TL;DR
My recently purchased pre-built PC crashed the other night and now at this point whenever the AMD drivers are NOT installed the system works fine. As soon as I install any version of the drivers... new, old, full install, driver only... I have artifacts, system freezes and black screens. That triggers a warning in the Event Viewer "Display driver amduw23g stopped responding and has successfully recovered." I have repalced parts and tried mutliple software-related fixes and I still have the problems.
My Specs:
MB - Gigabyte B550 UD AC (rev. 1.2)
CPU - Ryzen 5 5500
RAM - Corsair Vengance DDR4 16 GB (8 GB x 2) 3200MHz
NVMe - WD Black 1 TB
GPU - XFX RX 6700 SWFT 10 GB
OS - Window 10 Home
PSU - Corsair 750 watt gold
I am really stumped and hoping someone here has more ideas. I bought a pre-built PC (used) a few weeks ago and everything has been great until the other night. I was mid-game in large scale fight with many other players and the game crashed. This is typically very hard on the GPU / CPU and I get really low framerate in this scenario. I tried relaunching the game and got a driver timeout error from the AMD Adrenalin software. I rebooted the PC and now no games will run, steam and discord sometimes crash it too. I get the Adrenalin driver timeout error now and also artifacts on the screen, black screens and the system freezes when it happens. Upon checking the Event Viewer I am seeing this error each time it happens "Display driver amduw23g stopped responding and has successfully recovered."
I was running Windows 11 when it first happened and I hadn't updated any drivers or installed Windows updates in a couple of weeks (I have auto updates disabled). The first thing I did was remove the drivers with the AMD Cleanup Utility and DDU both in safe mode and re-installed the latest AMD drivers full package. Rebooted and still had the same issue. I ended up doing a fresh format and Windows 10 install. Installed system drivers, chipset drivers, etc. Everything was looking promising until I installed the AMD drivers. As soon as I installed it, before the forced reboot, I got the artifacts on the screen.
I removed the drivers with AMD cleanup Utility and DDU in safe mode again and rebooted. No artifacts, no black screens or freezes. System worked fine other than not being able to play games. I surfed the web, watched some Youtube, etc and had zero issues. Read some forums on this apparently common issue and found people trying registry additions (which I tried and did not work) and rolling back to old drivers or trying the Pro drivers. I did all that. I installed the original driver for my card from like a year ago which did not work and also tried a more recent but older driver from a few months ago which also did not work. The Pro drivers would not run on my card. Just got an error that the hardware was unsupported.
Here's what I've tried so far and all of them have not worked. I am running out of ideas and hesitant to get a new motherboard or CPU because I have stress tested the system and had zero errors. I have a request open with XFX to RMA the card but I'm not confident that is the issue any longer.
- Wiped and installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 w/ updates. Installed AMD drivers.
- Bought and installed a new RX 580 with the latest drivers (after running DDU).
- Bought and installed a new 750w PSU running 2 x PCIe cables to the video card.
- Bought and installed 2 new sticks of DDR4 RAM, removed old pair.
- Tried every PCIe slot on my motherboard.
- Updated BIOS to the latest for my motherboard.
- Went into BIOS and restored everything to defaults.
- Tried forcing PCIe 3 for the x16 slot. Was set to Auto.
- Ran Prime95 to stress test for around 2 hours. Everything passed without errors.
- Ran Memtest86, all 4 tests until it finished, Zero errors.
- Insalled driver only option in the Andrenalin installer.
I've tried some misc. other things software related and nothing has worked. Basically at this point when the AMD drivers are NOT installed the system works fine. As soon as I install any version of the drivers... new, old, full install, driver only... I have artifacts, system freezes and black screens. That triggers the warning in the Event Viewer "Display driver amduw23g stopped responding and has successfully recovered."
