Display driver crash after flashing 6950 and overclock

[Acheron89]

Hey forum,

I'm having an odd problem with my 6950 after I flashed the bios to a 6970. The flash worked successfully, but now whenever I try to overclock and run GUIMiner I get increasing amounts of display freezing and driver failure. I think it may be an issue that lays between two programs - AMD Overdrive, and Sapphire TriXX. I disabled AMD overdrive, though the mining hardware spreadsheet on the wiki says I should have the card at +20%. It helped to reduce the crashes a little bit, but not enough.

Has anyone else had this problem? If so, how did you solve the issue of the display drivers failing every minute or so?

Thanks for your input in advance

[Shuffle]

theres a reason they lock some of the shaders, its not 100% stable or they are out of 6950's

most of the time they are just out buy you had some bad luck and got a non stable card

[Acheron89]

I have trouble believing that this hasn't happened to someone else in the past and that there is a fix. The Sapphire cards are released with an added Bios switch for exactly this purpose. There is no reason to suggest that the card itself was not designed to be flashed.

Does anyone have any experience with Sapphire TriXX, or have any of you run into the problem I have described in the OP?

[Acheron89]

Update - Attempted to use only CCC's Overdrive, and the system appears to be stable - albeit with ~20 Mhash/s lower than my fully overclocked values on the TriXX. Perhaps I am using an outdated version of TriXX? I am currently on v4.0_634402083351463953.1. It was the only "latest" version of the software that I could find anywhere.

*Edit  This is by no means solved. I should definitely be able to increase my clock speed further with TriXX and push out more Mhash/s. I would like to get this fixed, and any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Gameover]

You have most likely fried your video card.  I have had a similar issue with 2 cards, the first one I never overclocked, ran it stock and it came from the factory with problems, would cause display and system freezes for like 10 seconds, then it would say the display driver restarted, if you check the windows event log you will see the exact errors.  called support and said its a hardware issue and had to RMA the card.  on the second card after running it for many months with no problems whatsoever the same problem started showing up after running it with overclocking for a few weeks, it only crashes or freezes when mining and under very heavy GPU load.  My guess is its a similar issue and will have to be RMAd to be fixed.

[Acheron89]

Actually it was that my voltage was too low. The good people over on the Overclock.net boards suggested I kick my voltage up to 1250. It solved my problem entirely. Try doing this next time you get a display driver failure and PM me, i'd love to get some more info because the mining hardware comparison page on the wiki would appear to be listing a drastically underpowered voltage for its stats.