Freezing and BSOD

Ok, so my coolant res. in my computer started leaking the other day. So I figured while I had the computer in the garage I'd break out the blowgun and de-dust it as well. All good so far, eliminated the res, so I'm just using my secondary res now. Went to the hardware store to get some new fittings to plumb everything up.

Well I had my second Visiontek Radeon HD 3870X2 card that I'm working out a trade on, so I figured I'd toss it in to make sure it works properly. This is where the problems start. Get the computer back in and all hooked up, and it starts freezing randomly and BSOD'ing. Upon restart, it checks and says the graphics card is the problem. So I uninstal/reinstall the drivers and Catalyst Suite multiple times to no avail. :think:

I figure somethings wrong with that card, so I put the original one back in. Same problems

I've uninstalled/reinatlled drivers multiple times, nothing works. Sometimes it'll work for an hour before it freezes, sometimes 5-10 seconds after windows loads it'll freeze. :evil:

Now I'm running a tri-boot setup, where XP Home, Vista Ultimate and W7 are all installed, so I tried booting into Vista...won't even boot up. Try in in XP, get the same random freezing errors. Now I'm lost for ideas. :?

However, if I start W7 in safe mode, it works just fine, no errors at all. So I'm assuming its a driver-related issue. I also downloaded the latest drivers from ATi's website to be sure.

On the plus side, my coolant leak it fixed now lol :banana:

That would be because you swapped the cards. Especially if they are different cards. They only have to be slightly different and the driver will throw out a BSoD.

Looks like you might need a format & reload. You might be able to get away with a system restore.

they're physically the same card, just different serial numbers. I tried a system restore, no go. I've also been browsing the W7 forums, and it seems I'm not the only one having this sudden problem. One solution was in the power center to check the settings, and it was set to turn off HDD in 20 mins, so I changed it to never, we'll see if that helps

didnt help, still having the issues. I'm failry certain its a driver issue as safe mode works fine :think:

well, safe mode worked fine for a few hours. I thought maybe it was the hard drive, so I unplugged it and plugged in my IDE 80GB and did a fresh install, still had issues.

so I swapped out my 3870x2 for my old x700, reformatted and did another clean install, still no go. this leaves my motherboard, as I tried each mem stick in each slot with no changes. but everytime it freezes and reboots, the automatic error reporting tells me its the video card :think:

What about uninstalling the vid card driver?

did it, uninstalled catalyst and also went in through device manager and did it that way, same issues still. also did it after I swapped in my x700