Greetings to the community.
I come here to ask for help in regards to an ongoing issue I have been having with AMD’s display drivers for years, now.
The short description is simple: My display drivers crash randomly, even if doing nothing, if I even so much as click the “Custom” tunning setting in Radeon Settings. If the driver is outside of its default setting within the Tuning tab, it is guaranteed that my drivers will either crash at a completely random moment throughout the day or my PC will restart.
Now, to give as detailed of a description of this issue as I can:
I have been an AMD customer for many, many years now. Ever since the early Athlon days with the Athlon 64 3200+ being the first CPU along with an ATi X700 Pro GPU.
This issue has started with the introduction of the GCN architecture and the Radeon HD 7850 GPU. Back then, instability was easier to identify and to deal with as too high of a core clock would show stretched polygons across the screen and too high of a memory clock would show colorful artifacts so the GPU would “talk” to me and tell me what was too much. Even so, there was no real stable overclock as every setting above default would eventually lead to my PC freezing and then restarting randomly throughout the day. A sort of solution that I had found was to disable Hardware Acceleration in everything that I could in order to delay this eventual crash and restart. However, even so, it would still occur eventually.
After I had saved up enough money to upgrade from an Phenom II X4 and the 7850 to the first Ryzen CPU and GCN 4.0 with the RX 480, I had hoped that the issue would finally go away. But it did not as it only seemed to get worse. When the RX Vega was released I had upgraded to the RX Vega 64 Liquid (Which is still sitting on my desk to this day) alongside with the Ryzen 7 1700 that I had initially purchased with the RX 480. The Vega seemed slightly more stable, but even that one crashed at least once a day. Ever since my Vega died and I had upgraded to the RX 7800 XT, on which I currently am now, I had tried to sort this issue by myself with no success.
What have I tried to fix this:
- I tried going from Windows 10 Pro to Windows 11 Pro and now to Windows 11 IoT LTSC, still the same issue.
- I tried changing the Motherboard, RAM and CPU from an Asus Crosshair VI Hero, 4x 8GB G.Skill 3200 CL14 RAM and R7 1700 - to an - Asus ROG Strix B550-F, 2x 16GB G.Skill 3600 CL16 and R7 5800X3D, still the same issue
- I thought that maybe the PSU was bad so I changed my old Corsair HX850i to a Seasonic PRIME TX-1600 Noctua Edition and, you guessed it, it still crashes the same
- I installed and reinstalled the GPU drivers using DDU and without using DDU while only using AMD’s built-in clean install feature, still the same issue
As you can see, I have had this issue over the course of multiple GPU generations, different Windows versions and different hardware. I don’t know what else to do as it is infuriating to see that my PC just restarts whilst not showing any hint of instability.
I would like to point out that this issue occurs even if I am not touching any of the frequencies, voltages or power targets. Simply clicking the “Custom” button and leaving everything untouched will lead to a random crash and restart throughout the day, especially while using Hardware Accelerated applications.
This is quite problematic as I can’t even change my fan profile on my GPU without crashing and my GPU does get rather hot in its default state, up to 87°C on the GPU hotspot and sometimes even 90°C on the memory during ray traced titles such as Metro Exodus.
I beg anyone with knowledge of this issue and with the technical knowhow to please help me get to the bottom of this and find a way to fix it. I have spent a lot of money and time trying to sort it out myself and I have reached a point where I don’t know what else to try. Buying some of the fastest GPUs and now a GPU such as the Sapphire RX 7800 XT NITRO+ to keep it in it’s Default state shouldn’t be acceptable. It might not be the highest end GPU but it was still a high-end GPU when it was released.
I am willing to answer any questions that might help get to the bottom of this behavior of my PC and I thank anybody that is willing to help.