Radeon 6970 GUIMiner and video play back causes system to freeze

[ToriAmos1963]

Hi,

I recently replaced my aging Nvidia 9800 with a Radeon 6970.  With my old card, I could run GUIMiner and do work on the computer.  If I needed to use more graphical processing power, I would stop mining and resume afterwards.  If I pushed the system too hard, the display driver would crash, but it would recover after a couple of seconds.

I un-installed all the Nvidia drivers and the 9800 card and installed the Radeon 6970.  The card mines great, but If I attempt to playback a video or go to a website with embedded flash video, the system freezes completely.  I have to power down the computer and restart it.

The 6970 is running stock frequency and I tried to adjust power and voltage settings to see if it helps, but nothing has worked so far.

Is it normal for AMD cards to crash the whole system if there is a problem?

[Graet]

Unfortunately it is a known issues with 69xx drivers, we keep hearing there is a fix in "version 11.x" but havent seen it yet.
I could watch tv from my tuner and mine on my 5770, imagine the dissapoimnntment when i found i had to turn my miner off to do much on a 6950.

cgminer today was tweaked to try to help with some of these issues. official thread  here http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=28402.0

Is it normal for AMD cards to crash the whole system if there is a problem?

and yes :S

[ToriAmos1963]

This really sucks.  This is my first AMD card in a very long time (I had an all-in-wonder pro).  I switched to Nvidia because they had better drivers.  I assumed after all these years AMD/ATI would release better drivers.   I guess I was wrong.  I can't see any reasons why AMD can't handle a crash gracefully like Nvidia.

[xcooling]

ATI decided speed was more important than airbags and breaks. ;-P

[ToriAmos1963]

I looked around to find more information about this problem.  XFX tech support is a joke.  Their response was this was normal because I was pushing the card too hard.  They are clueless.  If they didn't offer the lifetime warranty, I would return this card.

I did find some good news (maybe).  According to someone on AMD's OpenCL developers forum, they know what the cause of the problem is and it "should" be fixed in catalyst 11.8.  They are on 11.6 right now so I think this problem may be resolved pretty soon.

http://forums.amd.com/devforum/messageview.cfm?catid=390&threadid=128404&STARTPAGE=3&FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear

[feelz]

good to hear they are working on a fix. I had to resort to using the ipad to watch videos because the system keeps freezing while a video is being played