A significant amount of ATI users have taken to the AMD user to user forums to complain about grey screens, crashes and colored-striped hangups.
Zoom(There's actually countless forums out there with threads like this – including at least 4 threads in our own forums. I'm concentrating on the AMD forums because these guys, between them, have collected nearly 40 pages of possible causes involving everything from Windows, to mobos, to RAM.)
So far it's unclear as to what is causing the problem. Users report that grey, brown or colored stripes/screen appear while playing games, watching movies and in some cases, while idle. The problems seems to be confined to the HD 5xxx series, although there are a couple of mentions of 4xxx cards
... only updating the BIOS to a newer version or boosting the GPU voltage has solved this issue on our ATI Radeon HD 5770. After further investigation, we discovered that AMD has increased the GPU voltage in newer BIOS versions, but hasn't posted it anywhere. It seems that AMD needs to come up with a knowledge base article to address this issue. Until then, you can try the workarounds listed above – they worked for us.
ATI Confirms Grey Screen Issue, Promises Fix 7:50 PM - January 29, 2010 by Jane McEntegart
AMD has confirmed that a previously reported issue of grey lines or screens with certain Radeon HD 5000 GPUs affects both the 5700 and 5800 series.
Earlier this week, it emerged that many 5000 series users were experiencing problems with crashing and grey or colored lines appearing on his or her display. The grey screens and hangups were occurring while users were gaming, watching movies or in some cases, when the computer was just sitting idle.
When users contacted customer service they were told the issue was caused by a Windows 7 update. ATI recommended a clean install of the graphics card driver
as a possible fix, stating this had solved some users problems. The ATI Catalyst 10.1 release notes (published Wednesday) note the problem as a known issue; however, it's described as a problem affecting users of all versions of Windows and not just Windows 7.
Today Dave Erskine, an AMD spokesperson, informed us that, "only a small number of ATI Radeon HD 5800 series and ATI Radeon HD 5700 series cards are exhibiting the behavior," and that the team is closing in on a fix for the apparently software related issue.
"The team is testing a driver hotfix and initial tests indicate that it resolves the issue," Mr Erskine said. "We need to test it further but we expect to make the hotfix available shortly."
ATI Grey Screen of Death fix coming soon Windows 7 and GDDR5 state changes by Charlie Demerjian
February 1, 2010
THERE HAS BEEN a lot of talk recently about ATI's 'Grey Screen of Death' and almost all of it is hysterically overblown. Let's take a look at the problem in a bit more detail.
The short story is that a number of people have reported crashes with various ATI 5-series cards where the screen goes grey or striped in appearance. Some have gone to great lengths to quantify the problem, and a few threads have proposed solutions of varying effectiveness.
The GSoD in question is only on GDDR5 equipped 58xx and 57xx cards, and only on Windows 7. The problem first started when Microsoft put out an update to Win 7, although the exact patch and what it affected is not clear. One problem is that the GSoD problem is a specific problem, but there are other issues that may mimic the same fault, and striped screen crashes have been around for ages.
Talking to OEMs, AIBs and a few ATI people over the past couple of weeks, a few patterns became evident. First is that the number of affected cards is very small. The largest forum threads have hundreds of posts, but of those, only a few hundred cards seem to be affected.
As of a few weeks ago, there were 2 million-plus Evergreen (5xxx) cards shipped. If there are 1,000 GSoD affected cards out there, that means 0.05 percent are 'bad'. If there are 10,000 cards - more than the number of posts about it in all the forums I've read combined - that means half a percent. To put things in perspective, normal cards have a return rate that is 10 time that number. Every AIB I talked to said the numbers were not high enough to be concerning, so they are, on average, very low.
We could not get a definitive answer from anyone, but piecing together bits, it looks like the problem has to do with GDDR5 changing power states or speeds. The good news is that this is not a card killing problem, it is just a crash problem. That might not be soothing to you if your card keeps crashing, but there is hope.
We have word that there are two fixes coming - one is a software hotfix, and the other is a GPU BIOS update. The patch should work by just downloading and installing it, and it will be rolled into the next driver update. SemiAccurate was not able to get a definitive date on this, or whether it will make the Catalyst 10.2 release, but it shouldn't be long in coming. The BIOS fix will be loaded onto cards as soon as it is done, making all parts from that date 'fixed' in the firmware. There is no word if that BIOS will be released as a user upgrade.
The workaround that people have proposed, upping voltages, disabling power savings, or nuking HDMI, all seem to be rather hit or miss. This is likely because they do not address the GDDR5 state change problem directly, just accidentally. What works for someone else might not work for you and your situation.
Short story, everyone tells me there is a fix coming really soon. ATI, unlike some other companies, is not trying to bury this problem. The aggregate numbers of cards affected is extremely small, far under one percent from what we hear. ATI's 5-series GSoD's have been turned into a feeding frenzy, mostly by people without technical understanding of what is going on, and by a few with an axe to grind.
The problem is specific to certain 58xx and 57xx cards and involves GDDR5 timings or state changes. It was brought on mainly by a change that Microsoft made deep within Windows 7, and it should be totally fixable with the impending patches. While it is annoying, it will be history very soon.
