Radeon 5xxx owners report grey screens/hangs...

[meatloaf747]

A significant amount of ATI users have taken to the AMD user forums to complain about grey screens, crashes and colored-striped hangups. So far it's unclear as to what is causing the problem.
Users report that grey, brown or colored stripes/screen appear while playing games, watching movies and in some cases, while idle. The problems seems to be confined to the HD 5xxx series, although there are a couple of mentions of 4xxx cards... - http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ATI-Radeon-Gray-Screen-Crash,9529.html
Cheers, Mac...

 

[JCitron]

Mac,

This sounds like a bad GPU, etch short, or memory on the card. I remember seeing this type of problem when I used to fix video circuits on old computer equipment and terminals. The striping is caused by a bad address line being stuck high or low.

Way back in the old days, I dealt with a particularly snooty issue that went away when a scope probe was placed on the clock line into a shift register. The chips were a bit dodgy and needed replacing. The manufacturer of the equipment opted to add a 15pf capacitor instead of replacing the chips.

John