5870 driver stops working

okay so i got my 5870 (as a replacement of two 4870's).

I found the 10.5 driver doesn't work with dell's 5870, so I installed dell's drivers.

everything is working great, this gpu is more powerful than a single 4870 by a good margin.

however, my graphics driver has stopped working twice already today. all movement on the screen, including mouse pointer responsiveness comes to a halt, red pixelated artifacts appear all over the place, and a few seconds later, the screen goes blank and then comes back up working fine with a system tray balloon letting me know that "the display driver stopped working."

has this happened to anyone else? should i be under the impression that i have a bad gpu? should i reseat the gpu? is this simply dell's drivers sucking hard?

finally, has anyone heard whether or not AMD will be adding compatibility with their 10.6 catalyst drivers and the dell 5870?

 

Why in the world did you give up two 4870s for a single 5870?

 

You have a bad card. See http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/487478-ati-display-drivers-stopped-responding.html This has happened to several people. I am one of them. When Dell support finally sent me a new card and I installed it , the problem went away. Good luck.

 

this ^^^^ seems unfair to me, when rining them up id be tempted to say i thought i would have got 2 5870s not one.... can only say no.

 

dell is sending me a new 5870, and a new motherboard (just in case).

joker: because I'm sick of the laundry list of problems that accompany both SLI and CrossfireX, especially in laptops. secondly, if i ever wish to upgrade to dual 5870's, it will be much more simple now to simply buy the second card than to have to sell two 4870's on ebay and then buy two 5870's from dell or ebay.

 

but you have to buy the secon heatsink and the crossfire cable.

 

Did you check your temps, it usaully does that when you are about to get a BSOD from the video card. Did you try reformatting the system and installing 10.5?

 

haven't checked temps, dell is sending a new 5870.

10.5 (and prior) isn't compatible with the 5870. amd didn't include dell's vendor codes.we all have our fingers crossed that 10.6 will include compatibility.

red squares (almost checkerboard in nature, though irregular in shapes) appear on the screen as artifacts before the screen goes blank and then comes back to windows with a balloon that the driver stopped responding and has recovered.

also, and i've just noticed this, my wallpaper is always solid black after this failure occurs. trying to change the wallpaper to something else doesn't work, it stays black. it only fixes after a logoff or reboot.

 

wow. check out my temps after running furmark for only a minute:

http://imgur.com/PPTet.png

its at 98 Celsius now... still climbing.

 

it's going back and forth between 99 and 99.5 now. refuses to break 100.

NVM, we just hit 100 Celsius.

Holy hotsauce batman!

http://imgur.com/EaJ1S.jpg

 

No. Those come with the card. You can't buy the cable separately.