Ok....I live in Weirdville. Just keep that in mind.
I reported on 12/7/2010 that Memtest found bad ram...and was willing to
accept that as the problem with my Sapphire ATI 5770 card.
Well, naturally, even after having tested this RAM extensively early
this year, I wanted to know which of the four stick of ram were bad.
And let me say that I ran Memetest several times on this on system
before doing anything inside the box..and it was reporting errors within
minutes of having started the run (I have 8 GB of DDR2 ram in this box,
2GB each, with all of 4 slots filled).
So, I pull the sticks from slots 2 and 4 and leave the sticks in slots 1
and 3 (dual channel mode requirements). Run memtest....no problems. I
think I went up to 9 hours of testing, but with several tests.
Ok...maybe it's the other two sticks (or slots). So, I remove the
sticks in slots 1 and 3 and put the stick that was in slot 2 in slot 1
and that that was in slot 4 in slot 3. So, I'm just testing the other
two sticks in the other two slots (thinking the slot might be bad). Test
that...memtest finds no problems! Ok...maybe it's either slot 2 or 4
that are bad. So, I leave the two sticks currently in the system there,
but put the first two sticks in the slots where the second pair were.
So, this gives me a situation where the pairs have been swapped into the
other pair of slots. I run memtest again but this time for 24+ hours.
No errors.
And all the while, in between memtest runs, the ATI driver keeps
quitting. This morning it was quitting like every 5 or 6 minutes,
though the frequent that this occurs with is oddly varying...it
sometimes goes several hours without problems, and then starts up again.
So, now, after all of that, I have the HIS ATI 5770 card in the system.
This is one one I bought back in January and ended up thinking it was
bad. I didnt want to deal with getting an RMA because of the hassle
factor [HIS has a poor rep among Newegg users]. I ran that card with the
version 9 ATI drivers. It worked at first but finally got so bad I
could use it [just crashing WEI, driver quit working, etc.]. We, it
seems to be working now. It got through two runs of WEI so far without a
crash...but I have the 10x version of the ATI drivers. I'm not very
confident in drawing any conclusions, though, but right now it seems
that different versions of these cards have different issues with ATI
drivers. These cards aren't exactly the same, either. The HIS version
only has one DVI connector while the Sapphire has two. The
heatsink/fan/cover combination differ and give them a different look.
Win7 didn't load a new driver when I booted with the HIS in after taking
the Sapphire out.
I've been dealing with Sapphire tech support since 12/7. They now are
asking me to send my receipt in to get an RAM. I guess I'll find out if
this HIS card really works or not. If not, I can go back to my old
nVidia GTX 8800, which is in my other machine.
What a friggin nightmare!
Still waiting on a driver failure, though.
On 12/8/2010 8:24 AM, Anthony Q. Martin wrote:
The sad part is that I did extensive testing with Memtest earlier this
year when I put this box together. I started with 4 GB and then went
to 8GB. I had trouble with the second set of ram....that brought on
the MEMTEST testing which helped me to find which sticks were bad.
Everything was fine until a few days ago.
I'm going to pull all this ram and reseat and retest. It's hard to
see why RAM would go bad. This is the RAM i'm using:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002845LDC/ref=wms_ohs_product
On 12/8/2010 4:40 AM, Joshua MacCraw wrote:
Good to hear! I lost weeks on a system the user swore went unstable
w/o any changes. Only to try Memtest86 in desperation after several
reinstalls of windows, bad cheap no-name RAM upgrade was culprit.
On 12/7/2010 9:21 PM, Anthony Q. Martin wrote:
Memtest found error in under 12 minutes.
Sent from my Droid Incredible.
----- Reply message -----
From: "Joshua MacCraw"<[email protected]>
Date: Tue, Dec 7, 2010 6:19 pm
Subject: [H] ATI 5770 Card gone bad?
To:<[email protected]>
Could be, couldn't hurt to boot Memtest86+& do an overnight scan.
Best test is card in another system. Thoughts would wander towards
the PSU output vs. load also.
Trick I find with ATI drivers is the crash recovery trigger is too
sensitive timing (timeout?) wise thus wants to reset even when the
card may have to continued to respond, this for no other reason than
loose timing caused by high video+cpu+hdd loads IMHO.
So even when they work they hickup more often then they should.
On 12/7/2010 1:49 AM, Winterlight wrote:
Actually, it sounds like bad RAM to me.
At 11:36 PM 12/6/2010, you wrote:
Thanks, I got it.
I used ATI Install Manger to remove the driver. Rebooted.
Then I removed the driver that was installed in Device Manager.
Then I used Driver Cleaner.net to remove all ATI drivers.
Rebooted.
Got GPU-Z running.
Now, the driver is back. I guess Win7 is reloading the driver.
I don't see anything strange here. GPU Temp is 41C, fan speed is 35%,
and the 3 GPU temps are 38.5 to 41C.
Yet, the problem persists. Even while typing this out...the screen
freezes, then the screen goes dark, then it returns with a message
saying that the video card driver failed and restarted. This just
started happening today.
On 12/7/2010 2:15 AM, Mini Me wrote:
techPowerUp!'s GPUz
