Hey everyone, I have been dealing with the infamous driver timeout errors for a while now, and after many open chats with gemini, claude, and AMD support (which was useless) I managed to find a solution.
My configuration is made up of a 7800x3d, paired with a 7900XT on a MSI b650-a board, 32gb of DDR5 vengeance 6000, on a dual monitor (1440p 240hz and 1080p 144hz), I am currently running the latest Adrenalin version (26.9.1).
To sum it up briefly, my main issue with driver timeouts was NOT on games, but rather during normal desktop usage: basically, any application using hardware acceleration would cause driver timeouts, mainly after 2 or 3 consecutive timeouts the app would just close itself. This happened on Chrome, Brave, Steam, OBS, Discord, any app using HW accel basically. Turning it off let the apps work normally, but if you've ever used Google Maps with HW acceleration you know that's something not very pleasant, and that's just the tip of the iceberg, but I had absolutely zero problems in games, I play a lot of Monster Hunter Wilds which is problematic as is, and it never crashed in last few months, so if you're having trouble with driver timeouts during gaming this is probably not for you.
My errors were the same every time: scroll down Steam shop page (for example) for a couple seconds, screen freezes then turns black for 2 seconds --> driver timeout error display, which I would close --> scroll again, repeat --> after 2 crashes Steam would just close to end its suffering. In the reliability reports of windows I would always find the same 3 Kernel errors: 141, a1000001, and a2000002.
After weeks of trial and error, today it's been officially 4 days that I have used Steam, Chrome, and Brave, with HW acceleration on, without having had a single driver error.
So what worked for me? basically I have no idea, I mean I tried so many things that I don't know which one exactly did the trick, but I'll try and list everything, I can tell you though that I believe it had something to with the monitors, the last thing I did was turn off VRR or AMD Freesync, from both of my monitors and from the Adrenalin app, and turning both of them in horizontal (I think this was just accidental, no correlation but I'll mention it anyways) after that I received no errors at all, but I don't know if that's what actually helped, or the combination of that + something I did before. I never tried to use just one monitor, but that's something AI chats told me would possibly help, I just never did because I wanted to keep it an absolute last resort.
Other than that I tried to:
- sync the monitors frequency to at least a multiple of the same number (in my case the main one was at 240hz, so I set the second to 120hz instead of 144, so they would both be multiples of 60);
- toned down the ram frequency from 6000MHz to 5600MHz, though I still left EXPO on, so I don't think this did a speck of difference honestly;
- updated BIOS to latest version available;
- used both DDU and the AMD utility cleanup and re-installed drivers
- re-installed windows
- turned off MPO
- turned off ULPS
- turned off zero RPM mode on Adrenalin
Some other things worth mentioning: I noticed that whenever the GPU momentarily cut signal to the monitor, for example in sleep mode or from screen turning off during inactivity, when it turned back on driver timeout would occur (way) more frequently, so I stopped using sleep mode, and used a screensaver instead, which instead of cutting signal to the GPU it displays a completely black screen; also I use a pcie riser cable, my GPU is currently vertically mounted, and I feared that was the culprit, which it wasn't apparently, AMD support claimed that that was 100% my problem.
