ATI Catalyst 13.1 Black Screen/ BSOD

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ezekiel2517

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Jan 24, 2013
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Hello, and thanks for your help. I recently upgraded my computer to Windows 8 (a clean install), and was updating all of my drivers. Everything was going fine until I got to the drivers for my Crossfire 6870/6850 graphics cards. During the installation of the latest (13.1) catalyst drivers, my screen flashes as normal during a driver update, but then freezes on a black screen. On a hard restart I get a BSOD on atikmpag.sys. This issue also occurred on windows 7 with anything past the 12.11 drivers. I tried manually installing the drivers in safe mode, which works but still BSODs on a restart. The most progress I've made was getting to my desktop with the 13.1 drivers manually installed, but the BSOD occurred after a restart. I'm not overclocking anything. Thanks in advance.

Specs:
Windows 8
AMD Phenom II x6 1075T (stock)
Crossfire HD6870/6850
128gb Crucial M4 SSD
Asus M5A97

Current drivers:
Catalyst 12.10
All other drivers (chipset, SATA etc) all up to date
 
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yep and I don't want to, usually only buy a new mainboard every 4 to 5 years and I like mine m5a97 evo, god what did they change in there drivers to cause such a big problem.
I went through and tried 13.4 13.5 with no luck, I was hoping I might have more success as I have a newer 7700 series gpu, but no.

 
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I submitted two reports, one for 13.4 and one for 13.5, and have had no reply from them. The new motherboard, fresh install of Windows 8 and the latest drivers is working really nicely. The motherboard is great! M5A99 FX Rev 2.0
 
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Yes but as previously said, we can't all afford to buy a 990 chipset and it is their responsibility to fix it. Actually they should have already fixed it...
 
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Yes, they need to work on their customer service skills. All you folks can do now, is keep submitting report forms for the drivers. E-mail them, contact them in anyway possible to bring it to their attention.
 
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any one tried ringing them, I raised a ticket and submitted a bug report yesterday. in the mean time I might go back to 12.6, I was looking through my old 3d mark scores and the best performance was using crossfire with 12.6 (8.980.0.0) I know it wont have the fixes for games but 12.10 is to old anyway to have fixes for latest games.
 
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Hi everybody, in the same boat here - an M5A97 EVO R2.0 motherboard and two Asus HD 5450 GPUs in Crossfire (I know they're weak, but my rig is an HTPC only). In any case, after experiencing the exact same problems with drivers more recent than 12.10, I submitted a bug report and rang AMD Technical Support (Europe) at two different numbers - international (+31 208080959) and UK (+44 (0) 1276932318), just for good measure:). Both technicians were surprised by what I said (whether that surprise was feigned or not, I've no idea), although they said they'll check out this thread, as I directed them to it specifically. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like they'll get the problem fixed on the fly - more like by the next driver release.
Whatever, the only consolation that I can find is that if you google a bit, you'll easily find that Nvidia has just about as many problems with SLI.
 
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I emailed ASUS for support earlier today about this issue, don't expect much from them as 12.10 works fine and it seems like a driver related bug but as this only happens on AMD 970 chip and mainly M5A97 EVO/PRO I thought I would let them know, also with a link to this thread but then again the 970 chip is from AMD so maybe its back to them :) wouldn't a bios update that fixed this issue be nice

 
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Absolutely, a BIOS update would be excellent, but I also think the problem lies with AMD. On the other hand, BIOS updates for the M5A97 boards are quite frequent, so you never know:).
FWIW, I was considering a switch to a 990 model. For example, the Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 is getting rave reviews, but it just doesn't offer the same connectivity (no native FireWire, a smaller number of internal USB ports). That and the fact that I can't really afford to switch boards every so often because a damn driver doesn't work.
Whatever, I'll keep you posted on developments.
 
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OK don't use 12.6 especially for windows 8, stay with 12.10 or use latest drivers with only one card, 12.6 wasn't developed for win 8 but I installed it anyway and lets just say my pc did not stay on for very long
 
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I had the M5A97, non pro or the other version. I tried all drivers on Windows 8, only one that worked was 12.10.
 
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I personally tried EVERY version after 12.10 (I'm running Windows 7 Pro, 64-bit), and not one of them worked. As you said, it's either two cards and 12.10, or one card and the latest driver. Simply no other option (for the time being, I hope!).
FWIW, I'm sure you're aware of a site called "station-drivers", which offers a bunch of very up-to-date drivers and firmwares for practically every piece of hardware you could imagine. Among others, they have custom-made 'combo' packages of drivers for people with AMD motherboards and AMD GPUs. As you can imagine, these contain the very latest chipset drivers, SATA drivers, graphic card drivers, etc. What is really strange is that the latest 'combo', published a couple of days ago, has everything THE LATEST with the sole exception of the GPU driver, which is still stuck at 12.10. Interesting, don't you think? Because this clearly suggests that our problem is widespread enough for the compilers at Station-Drivers to know not to include any later graphic card driver in the package.
Really, this whole crappy situation makes me feel a bit sorry for myself:). Whatever cash I have, I invest in my kids - the leftovers go into cheapo AMD solutions that require huge involvement on my part in order to stay afloat. Ah well ...
Anyways, I'm doing as much research into this problem as time allows, so I'll update my postings if I find any breakthrough (or get some info from AMD).
 
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Too old to worry, you could try a 990XA-UD3 or 990FX-UD3. Plenty of USB ports and has Firewire as well.

Personally I prefer the revision 1.x over 3.0. The newer 3.0 is a different bios and UEFI as well which I'm not a fan of.
 
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I have a question for all of you with 970 chip! Why do you even have a crossfire setup with this chipset? It doesn't support proper crossfire setup since it doesn't support more than one x16 pcie at a time. Or am I missing something here?
You shouldn't actually benifit by crossfire on a 970 motherboard.
 
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That's just not true when using a lower end card like a 5770. There's plenty of bandwidth for older cards with the 970 chipset. Now with say crossfire 7970's sure, you will have a bottleneck to a certain degree.

Would be interesting to see the fps difference at 1080P 970 vs 990 with cfx 7970's. My guess is maybe 10fps avg difference?
 
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Well I see your point and after reading this article I agree with you even more: (URL]http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-scaling-p67-chipset-gaming-performance,2887-10.html[/URL]

The 970 was never an ideal choice for a crossfire setup though. Not saying that AMD gets of the hook for that reason.
 
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Thanks for your interest. I've researched the Gigabyte boards, too, and the ones you mentioned come up trumps. It's just that at the moment I don't have the spare funding. However, if AMD don't come up with a solution in a reasonable amount of time, I'll have to look at my options.
 
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I was just going to mention this. I myself use two 5450s in a crossfire setup. These cards are absolutely low end, and the 970 chipset provides them with great bandwidth. Really, my rig (basically an HTPC) doesn't require anything better.
 
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Just out of curiosity how big of a screen and resolution are you watching movies with the 5450 crossfire? I have a 5450 lying at home. Maybe I should build me a cheap HTPC myself :).

 
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I've got a 22'' iiyama ProLite E2278HD LED, which is full HD. Just for fun, I also connected the card to a 40" Panasonic. Image quality is fantastic in both scenarios (as far as I can tell). I really can't imagine a better - or cheaper - setup for watching blu-rays.
 
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amd 970 chip is the lower end cheaper solution for crossfire but in saying that it is not cheap and nasty, it was sold stating it is compatible with crossfirex. I to have low end gpu's hd7750 so a crossfire set up with one 16x slot and the other 16x@ 4x should be fine as the bandwidth should be plenty and I dont think 2 cards at 4x4 bandwidth would even be noticeably worse then 2 at 8x8 bandwidth espesialy with my lower end cards, before I had this issue performance in some games was
noticeably higher.
 
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AMD told me the same thing they told me months ago in one of the emails they replied to me about 13.1 "At this time this matter is being investigated. Could you please help us by creating a bug report with us? These reports are sent to the Catalyst engineers for review. Hopefully with these reports a new driver would resolve it" I received this today after complaining yesterday. they haven't fixed this from 13.1 to 13.5 beta like they said HAY HAY :) now there would have to be some very smart engineers there, they can fix this or recall the chip so asus recall my board and give me a nice juicy one with a 990 chip as a free replacement :) I wish
 
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Lucky you, at least you got a reply:).
As regards the recall - that would be nice, but to be honest I don't see it coming.
 
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