I recently upgraded to a Sapphire Pulse 9070 XT and performed a fresh Windows 11 installation. My system has a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, B650 motherboard, 32 GB of DDR5-6000 CL32 memory, a Gigabyte M28 4K 144 Hz HDR primary monitor, and a ViewSonic 240 Hz monitor running at 144 Hz as a secondary display. After playing for a few hours, the game eventually locks up completely. When I reboot, the graphics driver appears corrupted, so I have to use DDU and reinstall it. This has happened three times in one day. Event Viewer reports Kernel-PnP errors for the AMD device, including status codes 0xC00000E5 and 0xC0000001. GPU temperatures stay below 70°C and CPU temperatures below 75°C. What should I troubleshoot next, and could the card itself be defective?
5 Answers
Another workaround is disabling ULPS, either through MSI Afterburner or by changing the relevant registry setting. It may need to be disabled again after every driver update, but it has fixed similar driver crashes for some 9070 XT systems.
Don’t dismiss a defective card. I had a very similar problem with a 9070 XT, and replacing the card fixed it completely. Start the return or warranty process before the return window closes, especially if clean driver installs and memory testing don’t help.
A few things are worth checking: make sure each 8-pin connector has its own separate PCIe cable from the power supply, monitor GPU temperature and boost behavior, and run Windows Memory Diagnostic rather than relying only on SFC. Faulty RAM or unstable memory settings can sometimes look like a graphics-driver problem.
The card is powered by two separate PCIe cables. Temperatures stay under 70°C for the GPU and 75°C for the CPU, and I set the fan curve to run aggressively. I’ll run the actual memory diagnostic next; SFC didn’t report any problems.
Try limiting games to below 200 FPS, such as a 199 FPS cap, and consider checking the SSD where the drivers are installed. A failing drive or brief hardware instability can corrupt driver files. I had a similar issue with an older Radeon card that improved after replacing the SSD and reducing the frame rate.
Try completely removing the driver with AMD Cleanup Utility or DDU, then install a known-stable driver such as 26.3.1 while the PC is disconnected from the internet. Download the installer first, unplug Ethernet or disable Wi-Fi, run the cleanup, install the driver, and use Group Policy to stop Windows Update from replacing it. Windows occasionally installs a different graphics driver in the background and causes conflicts.
So the sequence would be to download the driver, disconnect from the internet, run DDU, install that driver, and then block driver updates through Group Policy?
That would be painful since the store already has my old 7800 XT trade-in, but I’ll keep the possibility in mind.