8.1 BSODs - Video And Audio Stutter / Blank Screen

I have an older setup (1366 i7 930) that has worked well for years with XP, Win 7, Win 8 and now running Win 8.1.

About 4 months ago I started getting every kind of problem : BSODs, audio skips and stutter, video hangs and blank screens (with mouse cursor still working), slow response, dropouts, logouts and general instability. These problems were at their worst when I was using older software and when the CPU was heavily loaded. The CPU temperature was never an issue and has been logged at well under 70C. The event logs showed multitudes of totally spurious errors but they mostly related to power faults and bad or missed interrupts.

It would take too long to describe the frustrating process I used to trace the problem but I have finally found a solution. My system has been working flawlessly for two weeks now and I have put it through the wringer.

In short the faults were all caused by the video driver for my Sapphire AMD 7970 card. I had accepted the Microsoft drivers as a conservative, but stable solution for my installation. This has always worked in the past. Microsoft puts stability ahead of performance in their released drivers (they say) and although they do stuff up every now and then I have never had any problems before.

Two weeks ago I installed the latest Catalyst package with the v14.100.0.0 driver and all of my problems vanished. I am amazed by the response and speed difference I am experiencing. I must add that I had reinstalled both my MS video and audio drivers before and switched them to minimal functionality with no success.

I had very bad experiences with Nvidia native drivers which is why I switched to ATI/AMD and MS drivers.