ATI Radeon Family has stopped responding and has recovered

Sabranan

Member
Howdy people.

Here’s my specs:
Chassis & Display
Viper II: 18.4" HD+ LCD Backlit Widescreen (1680x945) Super Clear Glossy
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Mobile Processor i7-740QM (1.73GHz) 6MB Cache
Memory (RAM)
4GB SAMSUNG 1333MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY (2 x 2GB)
Graphics Card
1GB ATI® Radeon™ HD 5165 PCI Express
Memory - 1st Hard Disk
120GB OCZ VERTEX 2 SATA II 2.5" SSD (upto 285MB/sR | 275MB/sW)
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
8x SATA DVD±R/RW/Dual Layer (+ 24x CD-RW)
Memory Card Reader
Integrated 4-in-1 Card Reader (SD, MS PRO, MMC, MS)
Network Facilities
INTEGRATED GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS 802.11N CARD (AS STANDARD)
USB Options
3 x USB 2.0 PORTS AS STANDARD
Bluetooth & Infrared Options
Integrated V2.0 Bluetooth Adapter + EDR Capability
Battery
Viper Series 9 Cell Lithium Ion Battery (6,600 mAh)
Power Lead & Adaptor
1 x UK Power Lead & 90W AC Adaptor
Operating System
NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED
Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Carry Case
TARGUS XXL NOTEBOOK CASE TCC008EU (£42)
Mouse
INTEGRATED 2 BUTTON TOUCHPAD MOUSE
Webcam
INTEGRATED 1.3 MEGAPIXEL WEBCAM
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£5)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 4 to 6 working days
Quantity
1

Had a nice new Viper II laptop for about 2 weeks and at first, all was well. I run windows 7 (x64) on it and while in the middle of watching a film yesterday the screen froze for a few seconds. Shortly afterwards it came back, although the film had become pixelated and the following appeared in a nice little box on the bottom right of my screen:

“ATI Radeon Family has stopped responding and has recovered”

Now, this happens all the time. The screen will freeze up for several seconds, show the message and repeat a number of times before it eventually BSOD’s. This happens instantly after I’ve logged in.

I decided since I haven’t had it long I’d just wipe windows and reinstall, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference at all. I’ve tried installing the VGA drivers off the provided disk, as well as from the ATI site. Same problem. The only thing that works is if I boot it up in safe mode, but that’s obviously not an acceptable solution.
Is this likely to be something I can fix or is this an indication of buggered hardware that I’ll have to RMA?
 

Sleinous

Author Level
Buggered GPU, early warning sign. Phone up tech suppport on 0844 499 4000 and explain all the steps youve already taken.
 

Gorman

Author Level
I call driver issue, the clue is "ATI". Pretty infamous for it.

Sleinous, it is quite uncommon to have a mobile GPU fail, theyre low power clockwork versions of their desktop brothers.

The drivers from the ATI site will fail as they need to be from Mitac AFAIK.

Give our guys a call for the correct driver updates.
 

Sleinous

Author Level
It happens, mine is proof of that rofl. Utterly screwed up. I keep meaning to post pics of the lines I get all over the screen lol. I realise mine is part of a screwed up batch but... even though theyre lower clock, Laptops have a tiny percentage of teh airflow desktops have available to them, so, the risks are still there if the cooling proves not to be adequate after having owned one for a while.
 

Gorman

Author Level
Yes, I am somewhat familiar with how laptops are made...

It does happen, but its not the most likely culprit by a long shot.

Lets look at the evidence.

“ATI Radeon Family has stopped responding and has recovered”

Driver error message.

Now, this happens all the time. The screen will freeze up for several seconds, show the message and repeat a number of times before it eventually BSOD’s. This happens instantly after I’ve logged in.

Driver crashes followed by a BSOD. Slight off chance it could be temp related, worth a check.

The only thing that works is if I boot it up in safe mode

Safe mode = no drivers loaded, +1 for driver issue.

I’ve tried installing the VGA drivers off the provided disk, as well as from the ATI site.

Drivers from the ATI site wont work, disk drivers are probably very old.

So lets sum up a little.

  • Its an ATI gpu giving driver errors, so thats the first suspect. Drivers + ATI = fail.
  • Its pixelating slightly on the crash and as a laptop GPU which often share system memory, so memory may need looking at.
  • Its a laptop so a temp check on the GPU cannot go amiss.
  • Last on the list is it could indeed be a faulty GPU, but thats quite rare and shouldnt be the first assumption.
 

Sleinous

Author Level
Whatever, I dont feel like arguing at 8.40 in the morning lol. I'm only saying because, for atleast a few months PRIOR to the whole GPU coming off the mainboard, I got those exact messages and BSODs, drive has stopped working blah blah, and, however many times I reinstalled, it did nothing. Bearing in mind i'd been using the Sony one (only one that works without using modded INF) and it always worked up until the day it started to display the little pop up in bottom right "Nvidia display driver has stopped working and has now recovered" so for me, was nothing to do with driver. Worth uninstalling and reinstalling though as I hear ATI dont make such good drivers? I must admit I had 4 attempts to install a driver for a 4000series ATI GPU last month before it finally worked :| They seem quite troublesome. Anyway, its worth not overlooking overheating, because, a few months down the line, believe me you'll soon know if its overheating or not lol.
 

Gorman

Author Level
Im not arguing, im just listing the things we should try first!

The tech guys will be quite grateful for the prep work being done, list of temps etc and a memory check done. Helps them out a lot.

ATI drivers suck. I just thought this thread needed that saying one more time.
 

Sleinous

Author Level
Anyway....steering us all back on topic, let us know how it goes with tech support, gpu temps & whether u get it sorted
 

Sabranan

Member
Ok, this is what's happened since I last posted.

Ran a memtest on the off chance it could be a memory error, which shows no problems. Doesn't always mean there are none I know, but at least it reduces the chances of it.

Done a lot of Googling! Seems this isn't uncommon, but can have lots of causes. For all the ATI bashing, Nvidia seem to suffer equally from this. That suggests to me that it's something other than the drivers.

I've installed Ubuntu using Wubi, ending up with a dual boot between that and Windows 7. Interestingly, this seems to work well, until I install the proprietary drivers from ATI. Then the screen freezes up in a matter of seconds, and unlike windows doesn’t give an error or come back, just stays frozen until I power off. Films (even HD) work in Ubuntu, but this laptop's supposed to be a gaming machine as well and I don't just want to run Ubuntu.

The only thing that makes me think it's hardware rather than software is that it began very suddenly, and never went away. Didn't follow a driver change, and even if it did, reinstalling Windows and loading the drivers from the provided disk should have solved that. This machine has been playing Mass Effect 2 on the highest settings and playing HD films across the network without issues.

On the other hand, temperature wise the graphics card never seems to go above 75C as an absolute maximum. Not sure what to make of it really! Would hate to RMA it if it's not a hardware issue, so trying to eliminate all the software possibilities first.

Any other advice will be gladly received!
 

Tom DWC

Moderator
Moderator
I'm sorry, Tom isn't home at the moment, but if you'd like to leave a message and contact number, he'll get back to you. :D

UPDATE: I tried to be impartial in this post but it kept eating away at me so I have returned to say that I agree with Phoenix!

Hey, quit bashing ATI/AMD! They're doing the best they can!

Exactly! It isn't fair!
 
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Sabranan

Member
Ok, here's the latest.

Whatever the problem was, after several frustrating days it seems to have gone away on its own. Haven't seen one of these errors for several hours, this despite not updating any drivers or making any other changes I can see.

Been playing games, watching films etc. most of this morning and not a trace anything was ever wrong. So God knows what happened there.

Do have one unrelated question though; isn't the Viper II supposed to have the Intel Shirley Peak chipset for its inbuilt wireless? I'm seeing a Realtek RTL8191SE in device manager, and it's not picking up my 5 GHz network like the dual band Shirley Peak should.
 

Sleinous

Author Level
Realtek is audio ;) and what 5ghz network? Wireless is measured in mbps for speed, I guess you mean wave-band? 802.11b/g/n for that.
 

Sabranan

Member
Realtek is audio ;) and what 5ghz network? Wireless is measured in mbps for speed, I guess you mean wave-band? 802.11b/g/n for that.

With that in mind, how do you explain the the item "Realtek RTL8191SE Wireless LAN 802.11n PCI-E NIC" in device manager under Network Adapters?
 
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