Windows 7: BSOD playing any game

I'm not sure what the error code is, but over the past month I've experienced an increased number of BSOD's. I'm not making too much sense out of the dump file, so I'm posting here for suggestions and help.

I know this isn't game specific because I've had at least one crash for these games: Tekkit, Shift 2, and Driver: SF.

Let me know if I need to provide anything else.

You said it's only been past month? From the crashdumps it looks like you've been suffering since May, with one crash that month, one in June, four in July, and four in August. Have those previous crashes been resolved?

The crashdumps report a lot of various memory corruptions, from solitary bit changes in code to messed up CPU registers that may have been grabbed from bad memory references. I cannot ascertain exact cause without a kernel dump (MEMORY.DMP in Windows directory).

You should be able to get a better answer if you let Driver Verifier crash your system a couple times and send us the minidumps from there. If I find that nothing has changed in the crashdumps that DV churns out, then you are looking at hardware problems, which is pretty much what I suspect right now. However, if it is caused by hardware failure, crashdumps will not be all that valuable in ascertaining exactly what hardware it is that's doing it.

If you wish, you may run a couple of hardware tests. First start off with Memtest and run that overnight. If you see any red on the screen, that's good evidence you have bad RAM. If you wish, you may also run Prime95. Have it go on Torture Test with Blend overnight. If you see the system has crashed or it has reported errors, then run it another night only this time with Large FFTs instead of Blend. If those also report issues or your system crashes during it, then you have either a bad CPU, motherboard, or PSU, with the CPU being prime suspect.

Thank you Vir Gnarus. I'll do that over the next couple days and report back.

Vir Gnarus and others,

I ran Memtest and found no errors. But I did run into problems with Prime95. CPU #4 failed on the 2nd run through of the test on test 3 or 4 on Blend. So I restarted that and ran it again and had a BSOD with the dump file attached below. I then ran it again with Large FFTs this time and cores 1-3 worked all night while 4 stopped at the same point as before.

The reason that CPU #4 stopped was that it came out with a number .49.... and it was expecting something less than .40. That's the only error that Prime95 reported.

That dump file is 9/4/12 by the way.

I also attempted to use the Driver Verifier, but I could not get past the log-in "Loading" screen. I was able to turn it off through Safe Mode.

Were you in a boot loop when DV was active? If so, that means DV has caught a bad driver performing something illegal during startup, and is crashing the system. Lord willing you'll have a couple crashdumps as a result of these crashes.

As for Prime95, that doesn't sound good. Those results coincide with the crashdumps you've been experiencing, as in the threads that caused your crashes were pretty much always running on core 4, or is reporting an issue with something involving your 4th CPU core. This also coincides with why your experiences only suffer with more intense applications like games, since Windows CPU scheduling will shove threads onto higher numbered CPU cores either when requested by the application or when workload gets high and it deems it beneficial to shove some of it off to other cores.

One thing I want you to do first before we consider replacing the CPU is for your to scour your computer and find and uninstall any and all motherboard software. This includes anything from USB "enhancement" software, monitoring software, overclocking software, etc. . Practically all mobo software is buggy, gimmicky messes and will often cause hardware-based failure because they tinker with kernel stuff in an illegitimate manner. You should remove them and only retain the drivers that came with your motherboard (update them too). You may need to use something like Driver Sweeper (free) to clean off any leftover drivers from the uninstalls (which happens frequently with mobo software).

If this all does not resolve your predicament, or you have no motherboard software installed, then we can be confident we're dealing with a CPU failure here. In fact, given how consistent the data is on use of your 4th CPU core failing all the time, I would be willing to put money down on it being the cause here, and therefore you'll need to replace your CPU.

Regarding DV, I couldn't get past the loading screen past login. So I had to do a manual reboot so no crash dumps were generated.

I removed all the programs that came with my motherboard and attempted Prime95 again. The 4th CPU core erred out a little past where it did before. For the time being, I've disabled that core. Should I try DV again to see if I can find more issues, or will I have the same problem not getting into Windows as I did with 4 cores?

I really thank you for your help.

Try DV one more time, and also test your gaming with the 4th core disabled (you disabled it through Windows, yes?) and see if the instability issue is gone.

Same process of having to reboot myself, I tried it 4 times and it would always stall.

How did you disable the 4th core? Did you just prevent it from being used in Prime95, or actually went into MSCONFIG and set it to use only 3 cores?