BSOD during gameplay, BCCode: a

Hi guys,

So, a few weeks ago my girlfriend knocked over a glass of water which poured into my PC. I immediately switched it off at the wall, let it dry out for a few days, and then turned it back on. Everything seemed to work fine, surprisingly!

... Until I tried gaming. I don't game much, but I do enjoy flight simulators and particularly X-Plane. I played this, and for about 5 minutes it was fine, then it would cause BSOD. I tried reinstalling, and then instead of causing BSOD, the game would just crash (still not ideal!).

I then tried playing Kerbal Space Program, and after a while, it caused BSOD too. I figured it was my graphics card that was perhaps damaged (this would make sense, as this is where most of the water would have landed during the accident). So I swapped it out today for a brand new MSI NVidia GTX 960 Gaming 2G (replacing my ASUS NVidia GTX 750 Ti).

I am now trying to play X-Plane again, and I'm getting BSOD again.

As I said, the water damage does not seem to have affected any other aspect of the PC's performance. Every other task seems to work just fine, as before. All hard drives are still fully accessibly, I have noticed no drop in CPU performance, all motherboard interfaces (USB, Ethernet, etc) are still functional.

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 2057

Additional information about the problem:
BCCode: a
BCP1: 0000000000000038
BCP2: 000000000000000D
BCP3: 0000000000000000
BCP4: FFFFF8000342C4CA
OS Version: 6_1_7601
Service Pack: 1_0
Product: 768_1

I've attached my stuff as requested.

Thanks in advance for your help, guys.

Arc said:

As the first try, disable nvidia streamer service.

Services - Start or Disable

If the issue continues even after doing it, let us know.

Thanks for the reply. I did this, and restarted X Plane to try. It lasted a bit longer than previously, and first time around, it crashed the game without BSOD. I then restarted the game, and again it lasted longer than it did previously, but this time it did cause BSOD.

New logs attached.

Arc said:

....

Thanks a lot for your instructions. I've done all this now. Unfortunately, when I took a screenshot of the FurMark stress test screen, for some reason all the information returns to zeros in the screenshot :|...

But, I can tell you that the frame rate minimum was 52fps, the temperature increased and then leveled off at about 60 degrees, the graphic quality of the test seemed very high, and there was no stuttering/stopping/freezing, and no BSOD.

Arc said:

...

I just run the FurMark stress test again and after about 10 minutes, I got BSOD again!

But this is a BRAND new GPU, so I take it this must be a Motherboard problem?

Arc said:

No, a BSOD during furmark indicates to a failing graphics card, which is consistent with the crash dumps.

As it is brand new card, RMA it.

How sure are you in this regard? Is there any way to verify for sure?

It's just that, yesterday I had a GTX 750 Ti that was crashing and BSODing. Today, I have a brand new GTX 960 which is also crashing and BSODing. My natural logic tells me that this should rule out the GPU as the root cause. Obviously, there is a chance that both GPUs are faulty, but I find that somehow less likely than the notion that it's just not the GPU.

Also, could you instruct me further in the use of FurMark? How long should the stress test be run for? Should the GPU be able to run FurMark indefinitely?

I'm finding that the GPU performance during gaming and during FurMark is very high, with high FPS, low and controlled temperatures, etc. It's just that, for some reason, the games either crash or I get BSOD. What kind of GPU faults can cause seemingly random crashes with no effect on general performance?