Displays Inacceptable brand new MSI Ati 7870 hawk

Hello guys, I feel really angry now. Bought a MSI R7870 Hawk edition ati radeon hd7870 graphic card for my new pc with following spec:

Asus Maximus V gene
Intel i5 3570K
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo
Crucial m4 120 Go
WD Black Caviar 2 To
Kingston Hyperx Beast 8 Go 1600Mhz
Corsair GS600W
Fractal Design Arc Midi Tower

Everything worked perfectly until today, I have installed the new graphic card from ATI.
-The installation was easy
-the connection to the monitor(HDMI) was easy.
-The PC recognize the graphic card, the installation of the newest driver from official ATI siteweb was simple
(http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonaiw_vista64.aspx)
-I don't touch any configuration from Catalyst Control Center.

I launched the first game, sleeping dogs, after the cinematic, troubles are coming. The display suddenly changed to this picture,



and the PC is totally frozen, with some strange gizzy sound from the speaker. I cannot do anything, not ctrl+alt+del, nor alt+f4. The only thing I can do is to press on the reset button of the PC.

I tried with Diablo 3 too, same thing was happened to me. It happened very randomly. sometime 5 minutes after I launched the game, sometime 20 minutes.

I tried with League of legends too, this game has the worst situation, the problem happened 3 or 4 time during one match. Very annoying. Sometime the screen has the picture i linked, some time it is black screen with some game sound repeat infinitely...

i tried reinstall the driver, nothing changes. I am about to break my pc in two if it continues. So I tried to calm down and look for some help here. I would really appreciate if you can give me some advice. Thank you in advance.

 

Hey there, sorry about this happening to you.

Have you tried benchmarking it using Heaven DX11? It would be my first choice to see if the card can handle this also.

Before doing so, try reseating the card and boot into safe mode to install the drivers that way instead.

 

could be your ram

manually downclock it see if that fixes the issue. Run mem test too perhaps

 

Had something do the same about two weeks ago. Turned out the corsair cx500 had pooped its pants and as soon as it became loaded it displayed same sort of thing

 

Had a similar issue a couple of years ago when I tried running 2x GTX 280's on a OCZ 850w PSU and it was all down to the fact that the PSU didn't have enough AMP's on the 12V rails apparently to support, both of the cards being ran in SLI but could handle them being ran on there own.

Changed the PSU to a 1kw Coolermaster and it ran fine.


@OP

It could be your psu at fault not having enough power to power both cards at the same time however I would run Unigine Heaven 1st to see if the same thing, happens and then if it does then test each card on it's own in the each slot on the board if possible to rule out a faulty card.

 

Thank you for your replies guys.

I have run Engine Heaven DirectX 11 test. Nothing happened during 8 minutes. Everything seem to be fine. So I don't get it. In such as a heavy load of GPU, i don't have crash, whereas I had several crashed during crappy League of Legends games. What is the point?

Also, I noticed another thing. When I first time and second time install the GPU driver, the screen doesn't flicker and goes blank as the installation message mentioned. Usually, with my previous pc, when i tried to install a new driver, the screen usually flicker and goes blank and then come back. But with this graphic card, it didn't do that at all.

Can someone explain me why?


"could be your ram

manually downclock it see if that fixes the issue. Run mem test too perhaps"

Indeed, the initial frequency of the RAM is 1333 MHZ and was set to Auto. I wanted to benefit the max performance from my RAM, so i set it manually to 1600MHz. Do you guys think that it could be the cause?

 

Run everything stock when trying to diagnose hardware failure.

I have some uber lame Gskill that wont clock above 1333mhz and that causes the system to spaz out if set to say 1600mhz.

 

I have dl the Graphic Card driver from MSI official site web, since the manufacturer of the card is msi. I will try that driver and tell you guys the result.

 

Most likely its just dodgy AMD drivers up to no good as always.

If heaven works stable for the full length of time then the Gpu is fine.

 

I'd be fairly certain Is a psu fault, either power distribution or your psu has crapped out.

One of the only things changing from when you system is not crashing and when it is crashing is the gpu is doing alot of rendering and thus you will be pulling more power from the psu.

 

I agree with you. I am afraid of that too. 600W is barely enough especially when this Graphic card is OC at 1100Mhz. I have ordered corsair HX650W, do you think that it will provide enough power?

Also, I noticed another thing. When I first time and second time install the GPU driver, the screen doesn't flicker and goes blank as the installation message mentioned. Usually, with my previous pc, when i tried to install a new driver, the screen usually flicker and goes blank and then come back. But with this graphic card, it didn't do that at all.

Can someone explain me why?

 

Firstly if it's a power supply issue then why wouldn't it come up when running Heaven benches? Don't they stress the GPU?

Anyway, in theory 600W is enough by far, your system would pull not even half of that at load. But yes the HX650 is a much better quality power supply so after installing that you can rule out any power supply issues.

Not sure about the flickering, it doesn't have to happen as far as I know, and don't know why it isn't happening for you.

And yes, your RAM could well be the cause if you manually clocked it to 1600. Sometimes you would need to manually loosen specific timings when doing that (e.g. the CR command rate timing setting to 2 or something), or increase certain voltages. If you want your RAM to run at 1600 (and it is supposed to run at 1600), then look out for an XMP profile option perhaps. If you can enable that, it should set all the RAM settings correctly automatically for you. For now, put the RAM back to stock or slightly lower, just for testing purposes and see if League of Legends keeps crashing like it does.

 

RMA the video card

 

Re guys, here are some updates of the situation. So as many members said, I set the DRAM Frenquency to Auto. It seem to be down to 1333MHz.

I also installed the new driver from MSI official site web. It is an older ati driver, but update on december 2012 on MSI siteweb.

This morning I ran the Heaven directx11 benchmark with everythintg max out. I get terrible score.


So nothing happened during the benchmark. But I keep getting black screen and system crash during League of legends games and Diablo 3 and Sleeping dogs. Really disappointed with this graphic card which should be viable according to my research in google. Is it supposed to be like this for a MSI Military Class graphic card? 960 scores for heaven directx11 benchmark? I feel really duped by their marketing "Military Class".

Well I find similary topic in other forums about the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 7870 OC too suffering the same problem. It seems that I am not the only one getting this annoying problem. I still don't find anyone who has solved this problem. Sad.

 

I know a few folk who have the 7870 and aren't having this sort of problem - it seems like a hardware fault. Why not RMA the card?

 

It's alright mate, sometimes stuff just doesn't work properly it happens to everyone at some point.

RMA is an option, or just get it replaced from the store you bought it from. They can hardly refuse.

 

Your heaven score looks fine to me, you have ran the test at native res than everyone who benchmarks it does, so you will score lower.( search this forum for the settings.

It should not crash in the games you have ran.

From a performance stand point the 7870 is basically good enough for mid details in all the latest titles with AA its not going to run bf3 ultra or anything crazy like that.

If it was me I'd request a refund and buy from a different manufacture MSI have rep for this sort of thing huge overclocks that are just not stable.

 

Agree with Rollo regarding your Heaven scores. At 1920x1080 with all settings on high and tesselation on extreme with 16 AF, I'm not surprised you only averaged 36fps.

Try running the bench with 4 or 8 AF and tesselation on normal - which is about what you'd set in game options to for a 7870 running newer titles to achieve around 60fps.

 

Thank you for your replies. I think that anyway I will RMA this card. I thought that this card is a really nice powerful card for a low price in the current market. But after what rollo said, I am quiet disappointed in its performance.

I don't know if I would take another 7870 or switch to a GTX 660Ti. The second one is just too expensive for me and I don't think it performs much better than the 7870. What do you think? I am afraid that the same will happen again if I exchange my current 7870 since a lot of people have this kind of problem with their 7870 (Sapphire, MSI, Asus...)

 

Well.. you were running Heaven on max settings (If I am correct) ?

You will almost get the same results buying a 660ti for sure. I was shocked with my scores from my 7970 until I noticed that I was running everything on max.

I say RMA your card, there are certainly problems with stability.