Just before Christmas, I installed new drivers (using Steam) for my Radeon 5870. Since then, I have occasionally been getting the blue screen of death. It only ever happens when the PC hasn't been used for 30+ mins (it seems to only happen when the "screen" sleeps, but not the monitor, just the signal to the screen I think). It has happened a few times since the update.

A friend of mine suggested that I uninstall the updated drivers and then re-install them (incase there was an issue with the original install). How would I go about doing this?

Also, just in case its of any significance, when I originally updated the drivers, my display went all funky until I restarted. My max resolution was capped at 1440*900 (I think that's what it was), despite the fact my monitor is 1920*1080.

I think if you just try and use the installer again it'll offer to reinstall.

Because that probably won't work - go back to the version that worked for you. Stability is probably worth a few fps.

I tried rolling back through device manager. While it was supposedly rolling back, it froze and went into not responding mode, so I had to close it, and now I have a bigger problem. When I try to start a game through Steam, I'm getting error messages.

For Mafia 2 (for example), it is saying "No suitable graphics card or render mode found! Please try to install the latest graphics driver to solve the problem."

You could try to use something like driver cleaner to get it out and then reinstall it. Windows will fall back to the default VGA driver so you won't be out of luck there.

There have been a lot of issues with some of the 5000 series... I just built a new machine and recently and I got a 5770, having a batch of problems with a few games... did some research on them and there are tons of issues with the 5700 series, and the indication was that the 5800 series had similar issues. They keep releasing new drivers (the most recent just... 3 days ago) but it hasn't fixed anything for me. I've tried everything, I'm at the point where I've decided to return it and go the nVidia route. (Looking at the GTX 470)

Nvidia has had similar driver and hardware issues too. I hope you have better luck with a different card, but in real % terms I don't think there's much hard evidence either company is worse on drivers.

Also you should get the GTX 560 instead of the GTX 470.

Thanks, I just looked it up and I will get that instead. I hadn't looked at any nVidia cards in a while, didn't realize the 470 was replaced with something better for virtually the same price. I'm going to order one from Newegg this weekend.

They're selling 900MHz versions at the same price as the stock 822MHz ones, so definitely get one of those. There's also a 1GHz version but it's not available on Newegg at the moment.

I got one of the 900mhz ones, because the superclocked ones were out of stock - I'm VERY happy with it - thanks! No hiccups, stutters, or crashing. All the games I was having trouble with using a 5770 are great on the 560ti - and I can play on max settings!