The only other game I have played is Dragon's Nest, a low-graphics game that did crash the system a couple of times.

I think my next step is to re-format the computer. Start with a fresh install and hopefully that will eliminate the issue. Probably should have done that to begin with

Beta drivers? I'm not quite sure what those are. All I have are the latest drivers from AMD.

As for another card I have a friend coming over the weekend that will swap parts and hopefully we can spot the issue.

I'll keep you posted!

Yeah, I think swapping cards will help narrow down the possibilities. Sounds like you've really gotten the short stick here -- but statistically someone was bound to get screwy errors at some point on this forum, things have been going smoothly for too long Just stay positive about it.

A format may or may not help -- the sucky part is that you'll have to re-download all those games again. It might be a good idea to re-format and install Windows fresh (or get an old HDD that's laying around and use that, then put your current one off to the side just in case it's not a Windows error -- that way you don't have to re-load everything). Download / install one game for now, whichever one most reliably crashes it. If it still crashes, try your friend's card and that will tell us if it's a GPU issue.

I'd hate to have you re-format and find out it's a hardware issue, though. I guess it has to be done at some point to ensure it's not something worse (like a motherboard issue).

Are you getting any video artifacting when you play games?

Re: beta drivers, they're just a more recent iteration of video drivers. It looks like the 6870 does not currently have beta drivers available.

support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/auto_detect.aspx

Try that tool to make sure you've got the right drivers on there (this is a stretch, but it'd be good to neutralize one more element). If you've already ensured they're correct, ignore it.

I believe this is where the crash occured:

Run through the sequence below and see if anything is better for you. It should get rid of Event ID 10 in the very least, though it may not fix crashing altogether. If you need me to elaborate on any of the steps, let me know. It's simple enough, but just let me know if there's something that confuses you or gives you trouble.

You probably have to do this from safe mode.




If this doesn't help, it might be time to start considering hardware failure issues. It could be a number of things at this point, but we won't know for certain unless you can try different hardware to test (swapping video cards or swapping hard drives would help immensely to troubleshoot this issue).

Doing a reformat on the harddrive... Wish me luck!

After a reformat it still crashes, but thankfully it is now displaying a proper error message.

"Display driver amdkmdap stopped responding and has successfully recovered."

Upon some research this is a common problem with ATI, specifically the HD series cards.

Not sure how to go about fixing it... Hopefully it the coming weeks one of the many possible solutions will fix it.

Aha! I had this issue! Glad to hear you finally got a real error message, that makes things so much easier. At least we know it's a video card problem now and not something worse.

I used to experience this with my 5870 several months ago... I was able to fix it with the below guide (luckily I bookmarked it). I also had the very same issue with my NVIDIA GTX 580 that they initially sent me, but I discovered it was a voltage issue (the card was advertised as 'overclocked' from the factory, but they did it wrong). It may be the same issue with your card. Was your card advertised as 'superclocked' or 'overclocked' at all?

I used this post to fix my 5870: forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?cati...99&enterthread=y

The card does not appear to be advertise as superclocked/overclocked.

www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102948

I'm going to try re-installing the drivers again using driver sweeper and in safe mode. Hopefully proper installation will do the trick.

If all else fails I will contact Sapphire first thing tomorrow.

Sigh, wish ATI would have addressed this issue a looonnngg time ago.

Going to swap the card into a friend's build.

What is the process in doing this? Do I simply install the ATI drivers and then run the card?

Or do I need to driver sweep his original drivers, install the ATI ones and then swap the card.

Additionally he is not sure if his card is overclocked or not, should I be concerned or will the Mobo bios be able to detect that a different card is in place and to not use the existing clock speeds?

Yep, it's really easy. You don't -need- to remove his old drivers, but it is wise to eliminate conflicts that could change your results. Ideally, I'd do it in this order:

1. Go to add/remove programs and uninstall his drivers completely.
2. Shutdown
3. Swap cards
4. Install your drivers
5. Reboot
6. Test

If he's not sure if it's overclocked then it's not an issue The system will figure things out.

Contacting Sapphire would definitely be the next thing to do... I'm sure they've heard of it and your card should be covered. I feel bad that you ended up dealing with all this BS, but I guess it just happens sometimes. Your friends build might not exhibit the same issues as yours for various reasons, so don't get discouraged if it doesn't. It will certainly help troubleshooting if it does, but I'd send it back to Sapphire regardless of what you find with his system.