ATI 4850 Crashing/Blue Screen

Vampiric Puppet

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Hi

I'm having trouble with my ATI Radeon HD 4800 series graphics card, basically when I try to play Borderlands or Left 4 Dead the card seems to crash, everything freezes and purple hatched boxes appear on the screen and ctrl+alt+delete usually does nothing but sometimes it minimizes it and I can end task the game. The sound carries on as well. But the past few times it has started blue screen of deathing.

Sometimes it won't let me do ctrl+alt+delete and the blue screen won't appear so I have to turn it off by the switch and when I turn it back on the graphics are screwed up with lines going down the screen until it gets to the login screen where it blue screens and when it restarts it's fine.

It first started with the old driver (which I can't remember the number of) but I since updated to this 8.712.0.0 and it still happens.

Please help. Does anyone know a fix?
 

Vampiric Puppet

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Wow you were right. Furmark ran until it hit 71C then my computer blue screened and crashed. And it just booted up again and HWMonitor says the GPU core temp is 56 and it's just idling not doing anything.

A week or so ago I accidently broke the fan on the processor so replaced it with a bigger version (ordered the wrong model). Could that have anything to do with it? I also didn't add thermal paste when I replaced it because I forgot.

But if that does have something to do with it then why is the GPU running hot? Not the processor? Or is it because it's dusty as hell?

Thanks for the reply mate
 

masterjaw

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71c is quite fine for a GPU. The culprit might be your CPU. You may want to verify that by running prime95 instead of Furmark to check CPU temps at load.
 

Vampiric Puppet

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By the way I'm totally using the word "GOO" from now on!

Also should I rub off the previous Goo with Rubbing Alcohol?

Right now I'm just browsing the net and using iTunes and the temp for the CPU is at 35C ish and the GPU is at 50C
 

Vampiric Puppet

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Just put the paste on and there was actually a fair amount on the bottom of the fan that I don't remember being there so I didn't remove it, I removed the small scraps left on the CPU and then put the new stuff on.

When I boot everything is fine but I ran the Furmark program and did a stability test with 1280x1024 not fullscreen and it crashed and I had to reboot several times before the screen returned to normal.

I'm about to try and play borderlands or any other game and see if it runs at all, does Furmark run until your PC crashes? Or is something else the matter?
 

Vampiric Puppet

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No the crash was just the screen spazzing out, with purple hatch marks everywhere.

But I just ran Borderlands and as usual it crashed but this time I couldn't be bothered to reset the PC so I did Ctrl+Alt+Del and then waited 15 minutes or so and it finally minimised to the desktop where everything was normal. Just as I was about to look at the temps the screen went weird again then I had to restart it.

But also while it was minimised a warning came from the taskbar saying the display driver had stopped working and then it crashed. It was amdkmdap and I just looked at the Event Viewer it has a load of warning events saying that display driver failed to respond but has recovered 8 times in the space of a minute.

So I think it might be the driver or something which is 8.712 also while I think about it for a while my desktop has been saying it's in Test Mode for Build 6002 Service Pack 2. Could that have anything to do with it?


I did a fair bit of googling and it looks like this is a common problem, people have different solutions but I'm about to download an update from Microsoft KB976264 and see if it works