Video playback/encoding hangups ...

[NightBirdDS]

... bad driver or bad card?

Well, I have been tryin to sort this problem out for months now, since I got the card in fact. I finally decided I needed to ask some folks about it, and this place has always been a good source of info for me, so I finally registered.

I have a Gigabyte HD 5870 1024 MB. Default clocks of 850/1200. When I playback HD video or encode something in HD with Windows Live Movie Maker the driver will eventually hang up, causing the screen to stop responding to commands right away.

There was a workaround posted here to create a CCC profile and set the base clocks to something higher than PowerPlay's default 157/300, and I've done that. That seems to help, but I wonder why I should have to do this at all?

I know that for a lot of people PowerPlay works just fine, so what am I missing?

For reference, here's my machine specs.

MB: Asus M3A78 Pro (AMD 780G)
Mem: 4GB Corsair XMS2 at 800Mhz.
CPU: AMD Phenom X4 9750
GPU: Gigabyte Radeon HD 5870 (GV-R5875D-1GD-B)

I know, the card is CPU limited, that'll change soon. I am just trying to figure out whether I have a remarkably common problem, or whether I should RMA the card.

Any of your help would be appreciated.

[DannibusX]

I used to get hang ups and driver crashes a lot with my old set up. I had a Phenom 9950 BE on an ASUS M3A32-MVP and 4 gigs of Corsair Dominator DDR2. I went into BIOS and changed the memory to run in ganged mode and it made the difference. Now I run with a 965BE on a Crosshair III and 4 gigs of Mushkin Blackline DDR3 unganged and have had no problems.

Set the memory to run in ganged made and see if it makes a difference. Hope this helps.

Edit: Also, I have an ASUS HD5870, and bought it when it first hit the market. I thought I had a dead card until I made that change in the BIOS.

[NightBirdDS]

I will give that a look and report back. If I remember right I had set it to Ganged to begin with, but I'll double check in a bit.

[NightBirdDS]

Update: I had the memory set to Unganged in the BIOS. Went ahead and set it to Ganged and tried again. As soon as I added the clips to live movie maker with default 157/300 clocks the driver locked up.

Activated a CCC profile with 400/600 clocks and tried again. Added all the clips, but live movie maker said some of them were corrupt and unusable. Closed the app, reopened it and added each clip one at a time. That worked. Encoded two videos at 1080p just fine.

As it's chugging along though, I'm hearing a bit of a hiss from the MB. Hadn't noticed it before.