"Driver has stopped responding and has recovered" Help!

[FrantikShotz]

I'm an online gamer with limited knowledge to the inner workings of a PC, making this account strictly looking for suggestions on how i can prevent my driver from "crashing" in the middle of a gaming session. I have an AMD Radeon HD 6670 graphics card and it quite frequently stops responding and i have no clue what to do to fix it. i've tried updating the driver, rolling it back, lowering the resolution, lowing graphic quality and still no luck whatsoever. If it matters at all, i play World of Warcraft, Team Fortress 2, and Counter Strike: Source, and the driver stops responding no matter which game. Sometimes i can go 10-15 minutes without a problem, other times it stops back to back and i don't even have any time to respond to the problem in between. Please help, any feedback is much appreciated.

 

[house70]

Try to run a video benchmark on it while monitoring the temps of the graphic card. Sounds like overheating to me. Ensure the PSU is matching the graphic card.

 

[truegenius]

ati are less stable, try new drivers (non beta)

 

[bloc97]

A 6670 Crashing? Thats wierd since a 6670 only uses 66W at max (Wich no GPU is capable of archiving his 100%)
It may be that your drivers are corrupted, update your drivers (From the official AMD site, DO NOT DOWNLOAD a microsoft driver.
(NEVER USE windows update for graphic drivers)

Also, as house70 mentionned, it may be that you have a cheap cheap cheap PSU under 100W or that your card is overheating. You can monitor your temps while gaming with MSI AfterBurner, then post back the temps exactly when it crashes.

Hope it helps!

 

[bloc97]

A general rule for Graphic cards : if the temps get above 90C, it's not normal. (Except for nVidia Cards that trend to heat more.)

 

[FrantikShotz]

during an all day gaming session, the temperature never got above 50C. so my next step i suppose is to go to MicroCenter and look into getting a new PSU. my dad build the PC for me and we have computer parts all over our basement so its entirely possible that it is a cheap/old PSU

 

[truegenius]

before investing in a new psu, try reinstalling of windows and i am sure that it will solve this issue, 6670 requires only 70w power, so psu doesn't seems to be the case

 

[FrantikShotz]

i just upgraded to Windows7, and the crashes are still there, but not as frequent

 

[esrever]

any other programs running when you are gaming?

 

[truegenius]

have you tried latest non beta drivers like v12.2 on this fresh installation of windows

 

[FrantikShotz]

i usually have google chrome open in the background watching youtube videos. and i tried v12.1 when i was still using Vista, but havent tried it yet with Windows7

 

[esrever]

close chrome when you game

 

[FrantikShotz]

alright i restarted the computer, and opened the game, never had any background program running. it worked fine for about an hour, then the driver issue started up and it crashed twice. i turned it off for about 45 minutes and turned it back on, same as before, then it crashed after about 10 minutes and it was the worst of all. everything in the game turned white, so i assume my graphics card just blew up or something along those lines.

 

[bloc97]

No, your GPU didn't blow up... When an display driver crashes, every OpenGL and D3D applications are terminated, so thats why your game is white.
If you were watching an Video, the screen would have turned white too when the drivers crashes.

Also, are you playing full screen?

 

[FrantikShotz]

I play in windowed mode. Also it has started crashing while watching youtube, hulu, and netflix

 

[esrever]

turn off windows aero and see if it helps.

 

[FrantikShotz]

isnt windows aero a vista thing? i searched programs and files for aero and came up with nothing

 

[esrever]

are you on windows 7 or xp? aero is in 7 but not in xp. It probably won't help but just might since you are running in windowed.

 

[FrantikShotz]

i am running windows7. but it doesnt just crash when i play windowed, also does it on fullscreen games and videos

 

[esrever]

is your motherboard bios up to date?

 

[FrantikShotz]

i have the bios v6.0. i just updated to version 12.1 driver non-beta. And the crashes are coming just as frequently. when i was using vista and it was crashing, it would say "amdkmdap has stopped working and has recovered". since Window7, it says "driver AMD has stopped working..."

 

[bluertom]

i have the bios v6.0. i just updated to version 12.1 driver non-beta. And the crashes are coming just as frequently. when i was using vista and it was crashing, it would say "amdkmdap has stopped working and has recovered". since Window7, it says "driver AMD has stopped working..."

Hey dude, i kinda figure out the problem. The radeon 6670 is a medium size card. It used to have that same problem when i'm playing Battlefield 3 with higher screen resolutions. The problem is your screen soulution you are using the play the game. I use 800*600 at high settings. Hope this work cus it work for me. I too though it was the power supply or my cpu.

 

[karthikjusme]

i had the same problem with my friends hd 6670 it was due to my mobo try installing it on some other pc and see.. it may also be an PSU problem

 

[matter37]

Any chance it has been overclocked or factory overclocked? If so you could try setting it back to the default manufacturer specifications and see if that helps, overclocking can cause it to crash although if its factory overclocked it shouldn't since its been tested but its worth a shot.

 

[FrantikShotz]

it turns out it was the card itself. i put in my old 5450 and it ran perfectly fine while i was waiting to get a new card. i filled out an RMA on the card and sent it out, came back to me and did the same thing within 30 minutes