Okay folks, I just built a new rig and I'm about to tear my hair out over it. First off here are the specs:
Antec Mini P180
EVGA ATX 550 Watt PSU
Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2
Intel i7 860 LGA 1156
G.Skill DDR3-1600 4x2gb
Sapphire HD 5850 1GB GDDR5
Seagate 250GB for OS
Hitachi Deskstar 1TB for storage
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit.
Okay so to begin with, everything installed perfect and booted up just fine with no issues. Unitl, I get to the ATI drivers. As soon as I get them installed I start getting lockups and BSOD's pointing to "atikmpag.sys" After scouring the net over and over again, I've found tons of similar problems not only with the ATI 5850's but with ATI's drivers in general.
Not to be deterred, I tried the oem drivers, drivers from sapphire (including a hotfix), drivers from ATI (both old and new) and I even looked at Omega drivers, but they didn't have any for Windows 7 64bit. On a side note, the first time I updated the bios the pc worked great for a few hours and I even played some games like Dirt2. However, the issues resurfaced sometime later. I went into the bios and set the DRam speed up to 1600 which is what the ram is and it worked for an entire evening.
Well this morning the system wouldn't boot until I re-inserted a usb thumb drive into my usb hub built into my monitor. After that it was the same old story of the graphics driver locking up and trying to reset itself. It eventually ended up corrupting my Windows 7 install and so now I'm here typing on a fresh install with no graphics driver installed. Funny thing is, I unplugged my usb hub this time around to make sure there were no usb hi-jinks and low and behold it does boot without the thumb drive, but now if I plug my hub in, it will not boot. I'm at a loss.
I don't have any test parts to really see what is or isn't working in the hardware department as my old pc is P4 with AGP. Deep down I feel it's a software issue, but either way I feel like I should RMA the 5850.
Sorry for the wall of text/rant, but any help would be awesome! Thanks!