Worst Possible Crash!

pp111

pp111

pp111

Permabanned
Joined
22 Oct 2018
Posts
2,451
I need some ideas on this one!

My main PC is crashing. It happens usually when the graphics card is under some stress, browsing or gaming however it can happen when the PC is just idle. It seems like the more stress it's under the more frequently it crashes. Crash is fairly infrequent but seems to be getting worse on a weekly basis ( difficult to say ).

1. It black screens, so there is no diagnostics info on the monitor.
2. The system appears to be still running, and it's just the graphics card that has died. It's a bit difficult to tell though but certainly things like fan control software are still running.
3. The system doesn't detect any issues in that there is no diagnostics information.
4. It's not the graphics card. I replaced that and the problem remains.
5. I have tried earlier display drivers and the problem remains.

All hardware is less than a year old. All temperatures are fine. Crash is completely random.

I am going to try to setup up some software today so I can access the PC remotely when the display fails. My guess is that the PC will be fine. But can anyone think of anything I can try to diagnose this problem? I am thinking the next logical thing to do is replace the motherboard but it would be good if I could actually get the system to give me some hint as to what's going on.

Oh having said all that it just did something different. It did a system reset style crash when I attempted to run Windows Troubleshooter. Again no log information. It just black screened and instantly reset. Normally it will run it, so again a random style crash.
 
Oh, I have just realised that the video driver updated itself so it is possible it's the latest NVIDIA driver. I will go back again and report some time later.
 
what is event viewer saying? Have you looked?

You replaced the graphics card what cards have been tried?

What PSU do you have?
PSU cables swapped?
Is the fan spinning,?
Is the PSU hot when it crashes?

Any overclock on system is so set to stock.
Is it stable with minimum hardware required to boot?

posting full system spec will give people on here more info to help
 
pp111 said:
I need some ideas on this one!

My main PC is crashing. It happens usually when the graphics card is under some stress, browsing or gaming however it can happen when the PC is just idle. It seems like the more stress it's under the more frequently it crashes. Crash is fairly infrequent but seems to be getting worse on a weekly basis ( difficult to say ).

1. It black screens, so there is no diagnostics info on the monitor.
2. The system appears to be still running, and it's just the graphics card that has died. It's a bit difficult to tell though but certainly things like fan control software are still running.
3. The system doesn't detect any issues in that there is no diagnostics information.
4. It's not the graphics card. I replaced that and the problem remains.
5. I have tried earlier display drivers and the problem remains.

All hardware is less than a year old. All temperatures are fine. Crash is completely random.

I am going to try to setup up some software today so I can access the PC remotely when the display fails. My guess is that the PC will be fine. But can anyone think of anything I can try to diagnose this problem? I am thinking the next logical thing to do is replace the motherboard but it would be good if I could actually get the system to give me some hint as to what's going on.

Oh having said all that it just did something different. It did a system reset style crash when I attempted to run Windows Troubleshooter. Again no log information. It just black screened and instantly reset. Normally it will run it, so again a random style crash.
Click to expand...

I had this same problem, only with a Vega64 card, it turned out to be the driver, it took them ages to fix it though, pretty much everytime I started the computer, I would get a message saying "Wattman settings have been set to defaults due to an unexpected error", even if I hadnt changed anything in there, sometimes the screen would go black and then come back on again and a message saying something like "Display driver has been restarted" and other times, id have to force restart.
 
Jason1973 said:
what is event viewer saying? Have you looked?

You replaced the graphics card what cards have been tried?

What PSU do you have?
PSU cables swapped?
Is the fan spinning,?
Is the PSU hot when it crashes?

Any overclock on system is so set to stock.
Is it stable with minimum hardware required to boot?

posting full system spec will give people on here more info to help
Click to expand...

Nothing is overclocked.
The PSU is a Corsair RM750i. At your suggestion I tested the fan and it works fine. Normally the PSU is at 33 degrees C so the fan is off.
The PC has been completely faultless until a few weeks ago when it suddenly started to black-screen.
It mostly does it in games but then started to do it in browsing.
It's fairly rare, perhaps once every few hours in games and once every few days in browsing.
It has only once crashed "differently" in that it crashed once when I ran windows troubleshooting. It wasn't testing anything when it crashed, it just crashed when the control panel troubleshooting app started.
 
Have you tried moving the GPU from the x16 slot to the x8 slot?
Have you tried plugging a second monitor into one of the motherboard video ports? (Assuming you're running an Intel CPU.)
Are you using two separate power cables for the GPU?
 
The event viewer is a bit confusing becuase the events are clearly marked as power fails - this is where i turned the system off.
the events are peppered with


The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{2593F8B9-4EAF-457C-B68A-50F6B8EA6B54}
and APPID
{15C20B67-12E7-4BB6-92BB-7AFF07997402}

But I don't think they are important.

Immediately before the reset there are nine events ...

The Desktop Window Manager process has exited. (Process exit code: 0xe0464645, Restart count: 1, Primary display device ID: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960)

Prior to that is

Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered.

So something is causing the driver to crash and even though it says that its recovered, it most certainly hasn't.
 
I had this for a while last year and it was because a lot of my games/apps were using the onboard graphics rather than my gpu
 
I will try stepping back the driver and see if that helps. I have also disabled the onboad GPU in the BIOS ( It was set to AUTO ) and am going to install XTU. I used to use XTU to monitor the system but then uninstalled it, but noticed during the events that the system was trying to run it still so I will try installing it and uninstalling it to see if I can clear that particular error. At the moment I am thinking this is more of a software issue than a hardware issue. Having said that I wonder if it could actually be the monitor.
 
Last edited:
I'd also suggest physically removing your GTX960 and running just with onboard for a bit. If you get a repeat, that at least takes it out of the loop. Did memtest throw up any errors?
 
adrichardson81 said:
I'd also suggest physically removing your GTX960 and running just with onboard for a bit. If you get a repeat, that at least takes it out of the loop. Did memtest throw up any errors?
Click to expand...

The 960 is a replacement for a 1080 that it usually runs with. Changing the video card made no difference.

It crashed twice again today. It was fine all day then just for no apparently reason black screened, reset, then black screened again ( but didn't reset ). It wasn't doing anything in particular. Just very light browsing.

This time I managed to get a report on the issue.


On Sun 18/08/2019 17:47:16 your computer crashed or a problem was reported
crash dump file: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\081819-5625-01.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: ntoskrnl.exe (nt+0x1B3F50)
Bugcheck code: 0x133 (0x1, 0x1E00, 0xFFFFF8063415A380, 0x0)
Error: DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION
file path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: NT Kernel & System
Bug check description: The DPC watchdog detected a prolonged run time at an IRQL of DISPATCH_LEVEL or above. This could be caused by either a non-responding driver or non-responding hardware. This bug check can also occur because of overheated CPUs (thermal issue).
The crash took place in the Windows kernel. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver that cannot be identified at this time.



On Sun 18/08/2019 17:47:16 your computer crashed or a problem was reported
crash dump file: C:\WINDOWS\MEMORY.DMP
This was probably caused by the following module: nvlddmkm.sys (nvlddmkm+0x1d9bd1)
Bugcheck code: 0x133 (0x1, 0x1E00, 0xFFFFF8063415A380, 0x0)
Error: DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION
file path: C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nv_dispi.inf_amd64_4b310b124a4f2d9f\nvlddmkm.sys
product: NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 431.36
company: NVIDIA Corporation
description: NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 431.36
Bug check description: The DPC watchdog detected a prolonged run time at an IRQL of DISPATCH_LEVEL or above. This could be caused by either a non-responding driver or non-responding hardware. This bug check can also occur because of overheated CPUs (thermal issue).
A third party driver was identified as the probable root cause of this system error. It is suggested you look for an update for the following driver: nvlddmkm.sys (NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 431.36 , NVIDIA Corporation).
Google query: nvlddmkm.sys NVIDIA Corporation DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION


I don't really understand what it's saying but it all seems to concentrate around the video driver. But what I don't get here is that this is a different video card. I can try stepping even further back on video drivers I suppose but I get the idea there is something else wrong here.
 
It's the motherboard.
Or more precisely it's the PCIex16 socket.
It's something I would never has suspected because nothing has been plugged/unplugged prior to the fault, however, it certainly seems to have failed in some way or other.
Whatever.
Thanks for all the help! New motherboard arriving tomorrow!
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom