Driver(?) Issue.

[Xerophos]

Fairly recently I've started to get issues with this comp. I've had it get about 5 gray screens today occurring within 2 hours of each other. I haven't updated any drivers recently and I've gotten 2-3 of these before, but spanning across about a month. Only today have these gotten bad.

These gray screens will happen when I'm doing anything, not just gaming or doing intensive things.

Sometimes the lower 4 inches or so of my screen will glitch out(around my task bar) and horizontal lines will appear(I'm not sure about this, the lines or whatever they are, are not there long enough for me to properly identify them.)

I have no idea what the potential causes could be for this.

Here are my specs:
Core i5 3570k OC'd @ 4 GHz (stable 30 idle, 50 under load)
Radeon 7850 Core OC'd @ 1020, Mem OC'd @ 1260. (This is stable as well, before I started getting these gray screens I never got any crashes whatsoever that would indicate it was the overclocks for this, I even set them to stock and it still crashed)
ASRock z77 Pro4-M
620w PSU, I don't quite remember the specifics but I recall it was a decent quality brand, ratings were good on the site I bought it.
8gb 1600MHz RAM, G.Skill X Jaws Series

Thanks in advance, hope I can get this sorted out. I'm not very good at troubleshooting and I just bought this computer recently (a month 1/2 ago).

 

[fantastik250]

So you have not updated your drivers?

Try doing stock clocks to make sure the card isn't faulty after overclocking, even though you mentioned that it was stable before. I just want to make sure.

 

[Xerophos]

Yeah, I ran at stock clocks for an hour or two and I ended up crashing.

I thought I said that in the parenthesis?

 

[fantastik250]

What version is your AMD drivers?

 

[Xerophos]

12.6, I tried going 12.7 beta, but I still got a crash. I'm now at about 8 of them by the way.
Reverted to 12.6 though.

Found an oddity, perhaps. I have both the AMD drivers and the Intel HD Drivers. Could there be a problem due to this?

 

[fantastik250]

That's your onboard graphics, it should be disabled. But, in your BIOS is your primary display where your video card is? For example, PCI-E x16 slot 2 or something like that

 

[Xerophos]

Yes. It would be impossible otherwise, considering my monitor is set up through my GFX card...

 

[fantastik250]

Have you updated your motherboard BIOS and/or chipset drivers?

 

[Xerophos]

Yeah.

 

[fantastik250]

Can you try the card on another computer? If the issue still happens, then you should replace the card.

 

[Xerophos]

No, I don't have any other computers to try the card with :\

 

[fantastik250]

Best thing you can do is to tell the manufacturer your GPU problem and get a replacement.

 

[Xerophos]

So I went into safe mode for a couple of hours and no gray screen.

Meaning that it's likely this is caused by either
a. Stress (I couldn't run anything stressful in safe mode)
b. Drivers

As for drivers, what is a course of action I can take to assure that they're all fine? Any programs to test driver integrity, or for drivers that I don't need but may be causing problems, etc...

Thanks in advance.

 

[fantastik250]

Well, there are a couple of driver integrity checks such as driver agent. But, sometimes you wouldn't want to upgrade a driver that is already working.

In this case for your graphics card, the only best one is 12.6 or 12.7 BETA.

I am wondering if the card has overheated and made a slight damage to the card.

 

[Xerophos]

If it were damaged it would occur in safe mode as well, or like right now where I don't have a display driver installed but I'm in regular mode.

12.7 doesn't say anything about gray screens, so I won't bother with it.

 

[fantastik250]

Well, it could be something is interfering. You may want to do a fresh install of windows. Some users here do it and most problems go away. But not too sure if you want to do that.

 

[Xerophos]

Is it possible to keep all of my data if I do reinstall Windows?

 

[fantastik250]

Umm, what you can do is a System Restore. If you have created any system restore points before any of the issues started occurring you will be able to go back to the previous state of the computer. It won't affect files but only windows related files.

But, it is always a golden rule to backup anything before doing any system restore. Perhaps a usb stick and backup your most important files.

In case you have other questions refer to this even though it's for a Vista system:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/System-Restore-frequently-asked-questions

And look at the options you have here for Windows 7 restoration options.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/help/system-repair-recovery

The best method you can do is a System Restore.

 

[Xerophos]

I reinstalled Windows altogether.

Since I reinstalled (last night) I've gotten one gray screen and a blue one with stripes.

Starting to think this may not be a driver problem, or it's a 12.6 specific thing.

 

[fantastik250]

Before doing any other driver update, can you try another display port?

I may think the card could possibly be damaged.

But, since your earlier posts mentioned that you went into safe mode with no issues. Then here is the older drivers from Guru3D
You may want to try 12.3 or 12.4

http://downloads.guru3d.com/Videocards---ATI-Catalyst-Vista---Win-7_c31.html