Troubleshoot AMD videocard crashing.

[Mathius]

Where to start......

I run my HD 4870 which to be fair to it is still a pretty decent card for the stuff I use it for.......
It was bought 2nd hand form ebay, and has run fine apart from twice.

#1
About 5-6months of use it started to get the atimkdag.sys driver error, but after a lot of searching, I found there is no real fix......eventually this seemed to fix itself and was running fine for the last 4 months....

#2
Last night while playing COD4 my screen just went black and got the No Video Signal message, shortly after the game sounds froze up.....(black screen crash)

Now, I removed the card, cleaned it up, and got rid of dust and put it all back together again and booted up....

I can do everything fine (web browse, watching films, youtube, emails, even posting this thread) but when I try to play COD4, MW3, BO2 or Tricky Truck its loads each of the menu screens, but when it actually goes to load the play screen (where you can start moving around) I get a variety of different crash screens.....

Sometimes its a black-white vertical lines screen, other times it can be plain white with flashing red squares all over the place and even straight to BSoD (atimkdag.sys)

All things I've done in the past dont seem to be working, but what is getting me is that if I dont load a games, everything is fine.

I've just used Driversweeper to remove all AMD, and uninstalled the Device manager 4800 series driver... and have installed the catalyst set 13.1 so I'm back to where I was in regards of drivers, just this time all fresh...

Am I missing something ?


Edit:
I'm soon to be looking at getting an upgrade to a 7950/760/670 kinda card, but for now I want to sort this out....

 

[tinytomlogan]

Card is broken mate, probably memory.

 

[SuB]

What card did you have previous to this one?

 

[WYP]

I have to agree with tom on this. It sounds broken.

with you uninstalling, then sweeping and reinstalling the drivers, that takes a software issue out of the equation. Which sadly only leaves the card at fault, not surprising given how old that card is.

 

[Mathius]

Dammit, my suspicions were correct then.

The 4870 has been the only card since it was built....

I'll be trying my wife's 7750 to rule out anything else though.

looks like im heading to the wanted section..... Lol


EDIT
I've inspected my card for any blown capacitors etc, at it looks fine.....
Best software to use to test my videocard to find faults......I heard bad things about Furmark cooking videocards

 

[SuB]

yeah don't use furmark.

 

[Excalabur50]

You could also try putting new thermal paste on as if your card was dirty and old it has probably dried out and is over heating

 

[CrazyRussian]

To me it looks like you GPU is failing, it is quite common on old cards, i doubt that is is the memory.

Most of the time it GPU soldering problems, there are ways you can fix this , but it is temporary.
if you are tight on budget , you can try to go with the fix,
if you have a heatgun.

 

[Mathius]

I'm running the card on a Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo II which I sorted my self, including the ram heatsinks and has been fine......

After a lot of Crashes and Trial and Errors, I've got my card semi-working.....

I've had to set the card up using:
GPU Clock 500mhz
Memory Clock 900mhz

Which is a serious underclock, but it does mean that i can still play my games......
It should buy me enough time to source a 7950 performance card, hopefully around the £150 mark (as i have this currently saved), but I might end up getting a 7870 Tahiti from a retailer with the Warranty.....

 

[CrazyRussian]

just want to say, until the card is fixed, you can run it as cool as you want even on liquid nitrogen it still will not work