blackscreen crashes, stuttering audio, out of ideas

Brainz · 26 Feb 2012

Hello,

I was recently given a case that had a motherboard and CPU that was slightly better than my old hardware, so I got a new HDD and put that plus my old video card, sound card, and RAM into the new case. I installed Windows 7 Professional 64 bit onto the blank HDD, and fully updated it and installed drivers.

I began to have blackscreen crashes, very occasionally with vertical white dashed lines, combined with stuttering audio. These crashes have only produced one minidump, which I have included. I have also included my DxDiag. You may notice that I am using an old driver for the video card. This was done because the current Nvidia driver has been reported to have many issues. I originally installed the most recent driver, had the blackscreen issues, and decided to try the older and possibly more stable driver. This has had no effect and the problem has continued in the same manner.

The blackscreen crashes have happened while playing Starcraft 2, Terraria, and Bejeweled Blitz. I have used monitoring software and have not seen any sort of heat issue, and also ran Furmark for quite some time to stress test the system, which did not result in a crash.

I am beyond out of ideas, and am hoping someone smarter and/or more knowledgeable than I will be able to help.

If there is any additional information I can provide please tell me.

ePeen · 26 Feb 2012

Hi,

I get an error when I try to open the dump file you've provided. Do you have any other dump files or can you try and reattach the provided zip?

Brainz · 26 Feb 2012

Here is another copy, freshly zipped.

Brainz · 27 Feb 2012

ePeen said:

Hi,

I get an error when I try to open the dump file you've provided. Do you have any other dump files or can you try and reattach the provided zip?

Any thoughts, sir and/or madam?

ePeen · 27 Feb 2012

Still nothing, this is the error I am getting when trying to open your dump file in WinDbg.

RonCam · 27 Feb 2012

Brainz said:

... I began to have blackscreen crashes, very occasionally with vertical white dashed lines, combined with stuttering audio. ...

By all means, keep trying to get your dump file to epeen, for analysis.

It could be helpful to hear details of this 'blackscreen crash' and the stuttering audio. Does the audio cut-off after stuttering, or does it continue to stutter for some (so far undisclosed) time, while the screen remains black?

Does the 'blackscreen crash' come before, or after the audio problem, or is it simultaneous?

Reason: I just recovered from a similar situation by first trying to recap, but finally having to replace the graphics card. Apparently it had developed an intermittent hardware fault. Now the system is rock-solid, like new. Before, the screen would go black first, but audio would continue playing. Then, the graphics driver would crash, bring down the OS and cut the audio, and then it would require a hard system reset to get going again.

OK, now back to getting your dump and see what epeen says ... it will be interesting to see if your graphics driver is mentioned there.