Graphics driver crashes, forced to reboot

Hactar the Epic

Reputable
Feb 23, 2015
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4,510
I have been running on my home-built Windows 8.1 PC now for several months without problems. I have a Radeon HD 6570, but in the last few days it has been giving me some strange problems.

At first, sometimes when I wake the computer from sleep it would turn on like normal, but immediately after anything shows on the screen, the monitor switches into "ANALOG - POWER SAVING MODE" as though it were no longer receiving a signal from my computer (which very likely is the case). I had some hotkeys set up for other reasons that give audio feedback, but I found that when this happens they only made sound less than a second after the screen went blank, as though the computer crashed.

And then sometimes, instead of blacking out, it would turn blue (the save color as the Windows 8 BSOD) with scary glitchy horizontal lines through it, as though the computer has tried to BSOD but the display had screwed up before it could.
Now it's started happening randomly, not just when waking up from prolonged sleep. At one point the screen turned to black, then seemed to recover, and Windows gave the classic "Display driver has stopped working and had now been recovered. So I checked the graphics drivers and they are up to date, and I figured I should try rolling then back. After clicking the rollback button in the Windows Device Manager, it flashed black for a second, then normal, and then again as it works when messing with video card drivers. Then it gave me another message about video drivers not working and recovering, and blocked out yet again.

The next time I rebooted, I got some scary distortion (not major, but similar to the BSOD distortion from before) and, because I couldn't make out the screen too clearly, it booted into Linux, installed on a separate partition of my SSD. Linux also crashed the same way as Windows after a moment.

Back when the first crash happened after waking from sleep, I checked to make sure my video card was held firmly in place (and it was).

Thanks in advance!

P.S. Sorry if there are some errors in here, I'm typing this on a phone with SwipeType, which isn't the most reliable thing in the universe...