Sapphire radeon 6870 with Mint

bmaguire · 08-04-2012, 04:26 PM

I have a new dual boot windows/mint system. The Sapphire Radeon 6870 graphics card does fine with Windows but seems to be failing on Mint. The screen just blanks after a few minutes and since there is no indication that the system as a whole is crashing I'm guessing it's a problem with the graphics card or driver.

Anyone have any ideas?

JimmyLinux · 08-05-2012, 07:31 AM

Hello,
Have you tried installing a proprietary driver (driver made by AMD that Linux devs cannot change)?
I had a similar issue only screen tearing happened more than black screening with my HIS Radeon HD 6870.
Also is your card a reference design or one of Sapphire's special designs that is like superclocked and has fancy coolers on it?
Ohh and is your OS 32 or 64 bit?

adamk75 · 08-05-2012, 08:48 AM

I suggest booting with the "nomodeset" option. This will at least get you into a console. Then install/configure openssh server. Reboot, this time without the nomodeset option, and then log in remotely from another machine over ssh. Check the output of 'dmesg' to see if there are any error messages related to the GPU.

Adam