HD 6770 won't stop freezing

[Lurno]

I replaced the old 8400gs with an HD 6770. I did uninstall all nvidia drivers, except for physx, which is needed for many games. It just freezes every few minutes of gaming or every few minutes i'm using it outside of gaming. During those minutes, I get around ~50 fps on many games with high settings. I have the lastest video drivers. I even tried AMD's auto-detecting tool, same problem. The only game that doesn't freeze is Sanctum.
specs:
Phenom 830 @3.5ghz
Cooler Master TX3
BIOSTAR A770E3
Patriot DDR3 4gb @1066Mhz
Windows XP 32bit
Cooler Master RS500-PCARD3-US 500w
Whoever knows how to solve this gets... ¢17?
Edit: I forgot to mention that the sound screws up gradually until freezing for a bit after which everything works fine, but it happens every few minutes.

[Macmaster4k2]

try reinstalling drivers? what brand is the graphics card? Also, it could be physx because you got it from an nvidia product and that could have nvidia drivers.
Check to see it the phenom is compatible with the HD 6770

[Indigo]

Originally Posted by Macmaster4k2

try reinstalling drivers? what brand is the graphics card? Also, it could be physx because you got it from an nvidia product and that could have nvidia drivers.
Check to see it the phenom is compatible with the HD 6770

Physx won't be causing the problem. I did a similar swap with another PC, took it from a GeForce 9500 GT which had included Physx and I uninstalled the nVidia drivers and left Physx and then installed the exact same model card (Radeon HD 6770) and it runs fine.

The other thing to ask is why XP 32bit? Your system has 4GB of RAM installed in addition to whatever the video card has. You're choking the system from achieving its full potential, and honestly, I doubt XP knows what to do with all that RAM flying about. You should upgrade to a 64 bit OS (Windows 7 preferably) ASAP.

Something else you can try is to adjust the fan speed on the card and see if it helps out - I just recently bought my 6770, and I did a lot of comparison shopping, and found that there were a lot of folks out there reporting issues with the 6770 from some vendors, so it could be related.

[Lurno]

As it turns out, there was a driver update that was only available on the sapphire website that fixed this problem. The thing that made me miss it was that despite selecting windows xp for OS, the website switches to Windows 7 drivers (not that I had Windows 7 drivers, I previously used AMD's automatic updater). Initially, CCC 12.1 seemed to make everything worse but after a day it strangely fixed itself. Some games have better looking textures, most games are playable at higher settings, but some games like Crysis are a bit unplayable with 8x AA whereas I could max it out with the previous drivers and still get playable fps but 4x AA seems to look better and some other games seem to have worse fps. I was going to post this sooner but as it turns out, this event was so mind-blowing that it reduced my platelet count enough to take me out for a few days.
On a side note, I went with Windows XP 32bit because it was what I already had and I was on a budget... Can anyone afford to make a donation to this poor lad?

[IAntDemo]

Can't make a donation but Indigo is spot on, your triple core(?) cpu isn't getting the most out of it with windows xp.. vista and 7 are designed to run your cpu cores alot better then xp can, even still I think this could be a problem with freezing, not your problem but it still would fix them problems

[Lurno]

The problem came back. I tried downgrading the drivers to 11.11c (a modded driver) but it only temporarily fixed the problem. As soon as I tried to crank up settings, it came back. Lowering them wouldn't work. I went back to 12.1 but the problem is still there. Can't anyone tell the last driver version that AMD didn't break for Windows XP? What further proves that this is an driver problem, Ubuntu ran problem free from a usb stick despite the fact that it loads HD 5770 drivers. Too bad that there isn't 100% compatability with Windows apps under Wine...

[lhuser]

Try uninstalling everything video driver related. Take out PhysX, take out all Catalyst, and remove any crap that's related to them. Download a fresh new copy on AMD's website and install just the drivers and not that extra bloatware junk.

If that doesn't do it, then I'm at loss.

Oh and, I've been running Sabayon (Gentoo) linux 64-bit on my system and nearly all of the games worked. GTA4 didn't work unless you had a later version, and if you need a few Windows apps, you could always use Virtualbox It works perfect.