M17 slave 3870 blown?

Okay, so I was playing Fallout 3 yesterday, and all of a sudden it froze, followed about 20 seconds later by a bluescreen. I thought it was a one off glitch, rebooted as normal, tried again, and this time it froze straight away on startup (literally, as soon as the screen went black as it normally does upon launching a full screen game).

Tried it with every game I have, and all of them excluding Minecraft trigger a freeze followed by bluescreen immediately on launch. Minecraft, I'm guessing, is an exception as it runs in Java. Tried running games in a window as well - same result, freeze then bluescreen as soon as it loads up.

On the other hand the machine boots into Windows perfectly fine and only bluescreens once I start up a game. I'm GUESSING this is to do with the clock speeds - when they aren't in a game, both cards are running at lower clocks.

I tried a clean install of the driver (uninstall, reboot into safe mode, driver sweeper, reboot, install) but unlike normal, the driver installed abnormally fast with no screen flicker.

The bluescreen error is STOP: 0x00000116, with the error on atikmpag.sys.

I'm about to format and reinstall Windows to see if that fixes it, to rule out software error, but as the driver installation went wrong I'm guessing it's a graphics card problem.


My presumption here is that it's something up with my slave 3870. It appears to not be utilised until I boot up a game, which makes sense. Either that or it's something up with either GPU at standard clocks.


Any ideas? Looks like this might be the excuse I need to get an M17x if I can pull together the money.

Thanks to anyone who can help.

 

Take out the slave card?

 

Going to try pulling out the slave as a last resort. But I want to be able to see if this is a hardware or software issue first, looking for advice. It'd be nice to know for sure that it's the slave before I pull it out.

EDIT: Definitely appears that the slave card has blown. Reinstalled windows, and prior to driver installation games appear to be running fine, although it also appears it's doing so on the single card. Pulling up HWiNFO64 showed very abnormal clocks on the slave, and several of its sensors weren't functioning, also showed up with an error in the Device Manager although I'm not sure if that's all because of no ATi GPU drivers installed. But once the drivers are installed, the clocks and sensors on the slave return to normal, and once again the system crashes and bluescreens on loading a game.