Random Horizontal Lines

[saturnine]

I have experienced the same exact issue since day one of completing my build and have yet to determine the problem. As others have said, the problem is intermittent and has been very difficult to troubleshoot. Thin white or black flickering lines will appear at the top edge of the screen. These lines will also appear when I open new windows. I've noticed black and white backgrounds seem to intensify the problem. A restart temporarily fixes the problem, but it always returns. So far I have done the following:

1. Used 3 different monitors and a television.
2. Used VGA, DVI, and HDMI ports and different cables for each.
3. Ran a memory test to check for errors at both default timings of motherboard and optimized timings 8-8-8-24. (Showed no errors)
4. RMA my A8-3850 and replaced it with a new one.
5. Monitored temperatures (APU runs between 27-30 C, Motherboard runs between 29-31 C.
6. Updated Catalyst Drivers to newest version over the course of a year. (No change)
7. Updated Bios to newest version multiple times for motherboard. (No change)
8. I've both set in Bios the UMA Buffer Size, which sets aside amount of RAM to dedicate to GPU portion of APU, to Auto and to a custom size. (No effect)
9. Changed Windows Power Settings from Balanced to High Performance. (No effect)

To be honest, I've always suspected an issue with the ports on my motherboard. Some sort of defect. Mainly based on the fact both a screenshot and video recording software failed to document the flickering lines. It seems the only common ground we all have is an A Series AMD APU. Everyone has different system configurations and HP laptop owners are experiencing the same issue, I am leaning back towards a graphics driver problem. I recommend reporting the problem to AMD using this form at http://www.amdsurveys.com/se.ashx?s=5A1E27D20B2F3EAC

AMD A8-2850 APU Processor
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Memory
COOLER MASTER Silent Pro M600 RS-600-AMBA-D3 600W ATX12V V2.3 Power-supply
ASUS F1A75-M PRO FM1 AMD A75 Motherboard
Corsair Force Series GT CSSD-F120GBGT-BK 2.5" 120GB SATA III SSD
Seagate ST3500418AS 500GB ATA HD
Samsung TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S223C ATA

[Welch]

Old thread, but I'll humor you with the fix.... Which you've already tried, but make sure you apply the fix just like so.

First off, you can download the ATI APU drivers for your 3850. These should be labeled 12.4 as they are new as of April of 2012, hopefully soon we will have 12.5. You will then want to go into the Device Manager. Under display settings see if you have something to the effect of AXXX, its only 3 numbers that DO NOT correlate with your APU series or its GPU. Right click it or the video driver claiming to be your graphics adapter and click Uninstall. You should notice the screen flicker at some point and the resolution sometimes (not all) will revert to 640x480, sometimes 800x600. At this point, install the 12.4 drivers, restart and enjoy.

If the above does not work, then you need to disable windows from Automatically installing drivers for devices. You can then make sure you've uninstalled the default WDDM drivers that windows assigned to your display adapter and then restart. You will notice again that 640x480 resolution makes it a pain to install the 12.4 AMD drivers. You've got to be good about using your keyboard and moving the windows around a bit, but once installed you can restart and should have no problems.

I've ran this fix on over 5 systems that I've built for customers and they no longer have this issue.

[Snowknight26]

I hate bumping old threads but this issue has reared it's head on a system of mine.

AMD A6-3650
Gigabyte GA-A55M-DS2 FM1 with the latest BIOS
2x Crucial BL25664FN1608.16FF @ 1333MHz

I've noticed that a few people mentioned that running the memory at 1600MHz could be the culprit but that doesn't seem to be it in this case.

The only common thing that each one of us have is we all use an AMD APU and the AMD drivers. As it's highly unlikely that all of us have defective CPUs, my guess is the drivers. However, since the issue was first posted about, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, and 12.4 have been tried without success. Since then, I've tried 12.5, 12.8, and 12.9 without success either. From the looks of it, it's still a driver issue, much like the famous cursor corruption that plagued the 11.x series.

For any that are curious, here's what the flickering looks like: http://stfcc.org/misc/vids/?name=A6-3650%20corruption

And finally, I've spoken to AMD Global Customer Care per saturnine's suggestion, but they're not very helpful. To quote one of their responses:

It seems like the APU is faulty. The drivers are freshly downloaded so it shouldn’t be an issue. Since this is a fresh install of Windows ensure that all Windows and Chipset drivers are up to date. If the corruption continues I recommend that you submit an RMA request to get a replacement APU.

Either their drivers aren't infallible as they suggest or AMD has some manufacturing issues with their APUs. I'd love to go out and purchase another brand new A6-3650 and a completely different motherboard to show them that the issue exists, but no stores around me sell them anymore.

With all of that said.. maybe someone has some other ideas aside from completely replacing the system and switching to an i5.

[oldvikingschool]

Got this problem as well, switched from Ubuntu to Windows after a year. This issue doesn't appear during Ubuntu only in Windows after watching a videoclip either from WMP/VLC or Youtube. Tried the fix above but get stuck at the A*** part, can't find it. It's tiresome to put Windows to sleep every time the flickers appears.

[lucasdavid_r]

Hello everybody, I'm from Argentina and I'm having exactly the same problem that all of you. I've communicated with AMD CustomCare and I'm trying to solve this problem with them. I think's is absolutely driver problems because I tryed with an APU A4-3300 and a A8-3870K, and the lines are the same. It has to ve a driver problem but I have to wait that the techSupport answer me again. The problem is that there is no an action that generates the bug, it's absolutely random, and this makes even harder to find the error. I've installed the 12.4 drivers and up to now I'm not having any flickering line, but this means nothing cause they can appear at any moment...
has anybody tryed to disable de Catalyst Control Center from the windows startup? What I mean, maybe it's not the driver the problem, I'ts maybe the application of the drivers!

Excuse my English, i speak spanish. I hope you can understand me!

[buzzur]

It is my turn. I have the same horizontal line problem on an Amd A8-3870k. I tried it on two different monitors, ram sticks and psu. It persists.
In my case this issue does not come out when windows starts but can take several minutes before it begins to be noticed (warm up??).
A question for the other unfortunate owners of this cpu: have you had this problem using Firefox?
I saw that It is much more frequent when I use Firefox + Youtube. Now I'm using google chrome, I hope It will be better...
(Sorry for my english, i am italian )

[optex]

Hello there.
Long time no talk.
I see the lines are still a bugger for more people now, to get rid of.
I as well, got them showing up in win 8 RTM.
Please try upgrading motherboard bios.
I think it can help.
I upgraded bios on Gigibyte GA-A75M-UD2H to revision F6.
I increased the on board video memory to 2048 meg.
So far so good.

[saturnine]

Appreciated the response from Welch, but his solution did not work for I could not find any incorrectly installed video drivers in the device manager. Since then, I have updated to the latest driver release and the problem still persists. Though, it appears to become less frequent after every new driver release.

And finally, I've spoken to AMD Global Customer Care per saturnine's suggestion, but they're not very helpful. To quote one of their responses:

It seems like the APU is faulty. The drivers are freshly downloaded so it shouldn’t be an issue. Since this is a fresh install of Windows ensure that all Windows and Chipset drivers are up to date. If the corruption continues I recommend that you submit an RMA request to get a replacement APU.

Either their drivers aren't infallible as they suggest or AMD has some manufacturing issues with their APUs. I'd love to go out and purchase another brand new A6-3650 and a completely different motherboard to show them that the issue exists, but no stores around me sell them anymore.

I replaced my APU last year through AMDs warranty replacement process and the problem continues even with a new APU installed. I'm convinced its not a manufacturing defect and a driver issue instead. The tough part is convincing AMD it is. I was hoping if enough of us reported the problem, a fix might make its way into a future driver release. A new driver release is on the horizon, right now 12.9 is in beta. All I can do is cross my fingers.

I suppose that is the risk you take when purchasing brand new tech. I knew it was a gamble when I purchased it, seeing how it is the first generation of APUs from AMD.

[saturnine]

A question for the other unfortunate owners of this cpu: have you had this problem using Firefox?
I saw that It is much more frequent when I use Firefox + Youtube. Now I'm using google chrome, I hope It will be better...
(Sorry for my english, i am italian )

I've noticed it in Firefox as well, but I think it is merely coincidental considering I spend most of my time on the computer browsing the internet. As I said, black and white backgrounds seems to intensify the problem. I've seen it go haywire in Firefox, Chrome, Outlook, Word, Paint, AIM Instant Messenger and any other predominantly white spaces within Windows. On occasion, I have seen it appear on my upper desktop just as in the video Snowknight26 posted.

What I find most frustrating is how unpredictable the lines are. I have never been able to consistently reproduce it. It's pretty much a waiting game to see if it will return.

[oldvikingschool]

Well I recommend Windows 8 only for the instant sleep and wake up in which removes the flickering lines until next time.

I've run my machine in Ubuntu again checking videoclips from random sites which different videoplayers, nope these lines never appear. In which leads to that the windows drivers are the cause for this issue.

AMD seriously needs to control check this in a Windows environment.

[optex]

Hello. Really sorry.
Apparently, I was on false hope last night, with the bios upgrade, that did not work out after all.
Yes. Lines back again.
Firefox has something to do with it, as some of you have discovered, but it is not the trigger.
At least I know now, that when it did start again, I was using Firefox version 16.0.1, watching Stratosphere Jumping, flash video.
When I exited Firefox, it stopped. Replayed browser video, and lines came back within a second or so, exited again, lines stopped.
Did this repeatedly. Same thing. Then I rebooted computer and opened Firefox Flash video, and of course, could not get the lines to appear.
So, all I can say is the trigger for lines is still not known, but video resources, such as Flash video browser can turn lines on and off, without restarting computer.

This may be the last AMD computer I buy, unless they come clean and provide a fix. Time is fast approaching for Lano to be made obsolete.
Been through something similar, many years ago, with Asus motherboard released to wild, when it was really still beta. I will never ever buy an Asus motherboard again. It took them a year to finally admit and release a bios upgrade, so Windows defrag program could work properly, instead of crash and burn.
Anyways, I lift up a glass of beer, to all of you out there working hard to find a solution.
Thank you.

[seantellis]

Nice to see it's not just our machine, then. I am also seeing this problem on a HP Pavilion machine with AMD APU, under Ubuntu Linux 12.04.

My story is typical of the problems described by everyone else. The problem appears after several hours of continuous operation, and usually manifests as a few black lines extending from random positions on the screen to the right edge of the display. Occasionally, these will also be accompanied by lines of pixels displaced on the display. The difficulties often occur during periods of high activity. On closer inspection, there are white lines as well. It's as if the display controller can't read the RAM and is just using some random value until the start of the next line.

They often recur at the same positions for a few seconds, then move. They also often appear at sharp black/white boundaries in the image (although it may be that it's just difficult to see the start of the line on this kind of image).

I have tried this with both analog VGA and DVI connectors, and two different monitors, with no difference.

AMD Catalyst control center reports that it's a AMD Radeon HD 6370D, DDR3 at 800MHz, 512MB, 12.8GB/s bandwidth, on a PCI bus (Presumably PCI-E really) and core frequency of 444MHz.

I have now switched on "Low frequency on high resolution displays" and switched off "Use alternate DVI operation mode"... so fingers crossed. If I discover anything more, I will post it here.

(Beware: speculation ahoy!) I also notice that AMD has frame buffer compression on its later GPUs. Depending on the exact algorithm used, could this be part of the problem? A single missed RAM read might then propagate incorrect data across the rest of the line. I couldn't find any details of the algorithm or whether the APUs support it, though. It may be a red herring.

[oldvikingschool]

Dunno if it was magic, a miracle or maybe just luck. But I installed the http://www2.ati.com/drivers/12-10_vista ... l_net4.exe update when my computer was affected by the flickering lines.
After 24hours with stresstesting of playing up like 100 videos on vlc and WMP then various flash clips they have not appeared yet. I'll update tomorrow if the result holds or not.

Update: I think this cured the flickering cancer for good. I will never update these drivers in the future

[optex]

It's all to do with the Mayan calender. All will become good,
then the only horizontal line that appears, will be one on the horizon,
as the diamond planet, that was hiding on the dark side of the moon,
smashes into earth, creating a gigantic carbon tidal wave obliterating us all!

Wierd. I don't see lines anymore either, and I never installed 12-10 drivers?
Only thing I installed lately was Adobe flash update?
Good luck for your way, oldvikingschool.
I'll stay on the stuperstitious side myself, wait for the signs.

[optex]

I just downloaded your ATI drivers just in case.
Thanks

[Welch]

I've gone down the road of updating the drivers on multiple machines affected by this. Unsure if the latest one has shown these same issues. I've also received reports of rare (but notable) blue screens. All of which lead back to SATA controller issues on these particular boards, and could simply be an out of date driver not jiving well with other updated software.

I'm starting to wonder if there isn't some serious HARDWARE flaw in these APUs.... for this many people to have this issue across a very broad variety of makes and models just does not seem to add up. Especially considering the number of us who have done updates out of the gates. I'm not an engineer by any means, but is it possible that one of the APUs extensions is calling on resources incorrectly or perhaps other damaged or mis-designed components? I mean just take a look at the whole Sandy Bridge chipset fiasco. Hardware level issues are not out of the question.

I'm considering looking a bit further into it and possibly elevating this to a higher level to get to the bottom of it. Its pretty clear that this "phenomenon" isn't going to magically disappear.

[Snowknight26]

Might be safe to say that 12.11 Beta (and maybe 12.10 but I haven't tested those) resolve the issue. Haven't seen any lines in over a week.. but that may be because I've restarted that machine once or twice during that time.

[mdimit]

I found a solution to problem with similar symptoms (random flickering horizontal lines). The problem occurred on a system with Windows 2012 and AMD A10 5700 APU. Here is a photo which illustrates the problem: Photo link

In my case the problem does not manifest if I:

• use the VGA output of the motherboard instead of the DVI
• use the default Microsoft display driver
• open a video file which activates DXVA playback

The following steps resolve the problem in my case (I tried them two times). They are applicable to Windows 2012 system (and probably other Windows systems with adaptation) with one display (DVI connected to the motherboard):

1. Open Screen Resolution (from Control Panel or from the desktop)
2. Click on Detect
3. Click on the Display list and choose Available display output on: …
4. Click on the Multiple displays list and choose Try to connect anyway on: VGA
5. Click on Apply
6. Click on Multiple displays and choose Extend these displays
7. Click on Apply and after that confirm the changes

These steps instruct Windows to use a non-existent VGA display to extend the desktop. This effectively removes completely the flickering horizontal lines on my system. If these steps also address your problem then consider informing AMD about this: http://www.amd.com/report, http://www.amd.com/betareport. Why? Because this is a workaround that may not work in all scenarios and because it has some peculiarities that arise from using extended desktop.