BSOD on Start up, White bars and pixelation in start up screen.

Hello, my machine is 2 yrs old and recently I have encountered this problem.

It started slowly. While playing League of Legends and Starcraft 2 it would occasionally freeze up, the display would become pixelated and I would have to restart my PC. I could still hear audio, but nothing would respond on screen.

Now, the problem has gotten worse. On start up, the 'starting windows...' screen will freeze and horizontal white lines will appear and then I will recieve a highly distorted BSOD. It said "Attempt to reset the display driver and recover from timeout failed"

I have used the Bluescreen View utility (By Nirsoft), which was recommended in another post I saw, and I have found that the problem is in "dxgkrnl.sys", "dxgmms1.sys" and, "nvlddmkm.sys".

I have restored to the earliest system restore point available.

Please Help. Thank You for Responding.

Note: I am using an NVidia gtx 470 gpu.

There is a high probability that either your Graphics card is defective or overheating, the display distortion is a clear symptom. Ensure proper airflow in your case & blow out any dust blocking the fan of the Graphics Card. The "highly distorted BSOD" suggests that the problem is not software related but rather a hardware defect.

My concern with this hypothesis is that I can still run my computer perfectly fine in safe mode. Could this still be the issue?

Skippy3 said:

My concern with this hypothesis is that I can still run my computer perfectly fine in safe mode. Could this still be the issue?

In safe mode the Nvidia driver isn't loaded, Windows makes use of the basic video driver (Standard VGA Driver) hence anything related to graphics acceleration & any other hardware features are disabled. You may try to reinstall a newer driver version from scratch by checking the "Perform A Clean Install" from the Nvidia Installer

Thanks. I'll let you know how it goes.

Hey, so I cleaned out my machine to remove any dust and contaminants, plugged it in and restarted it and nothing came up on the screen. My monitor didn't seem to recognize my desktop. After a few tries I finally got it booted in safe mode, but there was distortion anyways!

My machine was still functioning well so I decided to try a clean install of my graphics drivers. I also took the liberty of running CCleaner on my registry to make sure everything was gone. I booted it up in normal windows and still experienced the same problems followed by a BSOD.

After that, I tried safe mode again and it seemed back to where I was a few hrs ago. completely fine in safe mode, but troublesome in normal windows.

I am leaning towards a hardware problem, but if there is anything software related you think I can check before I spend some money on a new graphics card I would appreciate the advice.

One thing a friend suggested is to reformat my comp, is this worth the hassle?

Thanks for the help.

The fact that the problem also occurs in Safe Mode confirms that the issue lies in your Graphics Card. Since a clean install of the display driver doesn't improve the situation this further points to a hardware defect, you may try to reinstall windows ( Or a Repair Install) but that won't likely fix the problem.

I have replaced my graphics card and everything is back to normal. It seems that it was a hardware problem. Thanks!