White screen of death? in Off Topic

ID:119955
 
Oct 14 2011, 7:43 am
Lately, my desktop has been freaking out on occasion. It results in a complete freeze of the computer, and a white screen, or a black screen. It's also happened on a more mild level too -- then my desktop recovered and claimed it was a video driver crash/recover. This forces me to power down my desktop manually and reboot it, and upon reboot, I don't get the "windows has recovered from a serious error" dialog box.

At first I thought it was my RAM (no idea why, but it was worth a shot), so I tried all of them individually and what-have-you, none of the RAM was at fault.

I figured if it was my CPU, worse mojo would be happening than this.

Then I was like "well duh, one of my video cards is overheating." Except that isn't the issue, because when it freezes, I open my computer case and touch my video cards. They're both nowhere near hot enough to overheat.

After that, I figured it was my drivers, so I removed and re-installed them completely, and just last night it happened again.

I'm running windows 7 ultimate x64 with an ATI Radeon HD 5670 and an ATI Radeon HD 4300/4500 card.

Has anything like this happened to anyone? I googled around but didn't get many results.
#1 Oct 14 2011, 7:59 am
It used to happen a lot with me, but my computer is pretty terrible. It happened whenever I tried to run a graphical intensive game for an extended period of time. It stopped now, probably because I don't game as much though.
#2 Oct 14 2011, 8:01 am
Yeah, I thought that might be an issue too. However, all I've been doing lately is watching media and listening to music, as well as doing homework and programming, none of which are particularly intensive.
#3 Oct 14 2011, 8:01 am
WHITE SCREEN OF DOOM!
#4 Oct 14 2011, 9:25 am
It's happened while watching videos too, but only when it used to break down from games, when it was a fragile jerk. Didn't happen with any of that other stuff from what I remember.
#5 Oct 14 2011, 9:46 am
It seems ATI Radeon HD Graphic cards are the issue,im using an ATI Radeon HD 6300 and i get randomly some black lines on my screen that disapear after a few seconds...no idea from what,but it never happened on PC (not using an ATI Card)
#6 Oct 14 2011, 10:59 am
Sounds like one or both of your GPUs might be dying on you. Try removing the older one and see if it happens again.
#7 Oct 14 2011, 2:45 pm
@Yammen:
I had resolved to do that if I got another white-screen crash, but fortunately, I got a bluescreen this time. I grabbed a tool called BlueScreenView, and it showed me the cause (and offers a one-click google solution), and it appears to be the Catalyst Control Center.
If I still get a crash after this, then I'll take a look at removing a card, but I rather not if I don't have to.
#8 Oct 14 2011, 3:12 pm
Your PSU is enough to run that card, right? I know that when you have cards like that with like a 230 watt PSU, the computer will do that. Just freeze or shut off.
#9 Oct 14 2011, 3:12 pm
Yes. I have a 900W PSU, which should be more than sufficient for most hardware.
#10 Oct 14 2011, 5:36 pm
It's not likely to be anything but your Video Card- the symptoms are accurate, and if it were a RAM, CPU, or any other problem then generally you'd get a BSoD or just death in general.
#11 Oct 14 2011, 10:26 pm
Try booting into safe mode. Your normal GPU drivers won't kick into effect, it'll use minimal generic drivers. Run programs and stuff normally to see if it is in fact your GPU's drivers.
#12 Oct 15 2011, 10:28 am
My windows 2k laptop used to do that all the time, but it never froze. I'd just smack the back of the monitor a couple times and it was fixed
#13 Oct 15 2011, 11:47 am
Well, considering I don't have any CRT monitors anymore, I'm not sure smacking them would do any good.

So far, I removed the older video card, and everything appears to be working. I'm just disappointed that, if that is the case, that my older video card only lasted for a year before becoming useless.
#14 Oct 15 2011, 11:49 am
That's what you get for playing Witcher 2
#15 Oct 15 2011, 12:16 pm
I'm afraid I don't get the joke, nor do I have the game.
#16 Oct 15 2011, 7:50 pm
Yeah, WSOD is almost always GPU failure under win 7. I recently replaced my desktop video card for similar reasons.