It appears I've caught some sort of driver virus common with ATI's 3850 HD. It's extremely frustrating. I've researched this issue, and I find
alot of similar problems that people are having with this card. The card was working just fine for the first few months of it's life, but now it's gone to hell. & I can't pinpoint anything that may have caused it.
Here's exactly what happens:
1) I'll start up
any 3D game that requires something to be rendered. (Call Of Duty 4, Microsoft Flight Simulator, X-Plane...)
2) It plays fine, for about 5-10 minutes.
3) Suddenly everything freezes. I can't even communicate with people on TeamSpeak anymore. It's no use to try and end the game process to save it. Nothing will work.
4) This is where either 1 of 3 things will happen.
- The screen will remain frozen until reboot.
- I'll get a "Blue Screen Of Death" like screen, that tells me my system has done a memory dump, and regards the ati2.dvag.dll file.
- The screen will go completely black, and my monitor will say it has no signal (as if the video card has completely stopped giving out anything to my monitor.)
5) My question is...what should I do? I've tried just about everything, and I think I may need to wait to play anything until I build my new system in a few months. (Please don't give me obvious, 'update your drivers' answers.) Also, I've monitored my video card temp, and it remains within operating conditions. It isn't o/c'd either.
A couple of other notes:
The fan on my mainboard is failing, but seems to be operating normally still.
The screen flashes a bunch of white bars, and freaks out sometimes before a crash, which looks exactly like what was happening when I had a video card burn up to a crisp a few months back,
