Solved Radeon BSOD only in Windows 8 64bit

[bobofgold]

Hi all,
New to the forum so hello!

I've recently bought an XFX 7870 Tahiti and have been having loads of trouble getting the drivers installed in Windows 8 64bit. It shows up as Microsoft Basic Display Adaptor and when I try to install the Catalyst drivers I get the BSOD with the following error:

page_fault_in_nonpaged_area atikmdag.sys

When I first got the card I spent a couple of weeks trouble shooting this. I tried various things such as driver refreshes, running memtest, reseating every component in the case. Basically everything I could find online!

Eventually I took an image of my HTPC which runs Windows 8 32bit and copied this image over to my new rig. The card then installed fine. The card works perfectly in 32bit with no issues what so ever. This is fine, other than the fact that I can only use 3GB of my 12GB of memory!

With the release of Windows 8.1 Preview I thought I'd have another bash at this but still get the same issues. On a completely fresh install of 64bit I get the same BSOD but the 32bit version is completely fine.

Has anyone had any experience with this? Or got any idea about anything I can try!?

 

[kingtez]

Have you looked into a BIOS update for your Motherboard? have you got the correct drivers? AMD/ATi dont seem to show any that i can see but looking at forums suggest the drivers should be obtained from XFX directly. Be worth registering with the product details and see what it offers there. Reckon the drivers could be sat behind the login screen

 

[bassfisher6522]

Run Driver Fusion....formally Drive Sweeper....
Driver Fusion - The Complete Device And Driver Solution

Then make sure like kingtez suggested, that your BIOS is the latest along with all other mobo drivers. Then download your GPU driver directly from AMD.
AMD Graphics Drivers & Software

 

[bobofgold]

BIOS is updated and I've already tried Driver Fusion. I'm also running this off a completely clean install of Win 8.1 (previously tried with a clean install of Wind 8) so there shouldn't be anything "messy" installed. I've tried both the drivers from AMD and XFX. 32bit 8 and 8.1 are completely fine.

I'm tempted to download Win7 64bit to see if I have any luck with that but it's annoying that I've paid for a win8 license that I currently can't use!

 

[bassfisher6522]

What are your system specs...and be as detailed as possible? The only physical items that jump out at me is: is the GPU fully seated, does it have the correct power connections and are they fully seated and does you PSU meet the minimum requirements to run that GPU. An under-powered PSU can cause a BSOD.

 

[bobofgold]

I'm at work at the moment but off the top of my head the specs are:
Intel i5 750 @ 2.6GHz
Some undoubtedly rubbish Dell motherboard.
8GB Kingston 1066MHz
2 x 2GB Crucial 1066MHz
XFX 7870 Tahiti
Corsair 550W PSU
Samsung 128GB SSD
Lite-On Blu ray Drive

I don't really see how it can be a hardware issue though as everything works absolutely perfectly in 32bit. The PSU should be fine at 550W and I don't think that 64bit uses significantly more power than 32. Also it's not an issue that happens unless I try to install the driver. Obviously the card is passing through the video signal as it allows me to load windows and browse and even play games in 64 bit (using the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter driver). There's no performance though. As soon as I try and install the driver I get BSOD.

 

[bobofgold]

After 6 months I've finally come across a solution to this issue thanks to this thread. Seems like it's something that a lot of people have had problems with.

Anywho, in the end I needed to upgrade the video bios on the card.

Both the BIOS and the tools to upgrade it can be found here.