HD 6850 Latest Drivers Broke Graphic Card Functionality

[Mercer99]

Greetings tomshardware.com,

I'm running a minimalist install of Windows XP SP3 with a newer HD 6850 video card for gaming overclocked at 800mhz from 650mhz (fans and temps nominal). Today I decided to update the drivers to the official ATI 12.8 from version 11.11, which had worked flawlessly for the past 7 months or so. After rebooting my computer and opening firefox and navigating to google, the screen went immediately black, and then starting loading everything extremely slow including click-dragging windows around in explorer (very choppy/slow movement). Basically I lost the functionality of my video card.

Here's what I tried:
-uninstalled new drivers
-booted into safe mode
-cleaned ati display drivers using driver sweeper
-rebooted and installed original 11.11 drivers
-rebooted

After this I experienced the same problem, black screen after opening firefox and losing the functionality of my video card! I am stumped as to how to troubleshoot this issue. Please advice me, your help is greatly appreciated!

 

[cool07ist]

try to run it at stock speeds and do check temps of your hd 6850 with gpu-z. is it hotter? or if thats not the problem then try installing other previous version of amd drivers like catalyst 12.4. Some latest amd drivers give you a lot of problems, i have msi hd 7770 and updating to latest drivers helped me fix my constant issue of screen crashing and all during sleep mode.