Issues with 4670/4870

[nednet]

I recently made a new build consisting of an AMD Phenom II X4 955, an ASUS M4A79XTD EVO, 4GB of G.Skill DDR3 1333, a Cooler Master 550w power supply, and an ASUS EAH4670 512MB. Installed Win7 64bit fine, installed all of the latest drivers, and didn't touch any overclocking whatsoever. I was able to watch youtube videos and all of your regular desktop functions completely fine, but when I booted up Modern Warfare 2, it would crash to the desktop with a bubble coming form the Catalyst icon saying that the display driver has stopped responding and has recovered. Wondering if it was just an issue with MW2, I installed a couple steam games and had the exact same problem. I poked around online and a lot of people seemed to be having the same issue and pointed to bad ATI drivers, and to try out older drivers. I downloaded old drivers, tried the ones from Asus's website, and using Driver Sweeper to make sure everything gets wiped after every install. I even went as far as reformatting a couple times, and still no luck.

Wanting to be absolutely sure it was a video problem, I ran Memtest 86+, one stick at a time, 2 passes on each stick. Both came back with no errors. For shits and grins I pulled my 9600 GT out of my other machine and plunked it in, and sure enough, runs like a champ. Chocked it up to a bad part, so I sent it back to Newegg and bought a VisionTek HD4870 512MB at Microcenter as I don't want to be without a card for more than a week.

Get home, install the 4870, and sure enough, same "device has stopped responding and has recovered" issue. Does ATI really have such crappy drivers, or am I just going out of my mind crazy? This is my first time purchasing ATI products, and as the motherboard I bought has Crossfire support, I was hoping to in a couple months buy a second card to upgrade. I'm very tempted to just return the 4870 and go back to Nvidia and forget about Crossfire.

Is anybody else having a similar issue or have some advice as to a solution?

 

[hellraiser06]

Please mention the exact model of the PSU you are using...

 

[nednet]

It's a Cooler Master eXtreme Power RS550.

 

[hellraiser06]

CM extreme power series is considered bad by a majority of people. Although, 550W is plenty for a 4760, I think you should consider checking another PSU with the card. Corsair, PCP&C, OCZ, Antec, Cooler Master Real power (note: not the extreme power) etc. Any good 550W or greater PSU should be enough for a 4870 and plenty for a 4760. Also, try downloading the latest drivers directly from the ATI website, if you havent done that already.

 

[nednet]

CM extreme power series is considered bad by a majority of people. Although, 550W is plenty for a 4760, I think you should consider checking another PSU with the card. Corsair, PCP&C, OCZ, Antec, Cooler Master Real power (note: not the extreme power) etc. Any good 550W or greater PSU should be enough for a 4870 and plenty for a 4760. Also, try downloading the latest drivers directly from the ATI website, if you havent done that already.

The thing is if it were a power issue, the computer would just fail and reboot, not kick back to the desktop. I've tried the latest drivers as well as old.

I have been able to run Left 4 Dead 2 at 1600x1200 with all settings set to max for a good hour, which is making me even more confused.

 

[hellraiser06]

You mean, you have been able to run LFD2 on 4670 or 4870 or 9600GT?

Also, as you know, Gfx cards consume different amount of power depending on if they are idle or on full load. Many a times when the PSU cant supply enough power, then the gfx card can work fine when idle but not when its on load as the psu might not be capable to meet the new power requirements.

Man, if its not the PSU, then I dont know where should I start helping you. But as you can see in my sig, I have a full ATI AMD setup. And everything is working fine for me. The difference is that I have a quality PSU, which you dont.

So, please answer on what card you ran L4D2?

 

[nednet]

You mean, you have been able to run LFD2 on 4670 or 4870 or 9600GT?

Also, as you know, Gfx cards consume different amount of power depending on if they are idle or on full load. Many a times when the PSU cant supply enough power, then the gfx card can work fine when idle but not when its on load as the psu might not be capable to meet the new power requirements.

Man, if its not the PSU, then I dont know where should I start helping you. But as you can see in my sig, I have a full ATI AMD setup. And everything is working fine for me. The difference is that I have a quality PSU, which you dont.

So, please answer on what card you ran L4D2?

Sorry to mention that, I was able to run l4d2 on the 4870. What makes me highly doubt it's the PSU is that the 4870 takes two 6-pin connectors and runs a modern (though not very demanding) game completely fine at max settings and other games fail miserably?

I guess I came to a breakthrough, as the last time I tried opening MW2, it BSOD and listed an error with the atikmdag.sys file.

 

[hellraiser06]

What other games apart from COD MW2 are failing on you?

 

[JofaMang]

That sounds like a faulty card, considering the lengths you have gone through to diagnose the issue.

It could also be a heat issue causing the card to crash. Download GPU-Z, enable background refreshing in the sensors tab, and see how the temps are before and after a crash. An easy way to see if it is heat from poor ventilation would be to run the PC with the side of the case off. If that doesn't solve or reduce the issue, then I would look at obtaining an RMA on the card. You have obviously isolated the issue (GPU) and done everything properly with the drivers, so replacing the card (through warranty i hope) might be the only solution if heat is not a possible cause.

Tell us your temps after downloading GPU-Z, and how running with the side of the case off treats you.

 

[nednet]

What other games apart from COD MW2 are failing on you?

Other games that fail are Dragon Age and Unreal Tournament 3.

I also installed Team Fortress 2, and that runs great.

Searching for atikmdag.sys gave me this : http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=260&threadid=104677

atikmdag.sys is the video driver itself, and that the error could be anything, but at this point I can only deduce it's something to do with the motherboard drivers and the video drivers, or maybe something in the BIOS settings. I think this especially as I put the 4870 in my old machine and it runs all previously mentioned unplayable games fine.

 

[hellraiser06]

What PSU is the other machine using?

Also, can you try that PSU with your current rig?

And, please do what Jofa has said. It might be the poor ventilation in the cabinet too.

 

[JofaMang]

Editted to remove my stupidity from lack of sleep. Will check in on the thread in the morning! Good Luck~

 

[hellraiser06]

Jofa, he has been having problems with 4670 as well as 4870. So I have eliminated GPU as a problem for right now. Especially, since the card works perfectly fine in the other machine. I still think its the PSU, but I am waiting for the OP to answer as to which PSU he is using in the other machine.

 

[Dirty Durden]

I was having the same problem but with the first one Modern Warfare & after a couple phone calls to Activision. We figured out it was a the audio driver not updated &/or missing crash the game. I updated the driver & everything works fine

Hope that helps

 

[flyinfinni]

I actually had a very similar problem with both a 4830 and 4870 in my old DFI board. (running an MSI now) but it turned out to be a problem with the PCI-E x16 slot itself. however, running an older less powerful card (NVidia Geforce 7300GT) worked fine. Once I swapped my 4870 to the second PCI-E slot on my MB, it ran fine. (I then RMA'd the board). You may just want to try moving your card to the second PCI-Ex16 slot.

 

[nednet]

Ok, so I tried using the other power supply (which is a Thermaltake 500W) and it still gave me the same issue.

I tried Dirty Durdens suggestion of replacing the audio drivers, nothing changed.

Finally I tried flyinfinini's suggestion of changing the slots. It played Dragon Age for 2 minutes, and then crashed.

Next I went through my BIOS and disabled all unused devices, disabled Cool'n'Quiet, and ensured all other settings were set to default. This had absolutely no effect on anything.

I then ran Prime95 for 3 hours to see if it was my CPU, as I was reading a faulty CPU can sometimes give crazy issues like this. Everything passed, no errors.

I went through the event viewer to see what was happening during/just before the crash, and everything points to the display driver.

This absolutely has to be a driver issue as my 9600 GT has absolutely no issues in this computer, and I have no idea why a crossfire motherboard would have no issues with a Nvidia card but have major issues with any ATI card I try to use.

At this point I just want to return the card and get a GTS 250/260 and just forget about ATI cards. Driver issue horror stories from friends is what kept me away from ATI when building my last computer, but I that was 2 1/2 years ago and a couple of my friends had great experience with them as of recent.

 

[flyinfinni]

Do you have another PSU you could try? I know 500W should be fine for a 4870, but I just know that my old 500W PSU (OCZ ModStream) would cause my 4870 to crash. Another way to look is to leave your case open and watch the LED's on the backside of the GPU PCB- there should be 4 red LEDs. They'll light up (I think all 4) if there is a power fault.

 

[nednet]

I've tried two different PSU's, and both don't work in this machine. The 4870 works in my other computer with an old MSI intel board and the 500W PSU previously mentioned, but won't run with my ASUS M4A79XTD EVO.

That and there's no LED's on the back of my GPU. Must be something specific to yours.

 

[sgoodwin]

Just put this together: Athlon II X4 620 (no OC), Biostar A785GE, 2x2 gig G-skill 1066 5-5-5-15, Sapphire 4870 512 meg PCI-E. CoolMAX 500w PSU. I'm still runnning XP Pro 32-bit SP2.

Everything seemed fine until I tried to install the 9.9 CCC drivers. Each time I got a BSOD during the software installation (weird) until I gave up. I ended up installing simple reference drivers (9.9) which seemd to work ok.

However, I ended up deleting all of it (+ driver sweeper) and going back to CCC 8.8 which seemed to be well recommended. That installed and worked fine. I was nervous about the power supply though after reading on the Sapphire site that the 4870 required MIN 500w + 36Amps.

My new PSU was only rated at 32 Amps so I took it back and upgraded to a 600w with 42A. I'm sorry I don't remember the make but it was name brand and not generic. Everything seems to be running fine now, but I've only had a couple of hours on it so far. Fingers crossed.


Cheers,
Simon

 

[nednet]

Alright, I've been working on this for a while now, and I finally found an error in the event log that stood out:

A fatal hardware error has occurred.

Component: AMD Northbridge
Error Source: Machine Check Exception
Error Type: HyperTransport Watchdog Timeout Error
Processor ID: 0

The details view of this entry contains further information.

Now could a faulty Northbridge prevent ATI cards from functioning properly but allow Nvidia cards to run completely fine?

 

[wh3resmycar]

try connecting a microphone on your soundcard's mic jack.