Some of you might have been following my difficulties with the Asus EAH5850 video card. It began with screen flickering and overall instability here, which then progressed to a total hack job to fix the screen flickers here, and now finally I've updated to the newest Catalyst 10.2 drivers from here. However, there have been both good and bad developments.

On the good side, the display standby issue has been resolved as of the latest 10.2 drivers. All flickering is still gone, and I've gone into MSI Afterburner and setup a new fan profile to ensure the GPU doesn't get over about 75C. This is all good news.

On a rather bad note, I can now produce a Windows BSOD on call, simply by opening up any H.264 video. That includes hi-def Blu-Rays and movie rips. This is caused by ATI's display driver, and Windows claims that is has tried to restart the driver and a timeout occurred. Regular XVID, which I expect is not AVIVO-accelerated, runs just fine.

So, I've gone from a screen flicker and instability to a hot GPU that likes to crash Windows. I can achieve a full-blown BSOD by either enabling Overdrive or opening an H.264 video. I will say, it is very fast though.