MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION woes

Man of Honour
Joined
25 Oct 2002
Posts
31,893
Location
Hampshire
Bit of a weird one here. My machine keeps crashing when the action is very intensive in games, usually after a couple of minutes of play. It does the in Outrun 2006, did it a couple of times in a particular section of Prey, and is doing it LOADS in Bet on Soldier which I have just started.

What happens is, the game doesn't suddenly crash, it suddenly goes very slow (say 5fps) and then a few sections later freezes completely with looping/screeching sounds. In then bluescreens with a MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION error, and automatically restarts (despite automatic restarts being disabled).

Now, in order to try and diagnose the problem I have:

-Set cpu, memory and gpu to run at stock speeds
-Pointed a big desk fan at the inside of my case
-Gone back to older Nforce 4 drivers and tried without the SW IDE driver
-Gone back to older forceware drivers

Spec is:

OCZ Powerstream 470W PSU
DFI NF4 Ultra-D
Venice 3000+ w/ arctic freezer 64
2*512 Twinmos PC3200
300gig ATA133 16meg Maxtor
300gig SATA 16meg Maxtor
2*160gig SATA 8meg Maxtor
LG 16x DVD-RW
Audigy 2
Leadtek 6800GT

My system was running fine (overclocked) for many months, so I'm at a bit of a loss. I thought it might have been down to updating my video card drivers to 91.31, as I think that was the only driver I changed recently before the problem started, but I've tried a different version without any joy. My other theory was the hot weather (my case is appallingly untidy/poor airflow as I have so many cables in there), hence the big desk fan blowing in the case.

I don't think it's down to the cpu as prime95 can run a lot longer than games. I'm thinking it might be down to the GPU possibly as I was overvolting+overclocking it slightly, maybe I've damaged it somehow(?). As I say, I only get the problem when playing intensive 3d games.

I suppose if someone else had this problem, I would suggest trying a re-install of windows; I had planned to put Vista on as a test but MS are no longer giving out keys. I've got all the windows updates by the way.

So, anyone had much experience with these type of errors?
 
As a last resort I've tried an older Nvidia driver, this time running driver cleaner before installing it, and this is one which I know worked fine before....

So far so good! Will have to see how it goes for the rest of the week but it looks like my BIOS re-flashing, chipset driver changes etc were all a waste of time, ho-hum.

To be honest I'm suprised to see such an issue from an official driver release... it doesn't appear to be a known issue either. Maybe that driver cleaner did the trick afterall. All my googling was pointing towards a HD or Controller issue.
 
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