[OPEN]AMD Graphics Card with DCS

[GC1993]

Hi all

 

I got my new rig just over a week ago, and it works fine, except for an obvious problem with the graphics card. The card is a MSI AMD Radeon HD 7850 1GB. It crashes every now and then (used to be very infrequent, though it is happening more often now). The sound freezes and the screen goes blue with lines across the screen for about 5-10 seconds, before the computer restarts itself (please see attached).

 

All the drivers for GPU, motherboard etc are all up to date, and have done clean sweeps followed by fresh driver installation just to make sure. I have taken the graphics card out and back in again in case it was loose. The windows event log shows several events to happen around the time of the crash, mostly they are "critical" classification, and have something to do with "Kernel-Power". On a few occasions it says "whea-uncorrectable_error" also, which according to some people online is a critical hardware failure.

 

Seeing as I can't fix the issue myself, I am starting to wonder if maybe DCS is causing the crashes? The crashes only happen in-game, and are not a result of me over working the card (it's happened when the game has been on pause mode), so is there a known crash issue between AMD cards and DCS? I've read a bit about people preferring Nvidia cards over AMD for DCS but haven't read anything about crashing. Has anyone experienced similar issues with their AMD cards?

 

If it helps, the rest of my specs are as follows:

 

Intel i5 3570K, OC to 4.20 GHz

700W Power supply

MSI Z77 G43A Motherboard

8GB Corsair 1600MHz DDR3 RAM

120mm Alaska Nero cooling fan

TIR5, TM Warthog, Saitek Pedals

 

PLEASE someone help, any suggestions or advice is hugely appreciated, I am pulling my hair out here.

 

Thanks

 

Edited August 31, 2013 by GC1993

[NineLine]

What OS are you running? Also your drivers for your card are up to date? Are you over clocking your vid card?

[mjeh]

Just a layman's opinion, but it could be overheating.

 

Since it happens more and more frequently it could be because of the heat sink getting clogged up with dust, I have had this happen more than once. Remove your gfx card and unscrew the fan to inspect the heat sink. Removing the dust is as simple as blowing on it.

[tintifaxl]

I too think it's an overheating problem. DCS strains the card to the limit, so it runs hot.

[GC1993]

I'm running Windows 8 64 bit. All drivers were up to date, like I said in original message. The card was pre-OC'd by manufacturer, locked in (can't remember the figure though), I didn't go anywhere near the actual card's setttings.

 

Spoke to the company who built my PC and they think I just had a faulty card - wasn't overheating because sometimes it crashed after 5 mins on the pause menu, sometimes after 3 hours of thirsty graphical gameplay.

 

It's been sent back, and I've paid a bit extra to get an upgrade instead- I hear of GTX's being favoured for DCS so I've gone for a GTX 760 2GB.

[Kuky]

Ok, when DSC is paused the graphics card is still running as if the game is running (only the simulation aspect of the sim is paused (units, scripts etc) but graphics engine is still running).

 

To me this looks like either overheating card or faulty memory, you can check easy if its the first... run ATI CCC and got to Performance Tab, and enable overlocking... then reduce the core frequency say by about 100MHz and test is it crashed again... if not there's your answer. If it still crashed then I'd go with faulty card option and return it to get replacement.

[TordinVarglund]

I too think it's an overheating problem. DCS strains the card to the limit, so it runs hot.

 

DCS does not push a card like this to the limit, and even if it did, it would not crash if it were not for special circumstances, in this case being that the card is simply broken. The OP's picture gives it away. The kind of artifacts displayed are consistent with what you would expect from damaged memory modules or a damaged GPU Core.

 

I'm running Windows 8 64 bit. All drivers were up to date, like I said in original message. The card was pre-OC'd by manufacturer, locked in (can't remember the figure though), I didn't go anywhere near the actual card's setttings.

 

Spoke to the company who built my PC and they think I just had a faulty card - wasn't overheating because sometimes it crashed after 5 mins on the pause menu, sometimes after 3 hours of thirsty graphical gameplay.

 

It's been sent back, and I've paid a bit extra to get an upgrade instead- I hear of GTX's being favoured for DCS so I've gone for a GTX 760 2GB.

 

It is broken, there are no other explanations for the artifacts displayed.

As far as nvidia being a better choice for DCS i doubt it will do any better than a matching AMD card, yet the 760 is a more powerful card than the 7850 and any performance gains you notice will be as a result of that more than anything.

 

Good luck with your new card.

[Kuky]

DCS does not push a card like this to the limit.

 

it can, he has better CPU (and overclocked) to make this video card the bottleneck easy... hence work at higher load and overheat.

[Devilman]

I think heating, wack an old 60mm cpu fan on it. also change down your clock speeds with the ati tool.

[TordinVarglund]

Missing the point completely, being that even running at 100% modern GPUs do not fail unless there are special circumstances leading to it either in software instability or lower production quality on the core components. Even then, 100% utilization in a game engine is not actually the most stressful thing a card could face. Programs like furmark etc which are designed to strain the PCB and GPU to the very edge of what they can take do strain GPU's more than any game ever could, and even then your card should not fail if its working correctly.