Bad drivers or bad GPU?

Skoll357

Honorable
May 29, 2012
12
0
10,510
Specs: Win7 64 bit i5-3450, 3.1 GHz Sapphire r9 390x Nitro (8GB) 8GB DDR3 RAM PC Power and Cooling silencer mk ii 750w

So I've been having issues for a while now that I think are GPU or driver related. Pretty much at least once per day chrome will briefly lockup and I'll get a message saying something about display drivers crashing and recovering. My understanding is that this is related to hardware acceleration in chrome.

Later I started seeing quite a bit of nasty artifact and some CTDs going on in a game called Starbound. The game is graphically simple so I can't imagine it was pushing the GPU too hard. Temps seemed fine in Afterburner.

A couple days later I turn on my PC and login and after about 5-10 seconds my screen went black, no mouse, nothing. This persisted after multiple resets, and I even yanked my GPU at and reseated it. No dice. So I booted into safe mode and do a DDU uninstall and reinstall with the latest AMD drivers, and still the problem persists. I've had the drivers in question installed for roughly a week beforehand with no problems. I decided to try some older drivers from December and ran both CCleaner and malwarebytes. CCleaner showed quite a bit of registry stuff that was off, though I think the bulk of that was related to programs that have been deleted off my PC but not entirely removed. I regret not looking at everything closer. Malwarebytes only showed a couple PUPs, nothing horrible that should be causing those issues. One way or another something worked and I was able to login after restarting and everything seemed fine. Starbound ran fine with no artifacting.

Yesterday however playing another more graphically intense game (Rainbow 6 Siege) I got the dreaded BSOD. atikmdag.sys was apparently the culprit. Which to me means drivers, except for the fact that I must have wiped and clean installed at least 5 times in the past 2 days. A day later I am now BSODing on boot before I even get to the windows login screen.

I've had this GPU since April 2016 and as far as I can recall only started having these issues over the past couple months. I'm sort of at a loss at this point beyond trying to get Amazon to take this GPU back and switching over to NVIDIA.

TL;DR Artifacting in a non-graphics intensive game with normal temps. About a week after installing the newest AMD drivers I get a black screen shortly after logging in to windows. Problem persisted after DDU uninstalling and reinstalling the same drivers. Problem fixed after going back to older drivers as well as a CCleaner sweep and Malwarebytes scan. No more artifacting in the game from earlier. A day later I BSOD during a different game with a atikmdag.sys apparently the problem. And now I'm BSODing before I can even login. GPU bought in April and seems to have been working fine until a couple months ago. What do I do?
 
Sounds like your northbridge on your motherboard is cooked to me. Could be nothing wrong with the gpu. How's your case airflow? Prolonged gaming can get the Mboard too hot if case airflow is lacking.
 


I would think Amazon is out of the loop at this point. I Purchased my card from EVGA. From day one with that card there was this weird GFX snow that would happen at game startup and at boot sometimes. A GFX card disable and enable would clear it up. Called EVGA, tried troubleshooting with no success. It wasn't a HUGE inconvenience so I decided to not RMA it. Then it died. I received my RMA approval and exchanged it. I'd do the same with Sapphire.
 
Quick update: I uninstalled drivers in DDU and uninstalled Daemon Tools because WhoCrashed flagged its associated driver as well. I'm still getting a BSOD when I try to boot into normal windows though.

Edit Apparently at some point I enabled microsoft's driver verifier. Also you're apparently supposed to turn that off or you end up in BSOD city. Managed login and install the newest set of AMD drivers. Hopefully my problems end there.

Edit 2 for anyone with a similar problem I believe that the core issue was actually a very old Daemon Tools driver leftover on the system for some reason. Between disabling driver verifier, and deleting the old DT driver my system seems to be fairly stable again (knock on wood). Funny how such a small thing can cause such havoc on a system.