Windows 7: Crashes during heavy gaming loads, no BSOD

My computer has been crashing after random time intervals for some weeks now. It crashes almost exclusively during gaming, BFBC2, ME2 and Borderlands atm at medium/high settings.

The crashes are identical. I experience a breif moment och lag/slowdown followed by the sound starting to loop and the screen flickering and then turning black. The sound keeps looping until the computer shutdowns (this only happens sometimes, after approximately 1 min.) or i turn it off by turning of the power (front buttons wont work, only PSU).

I am, to the best of my knowledge, using the latest drivers for at least the GPU and sound card.

The computer has been able to generate mindumps on some occations. I attached them as a rar-directory.



Any help with this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Dumps blame atikmdag.sys, your ATI display drivers, may be also caused by overheating

(Do these steps even if you have already reinstalled the ATI drivers)

- Boot into safe mode with networking
- Uninstall the ATI drivers including Catalyst Control Center
- Use driver sweeper to remove leftover ATI display driver files Guru3D - Driver Sweeper (This step is important)
- Reboot into safe mode with networking
- Install the latest drivers. For 32-bit OS For 64-bit OS
- Reboot into normal mode

I will try once more as per your instructions. According to HWmonitor my temps are ok, about 70 degrees C at the most during gaming. Other temps seems ok. 50-60 C for cores and 40 C system temp.

I dont have any temps for my Northbridge but the heatsink seems quite hot, approximately 70-80 degrees C.

This is too hot, you should clean your PC of dust or get a better cooling system

I will look into a new heatsink then. Any suggestions?

I reinstalled the drivers, but i could not install them in safe mode. The installer couldn't detect system data or something like that. Some threads i found recommended updating windos c++ redistributabe, this installer wouldn't work either.

Installer did fine in normal mode though. I will see if there are any changes and try to to pick upp a new cooler monday...

P.S. If i attached a 40mm fan (3.8 cfm) to my current cooler, would that have any effect? I'm having some troubles finding a heatsink that would fit.

The problem seems to persist. My computer crashed after about 2 hrs of gaming.

Its most likely overheating or bad GPU/RAM

Test your RAM
RAM - Test with Memtest86+

I forgot to mention it but i've already tested my ram, no errors found.

Worth mentioning is that when my computer started crashing i checked temps and found out that my cpu sometimes would run at close to 90 degrees C (this seems new to me, a couple of months ago it ran at aprox. 50-60 C). I changed my cooling and its running at 60 C at the most now.

90C is just too hot for a CPU, this might be the cause of your crashes, it should idle at 30-50C and below 70C under load

Take out the heatsink and clean it, also apply thermal paste

My CPU is running at 45 idle, 70 load since i changed to my current cooling. My GPU is running at similar temps. recommended max temp for my CPU is 74C, so unless it's damaged i dont see an issue with my CPU. I will replace the thermal paste on my Northbridge.

Since i've experienced such high temps on bort cpu and northbridge, both where fine a couple of months ago, could there be an issue with my PSU?