ATI 5000 series driver errors

[sincreator]

Ok guys, here is my story. Back when the 5800 series ATI cards came out me and my brother picked up one each. I got the 5870 and he picked up the 5850. Both of us were getting the "driver stopped responding, and had to be recovered error". Him more so than myself. We both updated our chipset drivers, and it seemed to work for me but not for him. Now when I say it worked for me, I mean instead of getting the error 5/6 times a day, it turned into an every now and then issue. Like once a week at most. His just kept on crashing over and over, so he returned it and got a BFG OCX 285 instead. Now I have to point out that I was running the ASUS M3A32-MVP(SB600/790fx), and he was running the ASUS P5QL-PRO(P43).

So anyway back to the story. About a month ago ATI released a driver that "was" supposed to fix this issue, along with other issues that people were experiancing. It did not do anything to fix this issue for me at all. It would keep happening while surfing, or just idle most of the time. During gaming I didn't see it. Keep in mind it was still tolerable since it was once a week or less anyway. So anyway I wake up one morning and my computer had an all black screen and the HDD light was solid red. So I restarted my computer, only to get a new error(motherboard related). I got the "NVRAM is full" error and it would not boot to windows. I have no idea if it was related to the 5870 issues I was experiancing though. Then I tried everything I could find online+my own troubleshooting techniques to get back into windows, but it was a no go. I gave up and just picked up a replacement(MSI GD-70), and low and behold, not one issue since. lol.

Both the ASUS M3A32-MVP and the MSI GD-70 are 790fx(Northbridge) and are quad crossfire capable.(4x PCI-e 16x) The only difference between them is that the MSI board has the SB750 and the ASUS board has the SB600. I didn't want to post this until I had the MSI GD-70 for a month atleast without issue, and also after some heavy GPU overclocking just to see if I could trigger the issue again. Not one error, and perfectly stable at max clocks for CCC(900mhz/1300mhz) under load and at idle.

So with these issues, could it be that the older chipsets are the ones being affected the most by this issue? Just the driver stopped responding issue, not the green lines issue. I have never had that one so I don't know if chipset's would be the cause of that one. Anyway if your having these issues please post your specs, just to see if there is any trend in these issues. It may save some people some headaches.

 

[mister g]

Chipset should be fine, I'm using a low end Nvidia but I know that the graphics engine shouldn't be crashing at all, just a tip some graphics card makers release their own graphics drivers, I'm not sure if this would help because ATI's work fine with my little brother's 2400, and we don't even know what brand it is!

 

[shadow187]

Either of you try a reformat? You don't even have to reformat, just load Windows onto a small 15GB partition, then load the drivers, and make that your primary partition. If it works, your partition with Windows + Programs is messed up.

 

[sincreator]

Either of you try a reformat? You don't even have to reformat, just load Windows onto a small 15GB partition, then load the drivers, and make that your primary partition. If it works, your partition with Windows + Programs is messed up.

I did when I got Windows 7 a few months ago, but the issue was still there. It didn't go away completely till I got the new motherboard. The weird thing was, when I got the new mobo I was expecting to have to format again, but it worked fine. I havn't had any issues at all with overclocking or crashes either. That's why I decided to make this thread, just to see if anyone else ran into the same situation and to see if there was anything common hardware/software/manufacturer wise.

BTW: My 5870 was a launch one. Back when they were still priced reasonably low. $379.99