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BSOD: Video Card or Driver??

A

alizee

Senior member
Recently, after a big hardware shuffle through my gaming/htpc computers, I've been getting blue screen after blue screen on two computers. The hardware shuffle happened about the time Catalyst 11.10 was released, so I'm just not certain whether it's hardware or software. On my gaming machine I've narrowed it down to the Radeon 6850 video card or Catalyst, the system works fine with my GeForce GTX 285. The other system is running integrated video on a 785G chipset. I have a bunch of dmp files if anybody cares to look at them 🙂

I've updated to Catalyst 11.11, but that didn't seem to resolve the issue on either PC. The gaming system seemed to be running fine on whatever I had been running prior to 11.10, I don't remember if that was 11.8 or 11.9. I tried rolling back the driver, but that didn't seem to resolve anything, although I could have made a mistake.

As you can probably tell, I've done a lot of troubleshooting on the gaming system, but I haven't done any on the HTPC other than update to catalyst 11.11. My main question is in the title:
How do I tell if this is the card or the drivers???

Systems summery *everything at stock clocks:

Gaming system:
Before hardware shuffle | After hardware shuffle | Blue screen fixed
Athlon II X4 640 | Phenom II X4 810 | Phenom II X4 810
Radeon 6850 | Radeon 6850 | GeForce GTX 285
Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3
4x4GB DDR3-1333 g.skill RAM
500GB Seagate HD
Enermax Modu 82+ 625W

HTPC (didn't exist before the hardware shuffle):
Athlon II X4 640
MSI 785gm-p45 with integrated video
2x2GB DDR3-1333 g.skill RAM
320GB WD hard drive
350 Seasonic PSU (don't remember the model, could this be causing a problem from too little power?)

The stop error codes on the gaming system are usually 0x3B, sometime 0x7E, once 0x1B, and once 0x3D.
 
boot the machines in question with only 1 memory stick, perform the BSOD operations and see if it still happens. Switch memory sticks testing each stick singularly. Whether it works or not will at least rule out the system memory as the culprit.
 
Meractik said:
boot the machines in question with only 1 memory stick, perform the BSOD operations and see if it still happens. Switch memory sticks testing each stick singularly. Whether it works or not will at least rule out the system memory as the culprit.
Click to expand...

That is a good call. I've run MemTest86+ on the gaming system, passed 5 times in 24 hours. I haven't run it yet on the HTPC. Coupled with the fact that changing video cards resolved the easily reproduced issue, I'm 90% confident the RAM is not the issue on the gaming system, though I'm not so sure on the HTPC. The HTPC has already BSODed twice in the few hours since I originally posted!
 
Still having trouble 🙁
I got a blue screen with the GTX 285, but
It was different, 0x50. I pulled two sticks of RAM and it went away, so maybe it's that or the IMC on the Phenom doesn't deal well with 4 Dimms installed.

Still doesn't explain the issues with the HTPC. it hasn't BOSDed today, and it passed 6 loops of MemTest86+, though I'm beginning to not trust it.
 
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