but nothing seemed to have an affect.

The pc was brand new at xmas... specs are following...

AMD Phenom 9950 Quad-Core 2.61ghz
Asus M3A79-T Deluxe motherboard
4Gig RAM
Windows Vista Home Basic (64bit)
Crossfired Radeon 4870's

Vista is up to date with downloads.
Drivers are all up to date too.

Any help would be appreciated if anyone out there has the answers yet! The mention of heat being a problem is something i've been thinking may be the problem, but how can i test that without destroying my warrenty?

All i'm after really is, is this definately a heat problem or is it a card problem? It's been driving me mad for quite a while now and this is the first post i've found with the exact same problems as me, so i'm a little excited rofl.

Edit: I have read the posts too and basically just want it confirmed that it's a card problem before i go asking for a replacement under the warrenty. As to me it just seems odd that i'm getting the exact same problems.... Also, is there any way to test which of my cards is the problem? I can turn crossfire on and off, but is there a way to set which card is the master card when they are working singly?