System: Windows 10 (defective) / Ubuntu (works fine)
Built: 04/20/2012
GPUs: 2x Radeon HD 7850 2GB Ram in Crossfire Configuration
Motherboard: ASUS M5A97
CPU: AMD Bulldozer 8core FX-8150 (3.6GHz)
Behaviour
I'm getting the classic Black Screen of Death after the windows 10 spinner. That is a genuine crash as the keyboard is not responding back and I can't for example Win+Ctrl+Shift+B to reset the display.
It works on Windows 10 with Microsoft Basic Display Adapter deivers. (I'm writting you from that machine now).
Cause
Since roughly, April 2018, after a driver update setup using Catalyst, my rig stopped working in Windows 10, but, I have a dual boot setup and it's still running on Ubuntu. It appears that the drivers released by AMD since then do not really support my GPUs.
Attempted Solutions and Actions
In the past, every few months I would get this problem. paramound to the attrocious driver support release testing you have in AMD. I would roll back drivers and it would work for a few months.
This time however, I neglected the machine for a while and when I got back, I tried pretty much everything but I couldn't find drivers that date before April 18 to fix it.
I also tried a few things
- Clean install windows 10
- Removed the cards from Crossfire and test each one individually.
- Tried almost all driver packs AMD released with Adrenalin 2019 Edition
Conclusion
I depserately need driver pack that works with the latest Windows 10 build , for real.
Just a note for AMD Support. Please don't tell me the, "your card is defective" response. There are quite a few facts that you should get into consideration before you answer. I have two GPUs and I also tried each one of them alone. How can they get faulty at the same time and work in Ubuntu at the same time?
The rational answer would be, that, the problem is the drivers. It's probably due to the the fact that you do not really test them in all your devices and you probably dropped support of HD series long ago.
Something else that bugged me for a while was.... I find at least silly that the latest AMD drivers are unsigned and I have to run in test mode to install any drivers.
In conclusion, I'm very dissapointed with my life as an AMD GPU consumer and the support I got over the years. I always had to tiptoe with the AMDs driver release process and spent countless hours trying to solve problems that I shouldn't have to solve in first place. I'm lucky I'm a Software Engineer otherwise I would have thrown away my GPU cards ages ago (regarding I was taking seriously most of the AMD support responses on the particular subject "your card is defective").
Now, I probably see myself getting a divorce with AMD and defecting to the nvidia side as I don't want to see myself throwing away good money and time at AMD, again, for a rig that was supposed to just work.
P.S.To AMD Support employees Sorry. I'm sorry for the rant. If you have a good driver pack and you are able to provide an honest answer about which systems Radeon HD 7850 is supported on (really), and with which driver pack, it would help a lot of people. I personally only care about Windows 10 though.
Thank you for the long read. I hope this message didn't came out aggresively, but if it was, just blame it on me getting things out of my chest after a long unproductive Saturday (probably my last saturday with an AMD GPU).
