ATI card gray screen/black lines

Hopeing someone might be able to tell me if the ATI gray screen w/ black lines problem is driver related or something in the hardware? 

@Justin.kerr...you hear about this?  Know of any fixes?

Thanks for responding.  I really hope your new card will not give you any problems. 

i've had 2 defective cards now (different issues latest was the gray screen).  What would your advise be?  Keep trying or hold off for a while? I currently have no GPU.  My budget for a GPU is $400ish dollars.  Any ideas?

It's supposed to get here Tuesday ( hope I'm at home when they deliver ) once I get it installed and running will post here and let you know.

Originally posted by parallox Not sure if this helps at all, but years ago, I had an ATI all in wonder that had problems with memory corruption. Although it does not sound like the same problem you are having, I fixed my problem by getting a 3rd party software app that would allow me to turn down the memory clocking on the ATI card. For some reason, and I am not sure if it still holds true, but ATI overclocked the memory on the video cards. By tuning down the memory speed just right, I never had any issues. If you think it would help, I can try to dig thru some old backups and figuring out what my old software app was.

Actually that is helpful information. Thanks.  

Originally posted by mercman So I just installed my replacement card and so far, minus some other issues, it seems to be working okay. Haven't run any tests but my crash always happened at start up and I haven't had any yet. If anything happens will post here. Hope you have luck with yours AndydViking!

So far so good on my end here as well.  Crossing my fingers it'll stay that way.  Glad to see all is well with you thus far.

Started my comp up this morning and got another solid screen crash twice so I just kept it off. Will call DS today to see what can be done next.

edit: well just for kicks thought I'd restart it up one more time and it ran windows repair, since I've got windows problems from having to reset and/or hard restart, and did a system restore and I am able to get into desktop, haven't tried playing WoW yet. I did turn my OC off. I am now thinking of buying an Nvidia card to see if I experience anything like this with it. That way I will also have an extra card just in case I run into future issues. If I get the Nvidia card will I need to do anything besides plugging it in and downloading the drivers? Should I remove all ATI stuff first? From reading the posts in mainly the AMD game forums some have gotten the ATI card to work by adjusting the voltages and mem clocks for their card, would that make it a hardware problem or can that be solved by a driver update?

Another problem I encountered yesterday is that I tried reinstalling windows and at the screen where it asks to boot from cd drive it just hangs, the light on the drive is running and the light that shows that the comp is writing to disk runs but it just hangs. I get through where it asks for what drive to boot from, I pick CD, then it asks again and I pick the actual name of that drive, I think it's an Opteric? then I think you need to press any key to boot from it and that is where it just hangs. Maybe I need to return my whole system back to DS and have them look into all of these issues. It kind of sucks because when it's working it's an amazing system but when it's not, ugh.


Edited by mercman - 21 Jan 2010 at 9:55am

Hey AndydViking,

The colors vary from what my desktop is displaying, I use the windows architecture theme and the color of crash seems to be related to the background color. I've had gray, blue, red and brown crashes and the desktop background that was displayed at the time basically matched the color of the crash. This morning it was showing, I think, the EMP building, with bronze color and I got a brown screen crash.

When I get home I'm going to try to run memtest again, before I could test individual sticks but not all 3 at the same time, no errors were found, but I also ran Prime95 and let that run over night with all 3 sticks of ram in and no errors. I know windows is messed up from all the hard resets/restarts so that will need to be reinstalled but no point in doing that until the crashes are fixed. I left my comp on today so hopefully when I get home from work it will be working relatively fine and I can try to run memtest again. Not sure what to try after that, maybe I will try to adjust the voltages/mem clocks on the card like was posted in the AMD forum, but like you, for me that isn't a fix. Maybe the new drivers for the card will fix it, they are suppose to come out next week.

Glad all is going well with your card and I hope it continues!

Thanks I hadn't tried FurMark but will. DS tech just had me try turning my oc off/on and running memtest and prime95 when I originally contacted them. So memtest is for RAM, Prime95 is for cpu, and Furmark is for gpu. Hmm maybe there is a RAM issue as well since I wasn't able to run memtest with all 3 sticks in but still passed Prime95 overnight with no errors.

Is down clocking pretty straight forward? Never done anything like that. Would I go into CCC activate overdrive and mess with the settings there?

Thanks for the help!

edit: Is FurMark compatible with windows 7 64 bit? It says version 1.7.0 is xp/vista 32 bit.


Edited by mercman - 21 Jan 2010 at 5:59pm

Thanks.
edit: I did see that I was using memtest 3.5 so I d/l'd 4.0 and will try that as well.

Thanks Again!


Edited by mercman - 21 Jan 2010 at 7:04pm

Thanks parallox!

The temps and FPS sound right to me as far as I can tell.  Those are almost the same numbers I get with my good (at least so far) card.

My card would gray screen a few seconds into a game then it would also gray screen in furmark very quickly.

Originally posted by philiporphillip http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ATI-Radeon-Grey-Screen-Crash,9529.html

lol was gonna post this as well.  I am glad that a major site has included this.

Looks like Tom's mentioning this got ATI to pipe up a bit on the subject...

Looks like they are getting ready to release the hot fix for this issue. I will follow their forums to see if it really helps.

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/Grey-screen-and-vertical-line-corruptions.aspx

Well, sad to say that I have been verrrrry lazy and haven't done the HDD diagnostics test and the overnight memtest yet. I know, I know, I should get my butt in gear and get it done ( especially since I can do both of them while I sleep ) but since I got it stable and it's running error free I wanted to enjoy it until their hot fix came out and got some reviews about it. This weekend should produce a lot of comments about the hot fix.

It just seems weird that when I get it stable at desktop, as long as I don't turn it off for any length of time, it runs fantastic! I have been enjoying it but maybe not so much when I get my next power bill.

I will post on any tests that I do and if/when I use the hot fix.

Thanks for keeping up on this topic and helping me, I appreciate the support group lol. I assume your running error free?

Merc

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ATI-Grey-Screen-Lines-Fix,9604.html