Gaming BSOD 116

Hi all,
Lately I've been blue screening a lot while gaming. My GPU is a factory OC'd 4850 with a scythe musashi cooler attached. Other components include an EVGA 760i SLI mobo, a e8400 @3.3GHz with liquid cooling loop, 4GB OCZ DDR2 800 RAM, 700W OCZ PSU, a 500GB seagate barracuda 7200.12 running Windows 7 pro x64. The problem first arose when I launched Half Life 2 for another play-through. The game ran fine for about an hour, at which point artifacts started appearing all over the screen. The game froze and I got a BSOD with the error code 116. Lately the BSOD's have been more frequent, and happen under just about any game (15m of HL2, instantly in GTA IV, 1h of Assassin's creed 2, 45m in Bad Company 2, etc.) I have tried reinstalling windows, as my old install was getting quite buggy, but the machine is still giving me the exact same error. I ran ATI tool and Intel burn test several times in succession to see if temps were the issue, but everything seems fine. I have not encountered the problem while doing anything but gaming, and it seems to be getting worse. All of the components have been tested, and the problem seems to be the 4850. The GPU does not however, cause any other system to crash and Blue Screen under the same conditions. I'm not sure if there is some driver issue (ATI driver is up to date) or if my GPU is finally dying.
Any help would be appreciated
Thanks

noahmichvfs said:

Hi all,
Lately I've been blue screening a lot while gaming. My GPU is a factory OC'd 4850 with a scythe musashi cooler attached. Other components include an EVGA 760i SLI mobo, a e8400 @3.3GHz with liquid cooling loop, 4GB OCZ DDR2 800 RAM, 700W OCZ PSU, a 500GB seagate barracuda 7200.12 running Windows 7 pro x64. The problem first arose when I launched Half Life 2 for another play-through. The game ran fine for about an hour, at which point artifacts started appearing all over the screen. The game froze and I got a BSOD with the error code 116. Lately the BSOD's have been more frequent, and happen under just about any game (15m of HL2, instantly in GTA IV, 1h of Assassin's creed 2, 45m in Bad Company 2, etc.) I have tried reinstalling windows, as my old install was getting quite buggy, but the machine is still giving me the exact same error. I ran ATI tool and Intel burn test several times in succession to see if temps were the issue, but everything seems fine. I have not encountered the problem while doing anything but gaming, and it seems to be getting worse. All of the components have been tested, and the problem seems to be the 4850. The GPU does not however, cause any other system to crash and Blue Screen under the same conditions. I'm not sure if there is some driver issue (ATI driver is up to date) or if my GPU is finally dying.
Any help would be appreciated
Thanks

If you wish to have others assist you with your computer's BSOD symptoms, upload the contents of your "\Windows\Minidump" folder. The procedure:

* Copy the contents of \Windows\Minidump to another (temporary) location somewhere on your machine.
* Zip up the copy.
* Start your own thread in the "Crashes and Debugging" section of the forum and attach the ZIP archive to your post using the "paperclip" (file attachments) button.
* Briefly describe the problem history and circumstances in the same post. Somebody will attend to your query as soon as possible.

I believe we have a sticky here on troubleshooting STOP 0x116s that you should review. However, if you're actually seeing artifacts on the screen under load before the box crashes, you can be fairly confident the GPU is dying - this is especially true if you were to print screen or otherwise take a screenshot of the screen when it was starting to go awry, and look at it later when things are working - you're likely to notice there are no artifacts in the screenshot, and if so, you can easily confirm what Windows (and the driver) had was fine, but what the GPU output was not.