7970 Black Screen 100% Fans

[creeky]

Hoi there,

After tearing my hair out with 5970 crossfire for a couple weeks I decided to throw in the towel and replace them both with XFX 7970s BE cards.

The first one arrived and I've been playing away with it just fine till yesterday when it started behaving oddly.

The card runs supercool and is super stable so I had it running 1050Mhz Core and 1450Mhz Mem no problems temps are around the mid to high 70s under load no problems there. (up from 1000Mhz and 1425Mhz Stock)

Anyway I have my old 5970 in the bottom pcie slot powering my second screen and my first screen attached to the 7970, my 5970 sits there mining and playing whatever video stream I wish.

Last I was on my desktop, no games just browsing when the screen attached to the 7970 went blank and the 7970 fans went straight up to 100% and remained there. I could see all this unfolding on my other screen since the one attached to the 5970 seemed to be completely unaffected and had msi afterburner up monitoring the temps/fans etc

I had to restart the pc to stop this, and then again after another 15 mins the same thing happened. After this point I turned the pc off at the wall, discharged any capacitors in the system and restarted and all seemed fine.

Then this morning I was playing away on metro 2033, 5970 mining away when the 7970 fan shot straight back up to 100% (no blank screen this time). And I had to jump out of the game to lower the fans manually in afterburner. The temps were fine (about 78-80) when it decided to do this.

Any ideas what's up? Dodgy card?

 

[creeky]

PS, I am semi-dubious about how my PSU has been performing lately but it is a Tagan 1300watt modular version. In terms of wattage I probably have enough left to attach another 2 cards.

 

[kommotion]

I had this problem as well with my 7970. I know that it's not a hardware issue since it all began to happen when I upgraded my Catalyst to 12.6 from 12.4. When I went back to 12.4, the problem disappeared. What version of Catalyst are you running? I'm waiting until 12.7 is released to see if the issue persists.

 

[creeky]

12.7 Beta, incidentally I got a second card and am now running crossfire. Problem hasn't persisted since installing the new card.

It may have something to do with the process of uninstalling drivers, using driver sweeper and then reinstalling.

Perhaps worth you making sure you're installing on a clean slate?

 

[kommotion]

Good to hear that your problem is gone. I'll probably do a driver sweep and all that good stuff when 12.7 comes out. Just didn't have enough time to do all of that for 12.6, which doesn't have any performance increases, unlike 12.7, so I didn't even bother. Hopefully 12.7 works fine with just the driver sweeping. If not, a clean install of windows (ughhh) would do the work most likely.

 

[nighthawk_78]

I have two Sapphire HD7970s OC edition and recently I started to get black screen and then my monitors would turn off with the computer still running in Windows. I would always have to reboot to get everything back up. By the way I'm using driver version 12-6. So after watching my boot up process I noticed that MSI Afterburner would load funny sometimes meaning it would display the on screen server open on the desktop in a very small window during the boot up process and when this was going on usually the computer would shut off the screens after about an hour or so of use forcing a reboot. When MSI Afterburner loaded normal it worked perfect, so I'm thinking the problems here aren't necessarily with the hardware or drivers as much as it is with something going on with the MSI Afterburner software and ATI cards. If I completely shutdown MSI Afterburner or uninstall it the problem never happens again.

 

[manyee]

I am having the same problem with my new Visiontek 7970.
It happened 3 times to me so far. The first 2 are when I left the pc for more than 15 minutes, the screen went blank and card's fan went 100%. I scared me because I couldn't wake up the pc (brand new build). I had to press power button and turn it off.
3rd time happened last night. I just set CCC to enable graphic overdrive to 1100 core & 1525 mem. After that I started steam & played Crysis. Right after loading a checkpoint and pressing the "Press Any Key" screen, the pc went blank & fan went 100%. Again, I had to press power button to turn off.
Here is my pc history:
- Installed XFX 7950 & driver 12.6
- Downgrade driver to 12.4
- replace card with Visiontek 7970 & uninstall drivers using safe mode & driver sweeper.
- install driver 12.7 beta until now.

My rig: i5-3570k, ASRock z77 Extreme 4, Samsung DDR3-1600 RAM, 2 x 1TB Hitachi HDD, Cooler Master Silent Pro 850W, Win 7 Ultimate 64bit

Since it happened with different manufacturer (XFX & Visiontek) so maybe this is driver or software problem.
Honestly I can't duplicate this problem. It seems to happen randomly. But one thing I notice is that it always happen when I overclock it either with CCC or Trixx.
Never happened when I left it at stock setting.
Any thought?
-

 

[Guest]

Same here, i recently bought a new rig with an HIS 7970. It worked fine for a month, but now when i play games the screen goes black, the sound stops and the only way to get back is to turn the pc off and on. I replaced the card with my old 8800GTS and my systems runs okay, so that rules out any problems with memory or other faulty components. The wierd thing is that it does not occur all the time. I have times were i can play for hours on end without the system failing. i run driver version 12.8

troubleshooting:

-unplugged the 650W power supply, thought that maybe the system did not get enough power. :lol:
-plugged in my older 850W power supply, problem did not dissappear.
-reinstalled windows 7
-replaced card with old 8800GTS, system worked like a charm.
-left 7970 alone for a 2 weeks, and in a mad frenzy reinstalled it and it worked.. for 2 days
-upgraded driver to 12.8
-adjusted fanspeed to 65%, thought that maybe the card was overheating and that was causing the problem.

My rig: I7 3770K, asus P8Z77-vLX, 16GB Corsiar DDR3-1600 RAM, Samsung 830 SSD, Samsung spinpoint F1 1TB, Corsair AX650W, Win 7 Premium 64Bit

PS i did not overclock the card in any way. its running at stock settings

any suggestions?

-Richard

 

[noxturno]

Same here, i recently bought a new rig with an HIS 7970. It worked fine for a month, but now when i play games the screen goes black, the sound stops and the only way to get back is to turn the pc off and on. I replaced the card with my old 8800GTS and my systems runs okay, so that rules out any problems with memory or other faulty components. The wierd thing is that it does not occur all the time. I have times were i can play for hours on end without the system failing. i run driver version 12.8

troubleshooting:

-unplugged the 650W power supply, thought that maybe the system did not get enough power. :lol:
-plugged in my older 850W power supply, problem did not dissappear.
-reinstalled windows 7
-replaced card with old 8800GTS, system worked like a charm.
-left 7970 alone for a 2 weeks, and in a mad frenzy reinstalled it and it worked.. for 2 days
-upgraded driver to 12.8
-adjusted fanspeed to 65%, thought that maybe the card was overheating and that was causing the problem.

My rig: I7 3770K, asus P8Z77-vLX, 16GB Corsiar DDR3-1600 RAM, Samsung 830 SSD, Samsung spinpoint F1 1TB, Corsair AX650W, Win 7 Premium 64Bit

PS i did not overclock the card in any way. its running at stock settings

any suggestions?

-Richard

ok I did all you just did too and still had this issue only thing that seems to fix the problem was stop using msi afterburner. problem its gone for now.