Amd driver has stopped working and other gpu issues.

[ErickAguilar]

Hello forums, as you can see, I'm new here, but I am familiar with tom's hardware, and have been lurking for a while to get reviews and look up help for minor issues, but this time I believe I need help for this specific problem I am having.

Two months ago I built my first pc with this specs:

AMD A6-3670K cpu
Gygabite A75M-S2V motherboard
8gb of kingston hyperxblu ddr3
Seagate 500gb 7200rpm HDD
Samsung CD/DVD/CDRW/DVDRW drive.

and the psu which came with the thermaltake case which is 450w.

For the first months I had been running my computer only with the integrated graphics, gaming was okay in medium low settings, and some games would not run at all up until I updated the CCC/amd vision control center/drivers up to 11.4. Once or twice did my games crash leading me to a message saying that my display driver had stopped working and recovered successfully, but they soon stopped.

After some time, I bought a sapphire 6670 1Gb DDR3 gpu which gave my graphics a beautiful boost and was able to run my games at maximum settings with no lag whatsoever. Sadly the card only had a one week warranty directly at the store to be returned/replaces. And as per Murphy laws two weeks after purchase my games randomly started lagging the next time I got home and turned on my computer to play, no settings had been changed whatsoever since I found the sweet spot for the gpu settings. I reinstalled the drivers both from the included CD and from amd's site to no avail, i downclocked the gpu too (it wasn't overclocked that much anyway) but it still didn't make a difference, the only difference happened when I lowered the settings in my games, but it was minimal.

I was recommended MSI afterburner and kombuster to monitor and test my gpu, the temps are fine, 55 average under load, usage is at 99% at all times while running games. So i overclocked it a little, took the core clock to 900mhz which is the max this card offers and the memory clock to 900 as well, the max is 1040. Overclocking with msi did help the lag go away, however every so often my games would freeze and the dreaded ''display driver has stopped working and has recovered successfully'' would pop out every 15 minutes of gameplay. I found out MSI afterburner could have been conflicting with the CCC gpu overdrive, so I turned off amd's gpu overdrive, and so far I had not gotten the driver fail message up until an hour ago while playing IL-2 sturmovik online, which is not a demanding game at all, so I'm back to square one I guess..

I'll list the games I have, and the ones who give me this display driver failure message:

Tomb Raider Anniversary
Roller Coaster Tycoon 3
World of Tanks
Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
Minecraft
Need for Speed Carbon (Fail)
Skyrim (fail)
Il-2 (fail)

I'm seriously at a loss as to what could be the problem.. any help would be appreciated.

Thanks for your time.

 

[ErickAguilar]

My bad, I meant 12.4 as for the driver software.

 

[JamesSneed]

So currently you have two issues. The first is that you have performance issues(lag) if you don't overclock the GPU. The second is if you overclock your GPU you have crashes associated with "display driver failure message". Have you tried seeing if the "display driver failure message" goes away on stock settings for the GPU i.e. no overclock?

To debug you need to turn off MSI afterburner and overdrive to revert back to stock. If the errors stop then you know you cant overclock the GPU which is very likely with a $90 card. EDIT: I do realize a 6670 can get up to 25% overclocks but some of them don't fair very well so you may only be able to do a very mild overclock.

 

[vrumor]

Or the PSU that came with the case is garbage and is failing.

 

[ErickAguilar]

So currently you have two issues. The first is that you have performance issues(lag) if you don't overclock the GPU. The second is if you overclock your GPU you have crashes associated with "display driver failure message". Have you tried seeing if the "display driver failure message" goes away on stock settings for the GPU i.e. no overclock?

To debug you need to turn off MSI afterburner and overdrive to revert back to stock. If the errors stop then you know you cant overclock the GPU which is very likely with a $90 card. EDIT: I do realize a 6670 can get up to 25% overclocks but some of them don't fair very well so you may only be able to do a very mild overclock.

Thanks for your reply, I did downclock to stock 800mhz on core and memory, and so far I have not had issues, however skyrim seems to run the same with overclocked and stocked gpus. Il-2 didn't crash at all, still need to test out carbon for a while..

The PSU had stricken me as a possible fault, but apparently im only using 320watts of it.

 

[ErickAguilar]

This graphics card seems to be a loose cannon when it comes to it's performance.
Some days it will give me lag, and some others it won't, even if I have stayed with the same settings for quite some time now. The amd driver has stopped working message has stopped popping out, so I believe that was from straining the card too much with overclocking..

This brings up another question.. I know you can only use dual graphics with the 6570,6670 and such. Right now my 6670 is NOT in dual graphics as it's performance alone was better than in dual mode.

So.. my question would be if I could upgrade to a 6850 and not have to worry about bottle necks? My CPU is the A6-3670K unlocked quadcore

 

[JamesSneed]

Thats a tough call as the A6-3670K will have some bottleneck. If you could overclock the CPU to 3.0-3.2 Ghz then it may not take that big of a hit on FPS.

With that said I think you could get higher frame rates with a better GPU and depending on the game it may be significant. If you go that route look at the 6870 since its only $10-15 more on newegg.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150561

 

[Signous]

New to this forum so hey, Just as a word of warning, i'm running a 6870 and i'm having the exact problem mentioned.