BSOD : My computer does not seem to like Source games, especially HL2

My computer gives me BSODs after an amount of time every time I run Half-Life 2. It usually runs fine with Team Fortress 2 (even though even TF2 gives it occasional BSODs) but Half-Life 2 appears to be problematic.

I'm providing a text file of all the BSODs over the past roughly 24-48 hours or so. I got them all using BlueScreen View.

If anyone starts telling me to get rid of overclocking, please don't. I already removed EVGA Precision X from my computer and as for the processor - that was hardware overclocked by Origin ages ago and I don't have enough know-how to undo that, nor should I because I paid for my overclocking. If it comes down to be that then I guess I'll just have to not play Half-Life 2, which sucks, but it and sometimes Portal are the ONLY games that this happens so often on. Non-Source engine games never have the issues at all, I really don't get it.

Whether this issue does get fixed or not, I'll be sending my computer into Origin for getting looked at and cleaned up when I return to the US. Right now I'm in China and because of Origin not being a very big company they don't exist here - hence why I can't get any professional support here.

Thanks!
- Alex

System Details :

Manufacturer : Origin
Model : EON 17S (laptop) (from August 2011)
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate x64
CPU : Intel i7 Extreme 2920XM (4.1 ~ 4.8Ghz Turbo Mode)
GPU : Overclocked 2GB NVIDIA 580M GTX
Memory : 16GB Kingston Hyper-X Dual Channel DDR3 @ 1600Mhz
Storage : OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240GB
Storage 2 : 750GB 7,200RPM Hard Drive
WLAN : Intel Centrino Avanced-N 6230

Also note, my ethernet port is broken. Somehow it came loose from the motherboard. Will get that fixed later.

Alright, well here's the .zip file.

Though I'm not sure if it's giving you guys all the BSODs or just the most recent one. When running the game, it gives me all kinds of different BSODs at different addresses.

Updated my specs in my profile - hope that helps.

Any input?

Hello Alexander and welcome to Sevenforums.

BSOD ANALYSE

Problem Device(s)

Problem devices can be found in your Device Manager. Search Device Manager in Start, and look for :warn:. Note that if the warning sign isn't there, select View on the top of the window, and end with Show hidden devices.

I do not know what device this belongs to, but maybe you have more knowledge on it. Nevertheless you can disable it or update its driver.

Have you tried to reinstall that game? As far as I'm concerned, your crash dump indicated that wrong data came in the line.

Different culprits pointed towards your NVIDIA Graphics Driver. Driver Sweeper will ensure that you'd have a clean install at the end of the procedure, and by that no leftover files that'd bork the system.

* Make your way to Nvidia Drivers - Download NVIDIA Drivers and download the latest driver for your card, save it to your desktop for instance.
* Uninstall the Graphic driver you currently have and all its extensions (do not reboot yet)
* Download Driver Sweeper
* Get to safe mode (without network) and search for Driver Sweeper in your rb:
* Select all the Nvidia components and analyse them
* Clean them, head into Windows without internet and install the driver you downloaded previously

Best Regards,
Frederik.

Thank you. I did find that in my device manager. I have no idea what that does, and it says that it's already been stopped. I will ask my manufacturer if they know anything about it before further action as I wouldn't like to remove anything that's meant to be there.

As for NVIDIA, I always keep the drivers up to date. I do this by right-clicking the desktop, going into my NVIDIA panel, and then going to Help >> Updates >> Check For Updates..., and it appears I am up to date. I have done entire system restores of just starting over, reinstalling all the drivers on my computer, only to have these problems recur.

Well, I recently finished Half-Life 2 and in HL2 Episode 1 and 2, they seem to go away. This might be a fault on Valve's end as well newer system specs probably haven't been tested very much on their older releases.

If my manufacturer can't figure out what it's for, I might just see what removing it from my system entirely does. I mean, it's broken anyway, right? In that case I don't see any good that could become of it - the existence of a broken driver could only cause problems the way I see it.

Looking up that device has shown that it's the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility, which would probably be advised that you keep that inactive and disabled (or uninstalled completely if possible).

I checked the Nvidia website and I saw that the latest drivers for your Nvidia GPU is from May 22, but the driver itself that's present on your PC is dated May 15. I'm not entirely sure if that's just because the driver was compiled earlier before it was released in the driver package publicly on the 22, or if we're dealing with a driver that had a new release shortly thereafter. If it's the latter case, then most likely it was because they found a common bug that need critical patching and so a new driver was released ASAP, and that very same bug might be causing your woes. Can you check your Nvidia control panel to see if your driver package is version 301.42 and that it was released on May 22? You did say that it didn't find any new updates, but sometimes it's better to check the website itself just in case.

As for the crashdumps, when I looked at it I was seeing some unusual things, such as memory access violations on what appears to be completely valid memory. If that's the case, then something is wrong with your CPU, motherboard or RAM. I cannot 100% verify this diagnosis as only kernel dumps (MEMORY.DMP in Windows directory) or larger have the data necessary to analyze this.

I personally recommend turning on Driver Verifier and sending us another crash or two just to be sure. If we are dealing with bugged out drivers, then that's more likely to catch it for us. Obviously send us new crashdumps should Driver Verifier cause your system to crash.

Well, I was just playing Half-Life 2 Episode 2 and it crashed again.

I'd happily give you ALL the data you need if you tell me how. I'll give you the dump files straight up.

I ran the SF Diagnostic Tool again. Attached is the data.

I am now running the Driver Verification tool. Will edit in an update.

Also, nice job on making your own software and so-forth for all of this. This site is more pro than I thought... I was thinking it was just a generic Win 7 forum, but I've been getting proven otherwise.

Edit : Could you tell me exactly what to do in the Driver Verification tool? So far I'm doing this :

Launch Tool >> Create Standard Settings >>

Automatically select unsigned drivers = "No unsigned drivers have been found."

Automatically select drivers built for older versions of Windows = "No drivers built for older versions have been found."

Automatically select all drivers on this computer = "No settings have been changed".

Edit 2 : I have uninstalled IOCBIOS from my system. Now shutting down. I live in China and it's 1:40AM here now. I will get back with any replies morning my time (like 8:00AM or so).

Thank you very much for your help!

- Alex

Just follow the instructions from the article linked and that should get you through. Basically what you're doing is setting up which checks to make active, and which drivers you want to check. Since we aren't able to pinpoint a specific driver, we'll need to check all existing ones, but that does not include Windows drivers, so you'll want to manually select any and all drivers whose corporation is not Microsoft. After that's all set n done, restart the PC. If you get a boot loop afterwards, DV is doing its job and has found an early bug in a driver and is BSODing as a result. You can go into Safe Mode and turn DV back off, and then proceed to provide us the crashdumps.

Oh, and make sure that you are selecting the proper checks, otherwise we'll get false positives. The checks you want are anything except Low Resource Sim and Force Pending I/O Requests. IRP Logging also is worthless in our situation so you can leave that one out as well.

Hey again, I'm back.

After removing IOCBIOS my system is behaving strangely, just plain slow and awfully hot in fact...even though no intensive programs are being run. My GPU is very hot even though no game is running. My fan behavior also seems to have changed. I also got a new BSOD I've never seen before. I'm uploading it for review now.

Also, the SF Diagnostic Tool was a bit strange this time. It did not display the same alert windows as before...so please tell me if something went wrong.

I also want to tell you that according to the NVIDIA panel my NVIDIA drivers are version 4.4.730.0

I want everyone to remember that my computer has been hardware overclocked. According to Origin my CPU was overclocked "using both Multiplier and Bclock". I really hope that the driver I removed wasn't actually important to the system.

Edit : I am now running the driver verification tool on ALL drivers. Be back soon, hopefully...

I'm back. No boot-loop has occurred. Startup was fairly normal, besides the new slowness described earlier.

Edit : Oddly, it seems that after cleaning out the registry with CCleaner and a reboot the system is behaving better again. I'm gonna run a game though, just to give it something more intensive to test. Will let you know if I run into issues.

Another crash. This is the first since removing IOCBIOS.

Also, the program ran normally this time. This should be a more proper file than the last, I think. The last one uploaded so fast it makes me suspicious that much was even in it.

Another BSOD. This time it didn't even display the blue screen. It just froze and looped sound like a BSOD would. No dump was made either. Seems the computer crashed without an actual BSOD this time.

Two more BSODs. Again, they're happening when running games. Here's some more data for you guys. Hope I'm not posting too much.

The only thing I see that's consistent is that it contains "ntoskrnl.exe" or "ntoskrnl.exe+ 74583" in it many times (though not every time). Please note that this has happened no matter how many times I start over with this computer, the error comes back. I have updated my WLAN drivers because that's what my manufacturer told me to do ages ago, but that did not fix the problem.

Alexander Moore said:

Another BSOD. This time it didn't even display the blue screen. It just froze and looped sound like a BSOD would. No dump was made either. Seems the computer crashed without an actual BSOD this time.

Click to expand...

This has happened to me as well, I assume that the system locks so hard it can't even create a dump file.

Happened to you? You mean you get the same problem playing Source games? Same BSOD errors? Just wondering if this is very relevant to what's happening to me

If so, did you ever get them to stop?

Alexander Moore said:

Happened to you? You mean you get the same problem playing Source games? Same BSOD errors? Just wondering if this is very relevant to what's happening to me

If so, did you ever get them to stop?

Click to expand...

Not Source games, I've had the 'lock up no dump' playing other games (BF3, COD, Fallout). I'm in the middle of a BSOD crisis myself but it seems more generalized. If I can think of anything more specific to your situation, I'll post it.

Mostly just games in general myself. Not really so much just Source, it happens with other games sometimes too.

I know a lot of people that get random BSODs when playing games though. So annoying. I'm not really sure if there's a way to prevent those.

If there's ever been ONE thing I give console gaming over PC gaming, it's not having big errors like BSODs (though they have other errors, but they don't occur so often).

I'm not sure why, but it does sound like the Intel Tuning Utility was used to make some changes to possibly your fan speed, overclocking and other things, when all of that really should be done in the BIOS. As for the overclocking, you should reset those changes to factory default (if your BIOS gives you to the option to save, do so before changing) since overclocking can cause these kind of issues.

My concern right now is that despite Driver Verifier being on, there has been only one crashdump that has caught a potential suspect, and I'm not sure if it's related to our situation. Regardless, it was some old Logitech Wingman driver causing some problems (date on the driver is April 27, 2010). Try updating it or somethin.

The crashes you're experiencing are strangely consistent in some manner, which would suggest software, but the actual bugcheck types suggest hardware failure. I'm afraid we won't be able to garner the information we need to debug this any further, as it's a very elusive type of bugcheck. Because of that, it looks like we'll need to do some thorough diagnostic testing to kind of brute force an answer out.

My first recommendation outside of resetting your BIOS OC settings to default, is to first start testing with Memtest for about 7+ hours (so overnight). When that is done, you can then proceed to Prime95 for your CPU test. Start with an overnight Torture Test on Blend settings, then follow up with another one overnight with Large FFTs setting, even if the one on Blend happens to fail. Blend will help us discern if this is an issue with crosstalk between CPU and RAM, and Large FFTs will help us determine if it's corruption of CPU internals like registers and L caches. If Blend fails but Large FFT doesn't, it's the crosstalk, and if Blend succeeds but FFT fails it's the CPU internals.

Other misc. yet somewhat related tasks you can do is a CHKDSK to clean up any possible filesystem issues, and follow up with an SFC scan to check if Windows kernel is all clean on the disk end. It's best to do the CHKDSK first so that filesystem problems would be taken care of before dealing with the actual Windows files. Lastly, Seatools is suggested to ensure your drive is ok in the first place. You'll want to run all tests except Advanced.

That's all I can recommend at this point in time. I apologize for going this route, but it's only because there is really no other option I can see at the moment. Well, actually, there is one route, and there's a bit of work involved, but I'm curious about it so I'll take the plunge. I still recommend you start on these as I perform this one final task.

I remember doing CHKDSK a long time ago and that was fine. I'll try memory diagnostics overnight, along with all the other stuff.

As for resetting the OC via BIOS - Sorry to say this, but my BIOS options are very limited and nothing related to overclocking is even in there. It's just very basic stuff like the boot order and some hard drive options. Nothing much related to the CPU is in there.

Hmm... I'm going to remove this Logitech keyboard junk I have. It's the drivers for the G19 keyboard. Every time I install that, more BSODs than usual start coming up. I'm using the latest of the late, but they're still buggy.

What is ntoskrnl.exe anyway?