Can Of Code

Fixed Crashing of ATI Radeon 5600xt drivers on Windows

I’ve been lucky enough to look at replacing my now 5-6 year old laptop which has become to churn at that thought of Photoshop or Visual Studio. I have not built a PC in a long time and was a little daunted at first but not too much has changed. So I order everything I needed and got set on putting it all together.

  • Processor: Ryzen 7 3800X
  • MSI Radeon RX5600XT
  • 32 GB (2 x 16gb) 2666 DDR4 RAM
  • MSI Tomahawk Motherboard

All went well everything clicked into place, installed Windows, installed some games, updates and all the software I need. Then when I got into playing a game, the screen would go blank, then a handy little message would inform me that the Graphic drivers had gone wobbly and you should tell someone about it.

Some of the errors I was getting:

  • Event viewer would show: LiveKernelEvent 141 Error
  • the errors related to: LKD_0x141_Tdr:6_IMAGE_amdkmdag.sys.
ATI Radeon RX5600XT wasn't the problem

The internet will know!

I headed to Google to find a significant number of forum posts of people having the same issue with the same graphics card and lots of people were pointing to the drivers being the issue. Following the advice I tried the following:

  • Propped up the graphics card with some Lego! (Some were suggesting the card was so heavy it was sliding out the PCIe connector.
  • Installed many different combinations of Drivers from the latest to one from months ago
  • Swapping around the power cables
  • Questioning everything I bought, assuming I got something wrong somewhere.
  • Ran a memory test, passed with flying colours.

I was starting to get disheartened now, perhaps I should have stuck with a laptop and let the experts make the computers. Did I just buy a bad graphics card? However I found it just too hard to give up debugging this so I decided to just take one of the sticks of RAM out on a whim really.

BINGO!

No more crashes. Why RAM was causing the display drivers to crash I just didn’t understand. I wasn’t happy with this diagnoses because maybe it was just a coincidence? so I took out all the RAM and then put in the crashing stick and the crashing was back.

Must be the crashing stick! I was hoping that MemTest86 will tell me for certain but after running it over 4 passes there were no errors.  So its still sort of a mystery whenever that stick of RAM is in the PC, it will continually crash in games. I have returned the RAM and hoping that the replacement will be fine (It was although I went for a different brand and a faster speed 3200). Hopefully this will be useful for someone having trouble with the blank / black screen when playing games with the 5600XT. If anyone has any theories on how the RAM could pass Memory Tests but still be faulty let me know! And for that matter, why bad RAM crashes the graphics drivers exclusively?

Posted in Gaming | Tagged , |