Hello all,
Well, i'll get right to the problem at hand.
I have a Sapphire 4870 512mb videocard. Over the past three - four months, I've had some issues. Nothing huge that would make me need to get a new videocard ASAP, but it has become quite an annoyance.
There are two different things that happen with this card. This, so far, has happened in most of the games I have (COD:5,WoW, TF2, etc etc) so it isn't one games problem.
1. The game will hang, sometimes for half a second, sometimes for 5 seconds, then the card will sound like it restarted itself. In COD:5 this will usually kick me out of the game (multiplayer) but other games like TF2 or something else will just recover right away. But there is always an error message that comes along with it "Display driver atikmdag has stopped responding and has recovered." I looked this problem up for a while and found no solutions, and no real causes. The only thing that has really made much sense was that there is a delay in the videocard, and some setting in vista causes it to shut the program down. This may happen a couple times a day, maybe 5 at the most in a day.
2. The monitor will just go blank. Then a "No Signal" box will pop up on my Acer 20" widescreen monitor, after about 5 seconds the monitor will just go into power saving mode. Even if I wait for a while, nothing ever comes back on the screen. Its like the videocard shut the display off. This problem is the rare one I get. I might get it once every other day (say 6+ hours of computer use, 4ish 3d gaming).
Now, its either a driver issue that nobody, not even ATI or Vista have found a fix for, or my card is bad. I have checked everything out on the card before, RAM works fine, everything displays fine. The card is not overclocked, and the MAX I have seen the temp at is 58c, which is well within the normal limits of a video card I believe.
So what could be the problem here? Everything I read or think about just brings me right back to driver issues, or the Vista thing. My drivers are up to date, my card is at a workable temperature.
Also, as a side question. Before I really had this issue, I was thinking about buying a second 4870 and running them in crossfire mode. But my motherboard (Gigabyte EP45-UD3P) only runs crossfire at the x8 speed. Will this cause any problems, will it even be worth it to buy a second one and crossfire them if they are both running x8 x8?
Thanks for all responses in advance.
Well, i'll get right to the problem at hand.
I have a Sapphire 4870 512mb videocard. Over the past three - four months, I've had some issues. Nothing huge that would make me need to get a new videocard ASAP, but it has become quite an annoyance.
There are two different things that happen with this card. This, so far, has happened in most of the games I have (COD:5,WoW, TF2, etc etc) so it isn't one games problem.
1. The game will hang, sometimes for half a second, sometimes for 5 seconds, then the card will sound like it restarted itself. In COD:5 this will usually kick me out of the game (multiplayer) but other games like TF2 or something else will just recover right away. But there is always an error message that comes along with it "Display driver atikmdag has stopped responding and has recovered." I looked this problem up for a while and found no solutions, and no real causes. The only thing that has really made much sense was that there is a delay in the videocard, and some setting in vista causes it to shut the program down. This may happen a couple times a day, maybe 5 at the most in a day.
2. The monitor will just go blank. Then a "No Signal" box will pop up on my Acer 20" widescreen monitor, after about 5 seconds the monitor will just go into power saving mode. Even if I wait for a while, nothing ever comes back on the screen. Its like the videocard shut the display off. This problem is the rare one I get. I might get it once every other day (say 6+ hours of computer use, 4ish 3d gaming).
Now, its either a driver issue that nobody, not even ATI or Vista have found a fix for, or my card is bad. I have checked everything out on the card before, RAM works fine, everything displays fine. The card is not overclocked, and the MAX I have seen the temp at is 58c, which is well within the normal limits of a video card I believe.
So what could be the problem here? Everything I read or think about just brings me right back to driver issues, or the Vista thing. My drivers are up to date, my card is at a workable temperature.
Also, as a side question. Before I really had this issue, I was thinking about buying a second 4870 and running them in crossfire mode. But my motherboard (Gigabyte EP45-UD3P) only runs crossfire at the x8 speed. Will this cause any problems, will it even be worth it to buy a second one and crossfire them if they are both running x8 x8?
Thanks for all responses in advance.