4870x2 'stopped responding but has recovered'

Hi all,

When playing Dawn of War and other games my monitor goes black, my card revs up (as though it is resetting) and then if I'm lucky, the game continues. During this period a little notification pops up in the taskbar saying "your display adapter has stopped responding but has recovered."

There seems to be no pattern to these crashes, it can occur after 10 minutes or over the space of an hour. Other than the screen turning black there seems to be no other problems - no blue screen of death and the PC keeps running. Only once has it reset entirely following the problem. It's basically as though the card just 'stops' for a few seconds.

In another game, X3, the game will freeze for about 10 seconds and the HUD will vanish and reappear. Other than that, most games thend to lag quite more than I'd have though for such a powerful card.

Anyway, I've been searching online for a fix for ages but nothing really comes up. I'm also currently talking to sapphire to see if there's a fix but they're not being much use, and ATI help pointed me towards a solution to a problem I didn't even ask about. The guy then just suggested I RMA, something I don't want to do if the card is actually fine.

System specs are:

Vista x64
MSI K9A2 Platinum
Phenom 9850
4 GB Ram
Sapphire 4870x2

All drivers are up to date for the card and motherboard, and windows update has everything installed. Other than that, haven't a clue what the problem is. Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance guys,

M

also what psu.

Hey guys,

PSU is 650w Antec Earthwatts, bought it with all the components of the PC. Surely that should be enough?

@ coozie, its Terran Conflict, awesome game totally hooked lol, although I never got into Reunion which is strange. When you get the pauses does your HUD vanish as well? It will freeze for around 5 seconds, the HUD will vanish for about one second and then everything will carry on as normal.

Whats the best way of checking/altering my fan speed settings btw? Perhaps the card is overheating? Very strange though since I've had no problems with Crysis Warhead and that's a far more demanding game. So far it's just COD4, Dawn of War and X3:TC

Cheers,

M

Doesn't have to do with the fan speed at all.
This is a very known issue with the HD cards of ATi and the newer cards of nVidia.
I'm getting ~4 of them a day, andl ike 0-7 blue screens. Using the HD4850.

The issue is known as a driver/vista problem, although Vista is saying ATi and nVidia are making bad drivers. While ATi and nVidia say Vista doesn't support their cards good enough.
That's why this problem has been going for about 1,5 year now, there ain't any solution so far.
I'm on a (dutch) forum, with a huge thread about this problem, it has over 20 pages already. And it's full of people who have the same problem, none of them have found out how to fix it so far.

Low fan speed or hot graphic cards don't 'cause driver issues. That's all I'm gonna say.

Alright, I have to agree with you on that, I've been to fast with on my decision, I'm sorry.

The driver issue with this so called "error" mostly is the error called "atikmdag.sys". He could take a look at his error logs for more info.

On that site it said something about there being a BIOS update for sapphire cards for that issue (although that was for the HD4870)

Another workaround solution was to change the 2D clock speeds, although I'm willing to give that a miss. My card's fast enough as it is thanks, and I'd rather keep the warranty intact

Surely changing any clocks does? I didn't think it was ok to fiddle with those sort of things from a warranty standpoint?

Its not your hardware , I repaeat its not your hardware

In the game graphics options simply turn off shadows, job done
PS i had this issue with aalmost the same hardware as you.

you could try a clean reinstall of your driver's and also clean out your registry with ccleaner (its free) and has worked for me in the past.

its a tdr event and it could be down to your card being oc'ed. it happens more often if you oc your card so its putting a strain on your card more. it could even be a faulty card but unlikely and yes the 'nvlddmkm' error is for nvidia cards only.

same thing happens to me on my HD4850
usually when my gpu clock is too high, the screen goes blank then comes back about 5-10 seconds later. If I can see the desktop a bubble says that "radeon 4800 series driver stopped responding and was successfully recoverd" or something like that. (also during this process my card also revs up.
could also be that you dont have enough power the first phenoms were real power suckers and a quad core with an X2 card may bee too much for 650w