Help with laptop blue screens (dual AMD 7970's)

[simper]

So I am hoping for help, but I have a feeling it will be limited as I tried previously on here. The specs of my laptop are below, I bought it back in Feb 2013 (Vortex Series: 17.3"), and it is a fantastic laptop except for one problem, RADEON. Basically since the day I have had this laptop I have erratic bluescreens when loading games, all relating to hardware crashes with, you guessed it, the graphics drivers. I was told it was driver issues, and working in IT myself for 10-11yrs I kinda understood and expected that from AMD/Radeon. But the one blessing was that AMD were releasing newer drivers quite regularly and I was assured or at least I assured myself that the drivers would eventually come good and the blue screens would become less and less frequent.

Well here I am over a year later, and I been updating my RADEON drivers for the dual 7970 gfx cards in this laptop now up to 14.7 beta drivers I believe ( can I just add I remove all AMD drivers completely, boot into safe mode run a driver cleaner and then reboot before installing new ones). I have tried them all, I have even tried bespoke drivers from Guru3D but none have provided me with a stable base which would stop these damn blue screening errors. For example I loaded up Final Fantasy 14 several times the other day no problem, tried again yesterday and everytime it went to load up, BLUE SCREEN, eventually I had to load up Insurgency from Steam and then close that to then load up FF14, totally bizarre.

Now I have looked at the upgrade option that PC Specialist provides, but unfortunately my build will not allow any updates at all to the graphic card setup. I imagine its due to the motherboard but can't be sure for obvious reasons.

My question is, is there anything more I can do to fix this, is there any other alternative avenue for me to pursue, I don't mind spending money to switch my laptop from Radeon to Nvidia, but there isn't any facility to enable this, and I am not prepared to fork out another £1500+ for a new laptop just to fix this issue. I still have the Silver warranty, but because its a driver issue, or at least I think it is I am really not sure what PC Specialist can do either.

Does anyone else who potentially has gone through my problem have any ideas how to move forward. Its so demoralising loading up this beautiful laptop for gaming, when I have to play the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH roulette wheel to see if it will let me load the game today...

Thanks in advance to anyone, and as I said earlier my specific laptop specs are below, thanks

You can find some history to my problem on this forum too at https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/foru...change-a-gfx-card-on-previously-bought-laptop

Chassis & Display
Vortex Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)

Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-3630QM (2.40GHz) 6MB

Memory (RAM)
8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 (2 x 4GB)

Graphics Card
2 x AMD® Radeon® HD 7970M - 2GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 11

1st Hard Disk
120GB INTEL® 520 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW)

2nd Hard Disk
500GB WD SCORPIO BLACK WD5000BPKT, SATA 3 Gb/s, 16MB CACHE (7200 rpm)

1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
8x SATA DVD±R/RW/Dual Layer (+ 24x CD-RW)

Memory Card Reader
Internal 9 in 1 Card Reader (MMC/RSMMC/SD: Mini, XC & HC/MS: Pro & Duo)

Thermal Paste
ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND (£9)

Sound Card
Intel 5.1 Channel High Definition Audio + SPDIF/MIC/Headphone Jack

Wireless/Wired Networking
GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® N135 802.11N (150Mbps) + BLUETOOTH

USB Options
4 x USB 3.0 PORTS + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT AS STANDARD

Battery
Vortex Elite 8 Cell Lithium Ion Battery (5,800 mAh/89.21WH)

Power Cable
1 x UK Power Lead & 300W AC Adaptor

Keyboard Language
INTEGRATED BACKLIT UK KEYBOARD WITH NUMBER PAD
Operating System
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit w/SP1 - inc DVD & Licence (£79)

Mouse
INTEGRATED 2 BUTTON TOUCHPAD MOUSE

Webcam
INTEGRATED 2.0 MEGAPIXEL WEBCAM

Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£5)

 

[mantadog]

I highly doubt this would be a driver issue, especially if its holding out through so many different driver iterations.

Have you at least been in touch with PCS? If you have time remaining on your warranty I would highly suggest sending it back in for them to have a look at. I understand that sometimes a driver might cause an issue, but a years worth of problems not fixed by any drivers in that time is a bit suspect IMO.

Just because the error is being reported as a driver issue, it doesn't mean it is 100% a driver issue. have you tried a fresh installation of the OS by chance?

What error message gets thrown up when it blue screens?

 

[SpyderTracks]

Have also monitored temps when loading a game?

 

[simper]

May as well answer both of you.

To Spydertracks I have monitored temperatures and they seem normal, the problem is the bluescreen happens just as the game is about to boot up or initiate some stress on the gfx card so don't think its that.

To mantadog I am going to do more research on the particular file error, I believe it is atikmpag.sys but to be honest at the beginning I imagined new drivers would resolved it, and have become so disillusioned now I just put up with it. I may do a complete reinstall of the OS as well I think that may be a good idea to see what I can do

Thanks for all your help

 

[mantadog]

just had a quick look, found various things but it does seem common enough to have many solutions peddled on the internet.

You could always get onto AMD directly and see if they can offer some more focused advice.

 

[SpyderTracks]

May as well answer both of you.

To Spydertracks I have monitored temperatures and they seem normal, the problem is the bluescreen happens just as the game is about to boot up or initiate some stress on the gfx card so don't think its that.

To mantadog I am going to do more research on the particular file error, I believe it is atikmpag.sys but to be honest at the beginning I imagined new drivers would resolved it, and have become so disillusioned now I just put up with it. I may do a complete reinstall of the OS as well I think that may be a good idea to see what I can do

Thanks for all your help

Just wondering also, did you get the atikmpag.sys as failing from the bsod screen or the dump file? Realise you're a techy, apologise if it sounds redundant.