Windows 7 - BSOD when GPU overheats... Seems too cool to be overheating.

My computer fairly consistently BSODs while playing games for extended periods of time. Usually while playing a game my GPU peaks at about 70~72 C. I know this is up there, but I've seen lots of people not having to worry about overheating until they get to 90 or so.

So my question is, is it normal for my computer to be overheating with a GPU at 72? Or could there be something else underfoot that is causing my issue?

Unfortunately, the last few bluescreens I had were too quick to save any minidumps, and all my old ones are gone... I think I may have accidentally wiped them with CCleaner or something. I've been having this problem for a while and have finally (I think) narrowed it down to my GPU. If it happens again and I get a minidump, I will post it.


My GPU is an Geforce GTS 450.

That temp is fine, so it's unlikely that heat is an issue. (The GPU core temp anyway)

I'd go with something underfoot - but without a crash dump, it's hard to offer a definitive alternative.

If it's only after an extended period of time, have you monitored your CPU's peak temps?

Have you updated your drivers during this period, or is it the same driverset?

That is kind of high for that GPU. I have the same and fully stressed I have the fan control set so it doesn't go over 60. I would advise using the MSI Afterburner program - it works for most any Nvidia and I use it for my Asus GTS 450. It allows you to create a fan response profile, which as I said I use to keep the GPU under 60 event overclocked under load

Smarty, my CPU never gets over 45C or so. It never gets very hot. It's the same drivers, so next time I play anything, I'll just let it run until it bluescreens, and hopefully get a crash dump this time.

Geneo, thanks for the advice. I will check it out and try to keep my GPU around 60 and see if that helps. After I started getting these blue screens a while back, I even installed two more fans pointed at the card to hopefully cool it down, and it only helped by about 5 degrees or so, dropping me from 75 to around 70.

By the way, none of my hardware is overclocked. This is all stock.

This will enable you to have mini dumps on BSODs. But, those GPU temps should not be high enough to cause BSODs.

Thanks for the tip about MSI Afterburner. My GPU is running about 50C instead of 70C. Even though those temps are not hot enough to cause my problem, I like my system running cooler, regardless.

I got a BSOD again with my GPU only at 50C this time, so, definitely not an overheating issue. But once again, no dump file was generated. I don't know why. My system used to create small dumps in the minidump folder, but just now when I went to investigate, it had somehow gotten changed to a kernel dump. I changed it back to minidumps. However, no MEMORY.DMP was generated.. The BSOD is weird. The blue screen is only up for a half a second, then my system restarts, almost like it didn't have time to dump anything. When I restart, windows does not acknowledge the fact that it shut down unexpectedly. The event viewer only states that "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly."

Trying to cause another BSOD now that I have told it to save small dumps.

Obviously this isn't a simple overheating problem. I only thought it was because my system is only restarting when I've been playing a game for a while.

Well good then, you can probably rule out temperature. Is the BSOD error code, address and faulting module the same every time? Can you capture those an post them?

The are probably in your system log. Open the event viewer to the system log and filter on error, warning and critical messages.

What Nvidia driver version are you at.

Event viewer is quite unhelpful. Not even acknowledging that it was a blue screen, when clearly I saw one when it restarted.

Whenever I've had a restart, the only relevant thing listed in the event manager is citing Event 41, being a Kernel-Power error. "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly."

I'm just going to keep using my system like usual for now in hopes that I will get a blue screen that actually generates a helpful dump file. I've been having this issue for going on 6 months, but I gave up on figuring it out for a long while. I know I *was* getting dumps, but I apparently accidentally deleted them all. So here's hoping for a new one that will be useful.

My driver version is 290.36, by the way.

Well....we need the minidumps.

In meantime,

290.36 is beta,install and use an older driver,for the moment dont use any beta driver.

Download and install Speccy-Free-Version take a snip of the summary and upload it here.

Download,install and run OCCT-video-card-test. Finish,find the OCCT test results folder in your documents,zip the folder and upload it here.
During occt stress\test If you see artifacts, or the temperature of your GPU exceeds 80C, stop the test.

Run RAM - Test with Memtest86+
Let it run until at least 9 passes are completed, or errors are found (whichever comes first). The longer you run it,the better.

Or the latest beta, 295.51.