Windows 7: Black screen while gaming, every time

Hello,

I’ve got a brand new computer a few days out of the box and am having difficulty with the screen going black during game play (GW2). Sound continues for either 1) a few seconds, and then goes into a repeating loop or 2) indefinitely. Either way, the only solution is a hard reboot. No difficulties out of game. Previously, was getting BSoD playing Skyrim, but since I saw that was such a common problem I thought I’d try to fix this first… I’d greatly appreciate feedback.

Build (from iBuyPower), also in the system specs

Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H -- 1x PCI-E 3.0 x16, 4x USB 3.0
850 Watt - Corsair
Intel® Core™ i5-3570K Processor (4x 3.40GHz/6MB L3 Cache)
16 GB [4 GB X4] DDR3-1600 Memory Module - G.Skill Ripjaws X
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 - 2GB - EVGA FTW - Core: 1084MHz - Single Card
256GB ADATA SP900 SSD (used for program installation)
500 GB HARD DRIVE (shouldn’t be in play during any of this)

Running Windows 7 Pro

Initially, the black screen occurred, every time, ~5 sec into play. After doing each of the things below, the issue repeated without change:

1. Altered BIOS so that Internal Graphics is now “Disabled” (was “Auto”);
2. removed/reseated GPU;
3. downloaded GPU Temp – temp hasn’t risen above 49C (though I’m not able to check it until after the reboot);
4. Verified that High Precision Event Timer was set to “Enabled.” (it was)
5. Uninstalled vid driver, rebooted in Safe Mode, ran Driver Cleaner Pro, rebooted, reinstalled driver;
6. Looked in the event log and saw a million Service Control Manager event ID = 7001, so I:
Verified that DCOM Service Process Launcher, RPC Endpoint Mapper, Remote Proceedure Cal (RPC), Security Accounts Manager, and Server were all “started” in the service manager. They were.

7. Another error from the log (less often but prior to the one above) was a Warning Winlogon event = 6000 and Distributed COM event = 10005. I verified afd.sys, tcpip.sys, and netbt.sys were all in the System32\Drivers folder and that their startup types were “system.” TCP/IP I changed from “boot” to “system.” At this point I also uninstalled a program I’d installed called Hamachi, which perhaps had some potential to perturb something TCP/IP related…

This last bit made a difference. Now I can play for anywhere between 1 and 15 minutes. When the system fails, the failure looks a little different – the action gets slow for a few seconds and then the screen flashes lots of red pixelated boxes …and then the screen goes black.



FurMark ran at 1680x1050 and got up to 75C with a score of 4080.


Thank you for any help!

The zipped attachment...

This is stop 117, Video TDR Timeout Detected.

For the best, follow the instructions in the thread STOP 0x116: VIDEO_TDR_ERROR troubleshooting by usasma.

Those two stopcodes are almost similar, so the troubleshooting steps are also similar.