AMD's latest ATI Radeon HD 5000 series is indeed selling like hotcakes. Only three weeks ago, AMD had announced that it had shipped two million DirectX 11 GPUs. However as history has taught us, new products sometimes mean new issues. Since the official launch of the HD 5000 series, there have been many lockup reports on several forums. This lockup happens mostly during 3D mode and is accompanied by gray vertical stripes appearing on the screen (But sometimes it appears as a black screen) and looping sound. So far, we haven't found any information on AMD's website, but luckily one of our systems was affected and it allowed us to investigate this issue. Users have suggested the following workarounds:

• Use ATI Catalyst 9.10 Beta.
• Update BIOS to a newer version.
• Downclock GPU Clock from CCC's Overdrive.
• Disable ATI High Definition Audio Device from the Device Manager.
• Force fan to 40% or above from CCC's Overdrive.
• Disable PowerPlay with a tweaked CCC profile.
• Boost GPU voltage with an overclocking utility.
• Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA).
• Write a nasty email to AMD's Catalyst Team.
• Give up on gaming and troll on forums and play with cats instead.

We have tested all these possible workarounds (except for the last two), but only updating the BIOS to a newer version or boosting the GPU voltage or downclocking the GPU have solved this issue on our ATI Radeon HD 5770. After further investigation, we discovered that AMD has increased the GPU voltage in newer BIOS versions, but hasn't posted it anywhere. It seems that AMD needs to come up with a knowledge base article to address this issue. Until then, you can try the workarounds listed above – they worked for us.

THG received the following reply from AMD's Dave Erskine: "Only a small number of ATI Radeon HD 5800 series and ATI Radeon HD 5700 series cards are exhibiting the behavior. The team is testing a driver hotfix and initial tests indicate that it resolves the issue, we need to test it further but we expect to make the hotfix available shortly."

Update: AMD has released a hotfix Catalyst driver to address the vertical stripes lockup issue. Unfortunately, this hotfix only supports the Radeon HD 5800 series. But according to OEM sources, the HD 5700 series should get the fix within a week as well. Remember folks, you heard about this issue first on NGOHQ.com. You can grab the hotfix from our downloads section and don't forget to share your results with us by posting a comment below.