Driver keeps crashing under windows 7 x64

[Hat]

Hello,

This is my first post on these fora, however I have been actively researching bitcoin for at least 3 months now. I have my rig set up for mining, however I am facing problems already.

Mining computer:
4 x 5970 cards
Windows 7 Professional x64 (Authentic software)
I am using the "Latest Beta Driver with .NET 4.0 Support" which currently is 12.11 Beta (released at 03/12/2012). I have also tried 12.8 - same issues overall (that was with another copy of windows though, which I can't verify is original)
Also using AMD-APP-SDK-v2.8-Windows-64.exe (as instructed by some online tutorial)

I am using cgminer 2.10.4. I use this rig both for litecoin & bitcoin mining. Mainly litecoin as of late, but apparently this has nothing to do - same program, OS & drivers are to be used in both situations. I have tried with dummy plugs on 3 of the 4 cards as well - same results. Apparently they are not needed though, so my latest tests are without them.

I set up cgminer, and let it run for 24h (monitoring it for the first 1 hour - no problems), yet everytime I check it out the next day the driver has crashed, cards do not work on anything (they blow out cold air) and monitor is blank. Force resetting will get me to the desktop, but it'll usually pixelate and crash again. Second reset will bring is back to normal. This happens with intensities of 16 as well (not necessarily 20). Now my question is:

What combination of Windows & ATI drivers will be stable for this rig? I know this is a very particular question to my situation (possibly not really helpful to the community), but, really, I've tried MANY things, and wasted quite a lot of days & electricity costs working on this issue

[RyNinDaCleM]

Do you OC your cards? What are your temps?

I can tell you for sure that the type of windows makes absolutely no difference. My win7 x64 ultimate is not "Genuine" and I have mined for months straight without a restart. I've never used the cat12.11 drivers nor the 2.8 SDK so I can't respond to those directly, but 12.8 is definitely a working version, as is the 2.5 SDK.

[Graet]

for 5xxx series cards catalyst version 11.6 was best, the 12 versions are aimed at newer hardware
try rolling back to older drivers

[K1773R]

welcome to Windoze

[Hat]

My cards are not overclocked. Temps are below 90*C except very specific circumstances.

So is there any consensus on the driver & SDK to use for mining on windows 7?

12.8 drives & 2.5 SDK?

11.6 drivers & SDK?


dummy plugs? I do not use them anymore.

Maybe the problem's specific to my situation due to having 8 total GPUs?

[conspirosphere.tk]

I finally solved that problem disabling "Remap memory hole" in the bios.
But that will suck about 700 MB of ram per vga card.

[Krax]

Can you be more specific?

[conspirosphere.tk]

You should enter in your motherboard bios and find an option like "Memory remapping" and disable it.
That it worked for me is all I know.

[Hat]

Were you having the same problems as described above? Ie, monitor showing pixels (or groups of pixels) in somewhat ordered rows changing colour, and then crashing? Sometimes windows "recovers" and displays a message for having done so, others apparently it does not, since I usually find it blank the next day (as in "no video input" to the screen), not responding to any keyboard or mouse input

I didn't find a "memory remap" or similar option in the BIOS either...

I'm going to try the 12.8 drivers again (with this trusted Win7 copy), and with low aggression. I also have the feeling that 3 5970's wouldn't cause this issue, but in any case I'd like to have all my cards working.

[conspirosphere.tk]

No: I had random BSODs quoting atikmpag.sys or something like that.
Best wishes for your debugging

[Hat]

I removed 1 of the cards, and so far things seem to be working.