GPU drivers stopping windows booting

[Kanped]

Hi guys, wondering if anyone here can offer some advice before I resort to a new card and GPU (maybe time for an update, anyway but still...)

So, I was playing a game and the PC crashed to gray screen, unresponsive to alt-tab etc.
Powered off and on. When windows was loading the drivers after the reboot, it crashed to a glitchy screen (usually coloured vertical lines, sometimes scrambled colours; just messy graphics info, basically).
Safe mode works, used this to uninstall the GPU drivers (I have 2 7850HDs in crossfire). PC now boots fine and Windows reinstalls the drivers.
On reboot after the drivers reinstalled, I got the same graphical corruption and boot failure. Nothing in the Event Log shows what caused the initial crash (critical power failure of me turning the PC off is there, nothing of interest before it) and I've not found anything pointing to the cause of the boot failure, which makes sense because it happens before the logger would be running, I think?

Really hoping this isn't a hardware issue... although, it shouldn't be because even in safe mode, I'm running through the GPUs, just not using the drivers but anyway, what would you guys recommend I try next?

 

[Wraith]

Well running in safe mode will not utilise the GPUs the same as with Drivers in "Normal" mode, the cards will only be seen as generic VGA output. The driver enables the higher level 3D acceleration functions.

Which drivers were you using at the time of the crash/artifacts? Bare in mind that artifacting could be a sign of GPU die or VRAM failure.

Have you tried rolling back to a previous driver?

If your using Crimson try going back to the older style drivers with catalyst, I'm reading reports lately of none R series cards being damaged or even bricked through Crimson.

 

[Kanped]

I am using crimson, with the latest drivers. Damn. Right, well that's something to try. Hopefully if it did mess up something on the hardware level, it only hit one of the cards and I can drop down to one in the meantime.
I was looking t replacements and it seems mad not to wait for the GTX 1070 at this point but, you know... waiting.

Installed an older driver but still no boot. Took the primary card out and now I'm just running off the other one; that works fine and should keep em going until the OEM 1070s come out. Seems to me like you're right about the Crimson issue. Ah well. I'll live.

Thanks very much for the help!

 

[Kilbane]

My old 7970 had issues on Crimson drivers, the issue was HotFixed in a subsequent release. Luckily it is back working again now, unfortunately I did have to underclock it to get rid of some artifacting that was still present.

 

[NeverBackDown]

Use the latest non Crimson driver and if that doesn't work, try an older version of the Crimson driver.

If that doesn't work (assuming you installed/uninstalled correctly) I would try using only one card at a time(will require driver reinstall) to see if either reproduces the issue. As lines on the screen with glitches tends to be Vram/Memory related

 

[Kanped]

Yeah, it won't boot on one of the cards, but boots fine with the other one (and the one not booting seems to be getting really hot, for whatever reason? Much hotter than the booting one, anyway. Tried air-dusting it just in case but still a no-go).
Tried changing the PCI ports around as well, just to make sure it wasn't the board. Ah well; I can live with a 7850 until the 1070 OEMs hit, it's not so bad.

 

[NeverBackDown]

Yeah seems more of a hardware thing then. Memory may be starting to go and if the core itself is getting hot, depending on how old that card is, thermal paste may just be old and losing it's effectiveness.

 

[Kanped]

I would guess it has had about 5000 hours of use. One is around 8 months older than the other IIRC. Damn good run, really.

 

[NeverBackDown]

Not bad at all. Got your money's worth for sure in the end

 

[Tolemac]

If I were you I would wait and see what the RX480 brings to the table later this month fella

 

[Kanped]

I'll be keeping an eye on it for sure. Looking like the price/performance ratio is going to be very good on it for sure. With my budget, though, it'd be another crossfire setup, and in fairness, that may be considerably more powerful than the single 1070 but it could also be a little more hassle, depending on any issues I might run into. The other thing is that AMD's performance really seems to shine on Direct X 12 but I'm staying on Win 7 for the time being due to Win 10 introducing an unacceptable level of latency when using ASIO drivers.
Raw power, though, it could still be a winner. We'll see