AMD Radeon Crimson software - a word of warning

[IndiraLightfoot]

Hi'all!

 

Well, this is just a word of warning, basically.

 

Over half a year ago, Melkathi wrote a short notice on Steam about the new AMD Radeon Crimson messing things up. So, having Radeon Catalyst, I heeded that advice, and put up updating that graphics cards software.

 

However, a few days ago, in a weak moment, I reckoned it would be safe by now to let it rip, as it were ( ). Well, it wasn't. It turned out to be a disaster.

 

My fan was acting up all of the sudden, and I got instant black screen shut downs. I opened the casing, and felt some pretty bad heat coming from my graphics card. I started googling (with two more shutdowns), and learned that this Crimson software bloody well destroys your rig. Gulp!

 

It took me quite some time, but I learned from a clever Russian that I could lower the CPU percentage a bit, if plugged in, while searching, just to lower the heat. This bought me time to completely uninstall everything AMD (my screen graphics looked like it did in 1996), find the latest old Catalyst software suite from November 2015, and then download it and reinstall it.

 

Lo' and behold! It worked. My computer is not hot at all anymore according to my monitor program, and it's once again running silently.

 

Phew!

Edited June 10, 2016 by IndiraLightfoot

[teknoman2]

i've been using crimson from day 1... never had that problem on my HD7770 and neither did my brother on his R7 260x

[IndiraLightfoot]

@teknoman2: You were lucky then. Lots of people didn't fare that well. AMD tried to fix the problems, and some customers even discussed taking legal action after their hardware suffered from that Crimson software. I have the R9 280x, sadly.

 

Here are a few links on these issues:

http://www.pcgamesn.com/latest-amd-graphics-drivers-can-lock-fan-speeds-overheating-cards-to-break-point

 

http://www.myce.com/news/new-amd-crimson-drivers-damage-videocards-due-to-overheating-77928/

 

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3009688/components/amd-pushing-crimson-driver-fan-speed-hotfix-after-reports-of-overheating-radeon-cards.html

[Humanoid]

I suspect your problem is something else entirely. Those articles refer to a release from back in November where the fan speed was incorrectly capped, and yes, that would cause a thermal shutdown under load. This would not present a problem at idle, where the fan speeds would dip far below the incorrect cap (and indeed shut off entirely for some models) and the GPU would be generating very little heat by running at about 10-20W instead of 200-250W. Furthermore, there have been several driver releases since that problematic one, and I'm not aware of any systematic issues with them outside of rendering bugs in specific games.

 

What you are describing is something completely different and it'd probably worthwhile looking for more information because it may be symptomatic of a different underlying problem, like a system-specific incompatibility, or worse, signs of hardware failure.

[IndiraLightfoot]

Hmm, interesting.

 

I mean, all I know is this: After installing that AMD crimson software suite (I didn't install any other software and no patching or updates of any kind occurred), it merely took a few hours, and during that time, the following happened from a lay person's point of view:

-Normally, since I use an SSD, my computer is dead silent, except when running some really demanding games, then the fan hum pretty low.

-Well, as soon as I installed it, the fan actually started to make a fair bit of noise, even when at more or less idle work.

-After a couple of hours, when playing a simple card game on my pc, the fan sped up noisily, and then BLIP! Black screen. PC restarted itself.

-Well, it was late in the evening, so I went to bed.

-Next day, the fan sounds at idle were still weirdly noisy, and then it took merely a few minutes, using Photoshop. BLIP! Black screen. PC running, fan was crazy. I had to reboot it manually.

-Then, I installed AMD Monitor, so I could follow everything, and basically, all my quad cores were getting agitated, as well as the temperature and obviously the fan. Like I described, then it was just a matter of half an hour or an hour of whatever idle surfing I did. BLIP! Black screen plus fan rushing! Then that crash kept repeating itself.

 

After my un-installation of Crimson and re-install of Catalyst, and like a day, like 16 h of use of my pc, I have monitored the following:

-Not a single crash *knock on wood*

-Everything is silent.

-No fan rushing, nearly no fan sounds at all (like before)

-No hot graphics card, no fan rushing, even after 3 h of Overwatch!

-The four quads and the % use of CPU etc, back to minimal levels, like 8 % vis-a-vis 35-40% for one app, for instance.

 

The difference is stark.

Edited June 10, 2016 by IndiraLightfoot

[teknoman2]

i know there was this problem when crimson first came out but after an update or 2 there have been no reports of it. it's probably an incompatibility with some other GPU related software (i.e asus GPU tweak)... or lack of such software. in my case GPU tweak is overriding the driver settings about clock/fan speeds and any problem that the driver may have on this regard is not showing.

[IndiraLightfoot]

@teknoman: Perhaps. Then, oddly enough, it would then be the GPU-related stuff of the Catalyst software that tempered my problems under the new Crimson suite or something. I'm not that tech savvy, but perhaps it was just a stroke of luck. At least I know, it's heat related, since Windows said at restart that something may have shut down to protect bla bla bla (standard grey font message - I never got a definitive message telling me what's wrong). I suspect it's some 95 degrees heat protection trigger that black screened it all. It was never a blue screen. I checked all my wires and connections, outside the casing (which was clean, no dust) and inside, for mother board and power unit. I even ran a chkdsk, and I also ran a hardware diagnostic of my monitor.

 

Btw, everything else was standard, standard, standard. Win 7 64-bit, I never overclock or something like that. I have no special software for graphics that I've added. AMD + Windows.

Edited June 10, 2016 by IndiraLightfoot

[Gorgon]

I had the same experience. My HD series card died shortly after updating to Crimson. Pink lines and artifacting a few reboots and some more pink artifacting and, dead. Quite likely temperature related. 

[teknoman2]

you should check your card maker's site to see if they have an utility for tweaking and monitoring the card, most do, and install it. it will allow you to know what happens with the temperature and the fans at any given moment

Edited June 10, 2016 by teknoman2

[IndiraLightfoot]

you should check your card maker's site to see if they have an utility for tweaking and monitoring the card, most do, and install it. it will allow you to know what happens with the temperature and the fans at any given moment

Like I described above, I did: AMD Monitor plus one other software. I could follow everything, and I did follow it for like 2,5 h in total. Both the cores and the fans went ballistic quickly, and at any kind of activity - almost idle was enough - and then you saw a swift peak of the fan and the temp and then BLIP - black screen. The hours are ticking now, and I use my pc for pretty heavy lifting all day at work (and then for gaming). It's back in it's normal routine now, hopefully: silent and pretty cool.