BSOD for some games but not others.

Xoran · 22 Jun 2018

Dear tenforum members,

For about six months now, I have experienced crippling BSOD's while playing some games (eg supreme commander/warhammer total war/Crysis 2) but other games run completely fine at demanding settings (eg World of warcraft/europa universalis).

The crashes are sometimes preceded by stuttering, and usually occur within 10 mins of launching the game, or during the launching process itself.

I rarely have crashes when not playing a game. A notable exception is that three months ago (I already had the game crashes problems at that time) my whole machine crashed and followingly I was unable to boot windows. This led me to do a clean install of windows 10. The game crashes unfortunately persisted.

I have tried turning off antivirus/firewall.
diskcheck, memory test, and videocard stress tests have not shown irregularities or problems.

I fear there might be a hardware problem, but (if that is true) I am in the dark on how to identify which component of my system may be the culprit. The PC is currently about 5 years old.

Your help is greatly appreciated,

Tristan

Ztruker · 24 Jun 2018

All 3 dumps indicate a problem with your Nvidia 690GT card or driver. You currently have the 7-5-2018, 397.64 version. The Nvidia website has a newer one:

Version: 398.11 WHQL
Release Date: 2018.6.5

I suggest completely uninstalling the Nvidia display drivers using Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) from WagnardMobile (near bottom of page) then get the latest driver for you Nvidia card here: NVIDIA Driver Downloads

Then do a custom install of only the NVidia graphics driver and the PhysX driver.

See if that gets rid of the problem.

Xoran · 02 Jul 2018

Hello,

Thank you for the keen eye and the suggestion.
I removed my existing Nvidia driver in safe mode using DDU as per your suggestion. I then did a custom install of only the newest nvidia graphics driver and physX driver.
Unfortunately the issue seems to persist. I have attached the most recent dump file.

Do you (or anyone else) know of another angle we might try to go for?

Best,

Tristan

cwsink · 02 Jul 2018

I'd recommend updating to the latest BIOS for your system which can be found here (A11). I've seen DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION problems get fixed with BIOS updates. At the very least you'll have the motherboard in as stable a state as Dell have been able to achieve.

Ztruker · 02 Jul 2018

Same exact problem with

Code:

BugCheck 133, {1, 1e00, fffff80205662378, 0}
*** WARNING: Unable to verify timestamp for nvlddmkm.sys
Probably caused by : nvlddmkm.sys ( nvlddmkm+1cb141 )

Please run dm_log_collector.exe again and upload the resulting zip file. I want to see the other collected files including the dxdiag and eventlog.

You could try going back to an older driver. What is the complete model number for the Alienware computer? You could try using the latest driver supported by Dell rather than what Nvidia has.