G73 and Cat 10.5 GSOD Debug Thread

What player software are you using? WinDVD 2010 PRO works very well. Watched The Book of ELI with no glitches. I'll run Avatar later but I don't anticipate any issues.

Cheers,

 

I posted this in another thread, but I thought this info might be helpful here also.
I don't know if this could be of any help. I found this page when I was experiencing GSODs with my older Sapphire ATI 5850 desktop card (reference design).
This gives some explanation of what could be happening.
Gray Screen Explained (5xxx Series) *Updated w/ Solution* - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net

 

@Turbogear: That thread you linked confirms my personal suspicions that it was being caused by memory issues, which is why the OC settings helped.

 

Yes somehow I have the same suspicion.
That is what I believe cuased problems on my desktop ATI 5850. My GPU was behaving like what is described in that particular thread I linked. It worked fine for about 4 months but then it start showing random GSODs even during bootup process and when doing nothing except for browsing internet.

Funnily enough I got GSODs mostly in 2D mode. I rarely got GSOD with my ATI 5850 when I was gaming. I played sometimes up to 5 hours of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 without issues.

 

PowerDVD 10 Ultra 3D

I've done some more testing since I found it hard to believe only Blu-Ray would cause crashes. I can play games and DVDs all day long.

Back when I tested Cat 10.4, I tried a Blu-Ray watching on the notebook monitor and it crashes within minutes. Since I had never seen this happen before I just assumed it was the driver and reverted to stock.

So yesterday I put 10.6 on and tested again - same crash. Late last night I realized I hadn't seen the crash before because I always watch Blu-Rays on an LCD TV via HDMI. So this morning I watched an entire Blu-Ray with that setup on 10.6 - no issues at all!

More testing...Blu-Ray also crashes on stock drivers using the G73 monitor - I just never watched on the G73 monitor before so I never saw it.

Note it also crashes when watching on LCD and HDMI. HDMI-only is the configuration that works.

So, so far, the 10.6 Catalyst driver is just as stable on top of a stock system as the stock Asus ATI drivers.

 

That is interesting. Are you overclocking the gpu and VRAM? Mine is set to 705/1100. Also, are you able to test windvd 2010 pro? If you don't have a license key I can let u use one of mine for testing.

Cheers,

 

Everything stock except for the Catalyst driver

Thanks, I may just take you up on that. I'm going to try out WinDVD 8 right now since I have a copy that my reseller was nice enough to include with my notebook.

 

Quick test is to use the AMD GPU tool to overclock. If that works you can set it to boost at boot.

Cheers,

 

perfectly fine, but it was solid as a rock from 10.3 onwards so welp.

Edit: I fresh installed so 10.3 was the first version I installed.

So I don't know if I should flash the Vbios if I'm not having issues, but .95V idle voltage sounds nice.

 

This just came to mind and i'm not sure if its been done before, so i'll just say it. Since people are using VBios from other manufactures such as msi, why not try using the drivers from Msi instead? I've already flashed to Ziddy's Vbios so i really don't want to risk flashing back. So if possible could someone with the default Vbios give it a try? The Msi driver for the GX740 is dated april 2010. Worth a try?

 

I can understand your thinking, but I prefer the modded Asus vBIOS so that all the graphic hardware works properly.

 

I'm gona give that MSI drivers a try since the V3 still gave way when i played l4d2... Will report back if there's any findings...

 

It was a failure, the driver couldn't install. Ati catalyst goes in but no driver. So it got me thinking, this is just a theory, perhaps Asus and Msi has some coding or something to restrict their drivers from another manufacturer. So then what if someone with a flashed MSI bios tried to install a MSI driver. Maybe it would enable the hdmi and vga if the driver could be installed? Its just a theory. So perhaps someone with the MSI bios could give it a try.

 

They call them hardware identifiers. As for the V3 BIOS, It was never stipulated you would get stable performance at 700/1000. Other still have had to use the OC trick to get stability. I happen to get lucky that mine is stable at 700/1000 with 10.6.

 

which is exactly why I dont understand this problem... and I still think it could be hardware related, something to do with the 40nm production process that yields these semi-lemons. It just doesn't make sense that I've seen some people on this forum claim to have stability doing nothing but installing 10.6. Some others say 10.6+vbios v3. Then others achieve success 10.6+vbios+OC, while yet others never achieve success. Sounds like it may be an exercise in futility. One more PSOD and i'm going back to best buy and just see if it's all repeatable with a different system. Also maybe I can get the LG screen, lol.. I love making the best buy guys work for it.

edit:
The one big hole in the overclock theory btw: I crashed in a 2d environment 1 out of the 4 times, core won't oc unless running 3d.

 

Ditto! 10char

 

My issues so far with the G73JH ASUS laptop - Built To Order Forums Build Your Own PC or Notebook Help and Support

I just recently bought my ASUS G73JH here from BTO, and as soon as I updated it's graphics drivers to the 10.6 on day 2 of owning it, I started getting this "GSOD" that everyones been takin about in here. My screen goes black with the pinstripes goin down it, and locks up with the sound hanging/playing.

As you can see, I've been keeping track of it on the retailers site that I bought the laptop from, as the retailers main tech guy asked me to keep a "log" on it so to speak, for a problem history to refer to incase we needed to RMA it to either them or ASUS.
He was under the suspicion that the issue was the heatsink warping and breaking, which apparently happens to alotta these models in the first week or so of use. I figured he was right, but still had a suspicion that it was a driver related issue.

So, I went from the 10.6 to the ones off the asus site yesterday, and everything has been stable ever since. However, I noticed that alotta people here have seen stability also in reverting, but it proved to only be temporary. So here I am now, preparing for the inevitable breaking of the laptop and the returning of the pinstripes from hell.

Alotta stuff was tossed around in here to nail the laptops stable spot. Everything from driver changes to vbios changes to overclocking was mentioned, and all of them seem to work with one laptop or another. So this leads me to ask a few different things honestly, that I hope someone here might be able to fill me in on for when the hits the fan with my G73JH.

1) Where can I find this vbios that worked, and allowed for AMD OverDrive to work?

2) How do you flash a vbios/how dangerous is it?

3) What overclocking/temp control tool can I use without flashing the vbios to allow me to put the vram at 1100 for stability testing?

4) Which driver do you guys think will work the best with SC2 when it hits (lol)? the caty 10.5 or the caty 10.6?

5) Which laptop cooler should I grab for my soon to be obsessive SC2 playing? There's alot of em out there, but I have no idea which ones are actually effective enough to warrent buying.


All in all, I've delt with alotta problems with this laptop so far, but this ones by far the biggest of em all, and will prove to be the most difficult to solve. So I hope you guys can elaborate a little more on all these nuggets of wisdom that have been tossed around in this topic for someone who's been outta the laptop scene for some time now (5 years, lol).

Thanks in advance.

 

The answers are in this thread. This thread is only 12 pages long. I'm not even going to suggest searching this forum, because you've already found the answer and havn't bothered to read it (and there are other dedicated threads to this).

1) Here.
2) Not very
3) ATI gpu tool
4) 10.5 has artifact problems with SC2. Not sure if it is fixed in 10.6
5) None. Get air conditioning. Unless you take off the bottom access panel, there is very little difference reported by using a fan.

 

1) Here.

2) ATIFLASH 3.79
a) Setup a bootable USB Flash drive or HDD (preferably formatted to FAT32)
b) Copy ATIFLASH utilities to the boot drive, and a copy of the v3 vBIOS.
c) Edit UPDATE.BAT with the filename of the v3 vBIOS.
d) Using the G73 Boot menu, (hold ESC during POST) boot to the boot drive and run UPDATE.BAT. If it reports an error, ABORT. Else it will flash the vBIOS and ask for a reboot. (Before running update.bat, you can also save your current vBIOS) ATIFLASH /? for more info.

3) You can use AMD GPU Tool for HD5870 to check temps and change clocks for gpu and video memory. You can even set it up to have windows use the profiles, but if you use the v3 vBIOS, Overdrive makes it simple in the CCC.

4) 10.6 seems very good atm, tho I suspect ATI will update it when SC2 is released.

5) Use whatever will fit a 17" and hopefully is also portable. I use the Targus Lap Chill cuz its quiet, has good air flow, doesn't stick out around the lappy, and fits nicely in my backpack. Also gives a good angle when working with notebook. Tho others will have other recommendations.

Also see sig below for GSOD info + recommended OC settings to gain stability if neccessary. (Mine became stable on stock speeds after v3 upgrade and 10.6)

 

Thank you. I appreciate the breakdown, but might wind up needing more explaining on the matter if you wouldn't mind talking on aim or PM's or something for a few.

See, It's not that I didn't read the answers, because I infact read the entire thread. It's more or less that I didn't understand alot of the stuff and the process as a whole, simply because this is all very new to me. I've never delt with flashing a bios on a video card before, which seems a tad ironic as I normally stick to EVGA cards in my desktops, and they promote the use of different bios's and voltage tweaks and over clocking! They even cover failures due to it in their warrenty on the cards!
I just never needed to do this stuff tho because my 8800gtx/gtx260/gtx295 from them were easy to OC and cool with evga precision and very powerfully all around with that overclock.

I'm gonna be readin over your post a few times tryin to wrap my head around it, and see how that goes first tho, lol.

I'm not afraid to admit that im a total noob at flashing a video card bios and might need my hand held to learn it, much like I did originally with overclocking my CPU (which is now a 3.8ghz I7 920, very stable and very cool).


*edit*
link didn't work for the bios dl btw.

 

Hello Chastity

Well today i found my first bug, my blue-tooth stop working, under device manager > generic Blue-tooth adapter, there is a yellow mark and says that window has disable the driver, for security reason bla bla bla.

So my question's where did you find your > Blue-tooth BT-270 - driver 6.2.5.600 from ?
Thanks

 

I have spoken to 3 Asus Reps and 1 manager who has not called me back with any info. She stated on the phone that she was not aware of any issue with the g73 regarding Gsod. I then told her she was not being honest with me since the forums are full of people with this problem and she had to be living under a house not to feel the backlash from this issue. I am done calling them...to much cloak and dagger for me.

Question- After reading completely thru this Thread is THIS A SOFTWARE ISSUE OR A HARDWARE. I have 5 days left with BestBuy need to decide soon.

Chastity, you and Kalim have been awesome in helping the silent majority of us out here who usually never post.....Thanks again

 

I think it's hardware personally. Those who have it, have it with multiple CAT drivers, those who don't, can use just about any of them without issue. I would RMA or take it back to BB.

 

ZigZag557: I edited the link for you in the original post. (see above)

If you want to chat, I haunt freenode.net on IRC. Drop by #3DSoundSurge

 

Thanks Aramis109,
I will start planning to take it back Friday. I have had two g73 in the last 3 weeks. Returned the first one because bestbuy told me to. The second one had two Green screens of Death within 30 minutes playing Overlord. Flashed the vbios as stated no problems since but if a Hardware issue still have a window of return. Saved all year for this cannot afford a brick.
DO NOT TRADE IT FOR THE ALIENWARE SYSTEM AT BESTBUY IT FRIED SECOND DAY and the g-squad said they have had 4 returned at their local store alone this month already. He was feeling sorry for me I guess.

 

Azure BlueTooth 6.25.600

 

Thanks

Before this happened to me. I wanted to use for first time while gaming my blue-tooth headphones, wish did not work on gaming only on musique player !

Is this normal ? Can we use blue-tooth head phones on gaming mode ?

 

Update: had some GSOD issues at stock playing Overlord. Found it odd being Dragon Age was stable... it would GSOD on Entertainment, but run on High Performance, tho very occasionally glitchy. Anyhoo, I uninstalled Power4Gear Hybrid 1.1.29 (which is what was installed) and the Synaptic release of 14.0.10.0 for Asus' Synaptic release, and Power4Gear 1.1.37, and now Overlord is stable at stock, even on Entertainment mode.

Thought I'd share

Power4Gear Hybrid 1.1.37

 

Who know's, maybe the problem was never the vbios or gfx drivers. Maybe it was Power4Gear that was the problem since that helped your stable. I'll update mine later as well, nice find Chastity.

 

Is this still working? I had gsod issues for everything but stock drivers(10.4-10.6) also i got green screens every once in a while. Called ASUS tech, and they suggested i revert to stock drivers, which as of right now are stable.

So my question is also have you tried updating your drivers after changing the version of power4gear? or that matter has anyone?

 

Welp, here's some interesting news on my front with the GSOD battle.

I formatted the machine to see if it was a heatsink issue or just a software/glitchy driver issue, and so far on the 2nd day of the format, with the caty 10.6 installed, all windows updates installed, and the 209 bios installed, I've seen 0 graphical glitches and no GSOD.

I noticed the issue right away before after installing the 10.6 drivers, as it GSOD'd right after I tried to update my "windows experience", so if it was gonna happen then it shoulda happened I think. Not sure tho, as others here have reported the problem as taking a few days to come back after changes like this, so we'll see what happens.

I'm gonna cross my fingers on my issue just being a botched driver or windows installation, lol.

Still really wanna give flashing that vbios a go tho so I can get amd overdriver working, lol. Just putting it off till I finish re-installing everything (dnf takes 3 days sometimes -_- ).

 

Hello just want to inform you, that after updating the blue-tooth driver still doesn't work. generic Blue-tooth adapter

Broadcom

Bt-270

ERROR


So I came to the conclusion the blue-tooth hardware is kaput I don't want to RMA my laptop because of the blue tooth so i just plug in 1 dollar usb blue-tooth to it

Ones I get more serious issues I will one and for all send it to repair shop !
And if nothing wrong comes alone the short road, then one day I will upgrade the CPU and at the same time will put a new blue-tooth in it

I don't worry to much about tearing apart the laptop since here you can find plenty of technicians that will do that for 5 usa dollars lol and you can stay next to them

 

I already had 10.6 installed, so I just did the P4GH update. If you want the order of things I did:

1) Updated vBIOS to v3.
2) Did full uninstall of all things ATI, using ATI Installer, full auto removal.
3) Safe Mode and Driver Sweeper for ATI
4) Installed Asus release of 10.1 full install.
5) Did an overlay upgrade of 10.6 and CCC.
6) Did a full uninstall of Power4Gear Hybrid 1.1.29
7) Installed Power4Gear Hybrid 1.1.37

If doing things over, I would do all your uninstalls first, then the installs.

 

Chastity thanks, you always update us with the lattes software

Do you think i can just install the Power4Gear Hybrid 1.1.37
with out unistalling the previews one? ty

 

You want to uninstall first. You may get legacy settings incorporated which can cause conflicts or stability issues if you don't.

Power4Gear Hybrid should be treated like a driver. Uninstall old, reboot, install new.

 

I must have been doing something wrong previously as in L4D2 i had at most 40 fps during play. I mainly set my settings on "high" and turn off vsync. Today i tried what was suggested, removed Power4Gear Hybird and installed the updated version. My fps just flew... I was running at about 100+ fps. So my guess is i must have had some driver issues that was causing my gsod and performance issues previously.

 

or some power management setting was nerfing your gpu performance

 

Yea, its working quite alright now. At first when i launched BC2, i was quite bummed as frame rate was horrible. Then i realized i was on "Entertainment" mode. Switched to "High Performance" and it was much better. Guess the game requirements of L4D2 and BC2 are way apart. I'm actually waiting for ATI to come up with an equivalent FireGL card. Then use those modded firegl drivers. Their more for doing work rather then games. But would be interesting to see what happens.

 

Hey guys. I've been lurking around this forum the past few days, cause like most of you, I can't get the 10.6 Catalyst drivers to run stable (I got the laptop Monday). It worked fine all day, playing world of warcraft .. Next day I updated the drivers and within moments of installing them and playing a fresh install of WoW, I was getting the PSOD computer lockup w/sound still playing.

System restored back to the previous day, and played 4 hours straight with no lockups, two days in a row now. That is using the stock driver, which has a date of December 09.


I have some thoughts/comments questions/ideas. After reading everyone's problems here, I can't help but think Power4Gear is somehow at the centre of this, particularly the old version. I uninstalled it anyways, but I noticed one weird thing - that middle blue button on the upper left "twin turbo" or whatever it does... soon as I uninstalled Power4Gear, that button no longer does anything. Kaput. Zero functionality. Just noticed it this morning. The reason I suspect it's related is, does the twin turbo button overclock or tweak the settings/timiings of the gpu? (I'm assuming it does).
Cause it seems like, people who did NOT uninstall P4GH found stability by entering a hard value for GPU speed, thus effectively disabling that app.

When I get home from work, I'm going to uninstall all ATI, do this driver sweep thing (is that a utility or something I have to download, driver sweep?)
then do a fresh install of the driver on ASus website, then an overlay of ATI Catalyst 10.6 and see what happens.

It's comforting to know the PSOD is driver related (fixable) and the worst case scenario for us (relative) newbs is a rollback. I think it just has to do with that stupid P4GH app basically destabilizing the card by fluctuating its power on the fly, even as it pushes the clock speeds to very high levels.

When I checked my event log the other day, after the PSOD, I had trouble really interpreting it but it was listed as a critical power related event.

Anyways, has anyone just tried uninstalled the P4GH, then applying Catalyst 10.6?

 

Quite a few of us, which is why I'm going to include the P4GH as part of the update process in the OP.

 

What a rotten mess. Ever since i got my g73jh-a1, i have been getting the GSOD problem in every game i play. i have the catalyst control center 10.6, and its weird because when i uninstall the ccc, i dont get these problems, but i need these drivers for certain programs i use on my computer. is there any way to have up to date ccc drivers and play games without getting these glitches? i have to manually shut my computer off 10 times a day because of this problem. the whole screen just goes grey with lines running up and down. i've uninstalled all previous ati drivers and reinstalled the later mobility 10.6 catalyst control center drivers but i keep getting this problem. please help me solve this problem so i can use this computer for what it was designed for. i dont know if i should rma because i dont want to be out of a computer for a month...

 

I have currently installed the new version of power4gear (the version linked above). After that I installed 10.6 drivers. I have not used the computer extensively over the last 24 hours, perhaps (1-2 hours) but haven't had issues yet.

I am planning on doing some trials tonight, and let people know what the results are. (ie if i get crash screens or not).

Hope that this works......

 

Try using the AMD clock tool to overclock @ 705/1100. 10.6 is completely stable for me at those clocks.

Cheers,

 

@Zack500: OKOKOK... I see a new thread is in order.... "GSOD Debug Part Deux" Lemme work on it....

 

So your saying if you only install the drivers and not the control centre it works fine?

 

What ever happened to the omega driver guy? I remember that's what you were supposed to use back in the radeon 9800 days.
He still doin ATI's job for them? or did he wind up stopin?

 

Yea i remember him, i used to use them on my 9600xt and 9800xt years ago... Maybe what we need is someone with the proper knowledge to make a hybrid driver. I mean like take what was changed in the asus driver and do the same to the newer drivers. But for now the 10.6 is working for me. Did the V3, had some driver issues then managed to sort it out.

 

Hey guys I have NO idea whether this is relevant or not, or whether it will even help you...But ever since I bought by G73 back in March, I've kept the ATI drivers and everything else stock (been too lazy to reformat and start tweaking away with newer driver versions and everything).

I never experienced any GSOD or other GPU-related issues after a few months of using Asus BIOS 205 and the stock Asus GPU drivers. Anyway, the thing that I wanted to point out is that by default, my AMD GPU Clock Tool reports a default memory and clock speed of 699.99/1000 MHz... Is the fact that the engine clock is reported at 699. 99 by default relevant in any way? Or is that just a quirk, which is basically the same thing as 700?

I just thought that with those of you trying to tune your clock speeds to a stable setting, knowing that the "stock" speed is reported as 699.99 might be somehow relevant. Probably not, but I just thought I'd throw it out there just in case.

(Also, for some reason, I can't get any of my GPU-monitoring apps to recognize the "Twin Turbo" clock speed increase after hitting the hardware button... I know I probably shouldn't use that setting anyway, but I found it odd that the "TwinTurbo" message would display on-screen after hitting the button, but the reported clock speeds stay the same...)

 

I believe the twin turbo doesn't affect the gpu. Its more for the cpu and ram, but to be honest, i don't know if the twin turbo makes any difference. Read somewhere its more for multiple cores usage.

 

Yep, disregard that part of my post; just looked it up and remembered that you're right, it doesn't bump up the GPU clock. Thanks.