R6950 Artifacting on Desktop/BSOD

[Subzero Ray]

Greetings! I am a proud owner of a msi R6950 2GB VRAM OC Edition; however, it is running into trouble. Upon logging into my user account, the card begins to artifact, showing blocks of red and green dots before black screening, freezing, then BSODing (attempt to reset the display driver timed out). I've RMAed this card once already and received a second card with the same symptoms. Strangely enough, on ONE of the user accounts on my system, coincidentally the admin account, the artifacting DOES NOT occur at all! Safe mode is also problem free on all users. I've tried playing various demanding video games on the admin account and have had no issues at all on even maxed graphics (BF3 on Ultra anyone?). I've tried three different types of drivers, the on disk drivers provided in the box of the card, the latest drivers on AMD's site, and the old drivers on msi's R6950 page. All three have no effect on the problem. I put my old Diamond Radeon HD 4650 1GB card in the same slot I put the R6950 in and it worked fine in it. The card, according to AMD Vision/CCC, my card idles at about 37 deg. C. and on load doesn't surpass something like 50 deg. C. Relevant specs: ...

PSU: Vortec 550W
Mobo: ASUS M4A88T-M
CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1075T
GPU: msi R6950 2GB OC Edition
RAM: Kingston HyperX 2x4GB=8GB

I've run out of ideas on fixing this problem really, and I'd love to hear any of your ideas on what may be the problem. TY

 

[gameranew22]

Hmmm, I've been told in the past about playing all of my games and opening my apps in admin, because I had the same problem with my old 6870, and it worked for a while longer on most games but would ultimately always crash on the higher-end games like skyrim or bioshock2. I would not ram the card again but see if you get a refund because a ton of people are having thes problems with ati cards lately which makes me thinks it has something more to do with the drivers than the actual hardware not routin power correctly or having too massive of drops in fps over time, etc.

The rest of your setup looks fine as well so no bottlenecking or incompatibility issues... From my limited knowledge, I would says it's the drivers associated with this model of card but I could be totally wrong and maybe you do have just a bad batch though it is weird the rma'd one is crap too