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Troubleshooting assistance for crash

S

Swampthing

Member
Having issues while playing games where windows 8 will just lockup, or in the case of skyrim it restarts. There's nothing in the event viewer to give any clues, there's no crash dump.

I'm currently running memtest86+ to check my ram.

Without any crash logs at all, i'm at a loss other than just randomly replacing computer parts until it works which isn't the most financially sound method.

I'm at the point where i'm about ready to get the sledgehammer out to troubleshoot it once and for all. Sometimes i can be playing for hours on end with no problems. other times it's maybe 10-15 mins. It's not a graphics card overheating issue as i've installed afterburner and turned up the fan a bit, but in games like guild wars 2 the fan never speeds up much anyhow so I can tell just from sound that game isn't even taxing the GPU. Skyrim on the other hand maxes the fan out but on times it doesn't crash the GPU never goes over 76C or so.

I'm at a loss right now.
 
asus p8z77v lk
8 gb gskill ripjaw ddr3 1600
GTX 580 EVGA
intel i5 3570
power supply is a corsair 750w
 
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yeah i know which he was referring to, but i had mentioned earlier i was running memtest on the system ram to eliminate that.

I don't think guild wars 2 is high end enough to run out 1.5GB of ram?
 
I had an issue like this recently. Updated the firmware for my SSD drive and it's been fine since. Crucial M4
 
Swampthing said:
yeah i know which he was referring to, but i had mentioned earlier i was running memtest on the system ram to eliminate that.
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Except that memtest doesn't check VRAM. When the machine locks up, is the picture frozen or does the screen go blank? Any looping sounds?
 
mfenn said:
Except that memtest doesn't check VRAM. When the machine locks up, is the picture frozen or does the screen go blank? Any looping sounds?
Click to expand...

yeah, i'm aware of that. Was running memtest to solely eliminate the ram.

For guild wars the picture just locks up, the last time there was a stuck sound on the audio. not like white noise, but like the first part of a wav file was just playing over and over.

For skyrim it just reboots the machine.

Was playing arma3 for 30 mins and no lockup.

My monitor is only 1920x1080, wouldn't think running out of vram would happen that quickly especially in a game like guild wars 2.
 
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hmmm now that i think about it though. The card was gunked up with dust in the fan a couple weeks ago and i was having overheating issues and it was running up to 80c plus. I wonder if the high temps on the chip caused some damage to the vram chips.
 
Swampthing said:
hmmm now that i think about it though. The card was gunked up with dust in the fan a couple weeks ago and i was having overheating issues and it was running up to 80c plus. I wonder if the high temps on the chip caused some damage to the vram chips.
Click to expand...
Hope not but it could
 
So i manage to get into FFXIV a realm reborn for the first time in 5 days thanks to their login snafu.

I get about 10 mins of playtime and boom lockup with a blast of sound from the soundcard.

so after i rebooted, i downloaded and ran 3dmark to try and stress out my card. it ran all the way through, no crash.

No crash logs, nothing in event viewer nothing. Not even remotely sure at this point which piece of hardware is the problem, would probably have to be video card or motherboard. the video card is older at this point as i got it right when the 580's came out.

Any further suggestions what might be causing this insanely annoying lockup? It almost seems like once i crash and reboot it's fine, i just have to get that first crash out of the way. I did a clean install of the graphics drivers last night thinking that might cure the issue.
 
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Swampthing said:
yeah, i'm aware of that. Was running memtest to solely eliminate the ram.

For guild wars the picture just locks up, the last time there was a stuck sound on the audio. not like white noise, but like the first part of a wav file was just playing over and over.

For skyrim it just reboots the machine.

Was playing arma3 for 30 mins and no lockup.

My monitor is only 1920x1080, wouldn't think running out of vram would happen that quickly especially in a game like guild wars 2.
Click to expand...

Picture frozen with looping sounds is a dead giveaway for a GPU or driver problem. Usually it means that something has hung and the system is no longer feeding new input to the GPU.

Can you run the OCCT GPU stress test in error check mode? Crank up the GPU memory usage to 1500 MB.
 
I ran the test with no failure but it was after the first crash and the computer ran fine in any game till i shut it off and tried again this morning and of course it crashed again once on the first boot.

I did notice this in the event viewer that i hadn't noticed before because it wasn't a red x.

The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) did not load:
dam


I've searched for this and it's come up alot with crashes but i haven't found a solution for it, anyone have suggestions for that error?

and of course it locked up again as i was posting this as i was loading FFXIV in the background.
 
mfenn said:
Picture frozen with looping sounds is a dead giveaway for a GPU or driver problem. Usually it means that something has hung and the system is no longer feeding new input to the GPU.
Click to expand...

I've had instances where it loops for about 5seconds and then reboots - I think that's when I had PSU issues.

Given how everything else is loading, it's worth a shot.
 
You never mentioned the hard drive, did you check to see if there might have been a new firmware released?
My problem as mentioned earlier was similar in that the blue screen had something about a memory dump and nothing in the event viewer that would clue me in. I ran memtest, in windows and off disc, all sorts of scan tools swapped the vid card, swapped memory, checked configurations in the bios, reinstalled windows twice, swapped the PSU all to find it was the firmware on my SSD.
 
I have a SSD but it's not the drive the game is on or the boot partition. Still a possible issue?


well i take that back, one game is on that drive that crashes, skyrim, and that's the game that completely reboots the machine.
 
I thought mine could be a problem with the achi? ahci? at that was why I reinstalled windows but my initial diagnosis / testing was like you with the memory and video card. I also have an Asus but still the 775 platform. This was almost my excuse to upgrade. I did get a new PSU😀
Good luck.
 
Nearly everything you do touches the system drive in some way, so it's certainly possible that the SSD could be causing issues. I would expect that to manifest more as long, unusual pauses that eventually go away rather than straight up crashing though. You could try doing a test install of Windows on your HDD and seeing if the crashing continues.
 
well it has to be a windows issue i think.

New video card and it locks up even faster in games now. locks up once, i hit restart and then it's fine until i shut it down and leave it sit for an extended time and power it back up. I suppose i'll have to reinstall windows next.
 
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