Random freezing/crashing with Nvidia GeForce GT 220

distribute said:

I bought a new Dell computer with windows 7 64-bit home premium and a Nvidia GeForce GT 220 graphics card in early January. Its main function is gaming.

About 2 or 3 weeks after I started using it, my computer would freeze up and display distorted colors, and if a game or music is playing, the sound would become a choppy monotone over the speakers. Alternately, the screen would turn black and the computer would simply restart, or sometimes I would get the blue screen of death before it restarted. This would occur at completely random times at a rate of about 5-20 times per day.

It might crash and restart/freeze up five times in three minutes, or it might crash and be fine for six hours. I have heard it crash while I'm lying awake in bed, and then would not surprisingly find that I would have to log back in the following morning. I have gone AFK for hours and then come back to find the desktop frozen up. After these such experiences and more I have concluded that there is not a specific program I am consciously running that is causing it to crash.

Less often the screen would shut off for a second and then come back completely fine, but with an accompanying error message "your display driver stopped responding and has successfully recovered" or something along those lines. In the memory dump on the blue screen of death, the file "nvlddmkm" would be mentioned, which is part of the Nvidia driver.

I tried calling Dell support. They had me reinstall my bios and graphics card driver, then do a system restore. None of these things worked, and Dell didn't have anything further for me other than that I should reinstall my operating system.

I also checked the core temperature and found it to be a bit high, so I cleaned it out, which took the temperature back down. Nothing changed.

The crashes/freezes still occur when not downloading anything and while not connected to the internet. The crashes do NOT occur, as far as I have observed, in safe mode, though tonight I will leave the computer on in safe mode just to be sure.

I have AVG virus protection software, and it does not detect any viruses. I doubt that viruses are the source of the problem.

I have looked on some other forums, including dell support and nvidia support, and from what I have gathered, nvidia has not created the appropriate graphics card driver for their card for windows 7.

I wanted to check here first with individuals more experienced than myself before trying the following solutions:
1) Since Dell is covering my computer with a warranty for awhile longer, I could talk the support team into sending me a new graphics card brand, since it is technically their responsibility to fix my problem until the warranty runs out.
2) Try reinstalling Windows 7 on my computer, which would wipe out everything I have installed and taking up a lot of time.

Neither of these options are very appealing to me, but I don't really see any other way. I would appreciate some input on this, if anyone has some other things I could try.

I can get the mini-dump thing (the data gotten on startup when the computer recently crashed) the next time this computer crashes, if needed.

Thanks for your time.

How did it go? Did u fix the problem you had with Geforce gt 220`? I have same ptoblem now.... Please help me, its very bad.

sire said:

How did it go? Did u fix the problem you had with Geforce gt 220`? I have same ptoblem now.... Please help me, its very bad.

I called Dell support and they replaced it with the exact same graphics card. Yes, you heard right. My geforce gt 220 was causing my computer to crash and then Dell replaced it with another geforce gt 220. And somehow that solved the problem; I have never had graphics card-related problems since.

Also, you should try installing the latest graphics card driver for it on the nvidia website.

I have updated it from nvidia but it didnt help. the older updste from october 2010 worked better but i really think the ge force 220 series is just not good enough for windows 7. I have had nothing but trouble with it since i bought this pc july2010. I have had every problem as the last person and then some. blue screen of death, crashes and freezing. desktop windows session manager session is one of the startup sevices that was causing freezing on startup but, that could be another prob. freezing when i open wmp or any program really. HP says its software and told me to update nvidia drivers and ram drivers but they didnt help. I lost my reciept for it ond now im kicking myself cos its still under warranty n its still got five months left. I never had half the problems on my hp laptop running XP.

I had the same problem with a dell xps 8000
same card etc.I tried it in another computer that
worked perfectly and it crashed.I have tried all
the drivers from nvidia without success.I took
the old card out of one of my old computers which
was a gigabyte geforce 8400 gs and have had no
problems since. If Del wont replace it in warranty
then you might be better off shopping around for
a replacement.Hope this helps you

the lizard

I've got similar problem its crashing and freezing in every 30 mins please help its very annoying I've got Palit 220GT 1GB ddr3 hdmi/dvi/vga.

Confirming the issue, my card failed as well. HP replaced it with another. However, that failed also. Turns out the replacement card is not compatible with Windows 7 64 bit. I replaced the replacement card with a PNY NVidia Quadro 600 1 GB at my expense. Works great! Am researching small claims court to see if I can recoup my out-of-pocket expenses from HP.

Jim

I am also confirming the issue, my card failed...twice. Recently bought two new gaming laptops, and allowed the kids in the house to inherit the two 'old' DELL XPS Desktops. We are a gaming family, so our vid cards take a good beating. From the very beginning when we bought these systems a few years ago, we had immediate problems with the NVIDIA 220's. First, my husband's went out, and shortly thereafter, mine followed suit. We were still under warranty (90 days from expiration!), and after a few hours of tech support, Dell denial, and screaming, a tech finally showed up and replaced the vid cards. Unfortunately, it was with the same exact type of card. A month later (60 days to go), Vid cards fried again, and this time, Dell finally admitted that they may have a problematic defect on their hands. Another tech came out, replaced the cards (AGAIN), and the Motherboards (the heatsinks burned this time around). They verified again that the power supplies were adequate, cooling shouldn't be an issue, but still they died. Another 30 days goes by... BAM. Again. All fried. So this time, we got an even nicer Dell Tech Manager who fully authorized a complete replacement and upgrade to the newer XPS series model, identical machines. No charge. We received them and set them up with 24 hours left on the Dell warranty.

Fast forward to this week, when we decided to expand our home network to allow the older kids to start gaming with us. I wanted the portability of a laptop, and so we set the kids up with our two identical Dell systems. Unfortunately, the familiar black outs and BSODs started happening on my machine. It only happens when playing WOW or other graphics intensive games. It shuts off the entire system to power down. I ran a bunch of diagnostic tests, and the source is not shocking; the NVIDIA 220 *.sys file is identified in the diagnostics. I have renamed, recopied, re-expanded and reverted drivers, etc. I did a full uninstall of the card itself, cleaned out the tower, checked the seatings, checked the power supply, and completed a clean install of all the drivers in stages, including the latest beta they offer to 'fix' similar issues with BF3. Within 5 to 6 minutes of playing, she shuts down. I have been at this all day long. My 7 year old is playing on it now without problems...I guess Build-a-Bearville doesn't tax the crappy, Win 7 64bit incompatible NVIDIA 220 like World of Warcrack does.

Heading out to buy a couple snappy new graphic cards that can run properly in Win 7 O/S. I know these are dated, but come on...this is not my idea of a nice vacation day.

distribute said:

I called Dell support and they replaced it with the exact same graphics card. Yes, you heard right. My geforce gt 220 was causing my computer to crash and then Dell replaced it with another geforce gt 220. And somehow that solved the problem; I have never had graphics card-related problems since.
Also, you should try installing the latest graphics card driver for it on the nvidia website.

The driver is not directly in cause, but definitely this is a severe compatiblity problem with the embedded firmware of this graphics card and the BIOS. Some PC manufacturers (notably for notebooks) designed their PC with this graphics card that unforunately does NOT have a flashable firmware (VGA BIOS) which incorrectly reports the "WMI" settings for memory contraints.

The GT220 card CANNOT decode memory addresses higher than 4GB. But as it has generally 500MB of VRAM (actually DDR2), it incorrectly declares it to the motherboard BIOS without this constraint for mapping this VRAM correctly below the 4GB barrier. Even if the BIOS does the correct thing, it may then remp your normal RAM (SDRAM on your motherboards) so that some of it will be placed above the 4GB barrier (and so usable by the OS and applications).

Unfortunately, the nVidia video driver forgets to check this constraint, and (notably when using CUDA or with memory intensive application or intensive use of the GPU) the driver incorrectly accepts to perform memory transfers (e.g. images, textures, or CUDA kernels) between the VRAM of the graphic card and some SDRAM on the motherboard (used inside applications for CUDA, or the Windows display compositor or games or OpenGL drivers) in memory blocks above the 4GB barrier: the OS should not be allowed to instruct the nVDIA hardware to perform accelerated DMA transfer between this graphics card with any block of memory above the 4GB threshold.

Normally the GT220M should be able to decode 37 bits of addresses on the bus... but the motherboard was also designed with a buggy north bridge (from nVidia) which allows transfering only 32 bits of addreses (the 5 higher bits, that should allow adressing up to are silently cleared by the nVidia North bridge).

So the fault is inside the design of the north bridge and the PC manufacturer forgot to include on the mother board the correct address filter for the bus connector going to the graphics card, or the manufacturer did not connect the pins: the motherboard was designed only for 32 bits, and could only allow up to 4GB (of memory, but forgot to count the amount needed for mapping the VRAM, or other PCI devices, which at that time of 32 bits was supposed to use a maximum of 4GB).

What is worse, is that these manufacturers designed these boards to support 64bit processors, but forgot to remvoe the hardware limits. Instead, they internally tweaked the Video BIOS and the BIOS in an incompatible way, with a trick that only worked with Windows 7 64 bit; this was made against the specifications of nVidia (which were not clear enough), and Intel, and Microsoft was also not informed of that.

So the only solution for that problem is to REMOVE some physical RAM if you intend to use this graphics card with its bogous Video BIOS, and its bogous north bridge, and a PC BIOS which was also buggy! As well you could not use any other OS version that the one that was shipped with the PC (Windows 7 64 bit, but, not the standard distribution by Microsoft). As well to work in Windows 7, you needed a specific patched version of the nvidia GT2xxx video drivers (and of its companion CUDA driver), which slowed down considerably the operations (internally the patch was for the tweaked nvideo driver to allocate a block of normal RAM below the 4GB threashold, and copy block with the CPU to that window if the OS or application ever passed a block of memory residing about the first 4GB of SDRAM memory, if ever then it attempted to use transfers by DMA. However this tweak made by these PC manufacturers were not correctly reported to Windows for the device manager.

The same hardware problem occured as well with any other OS: as soon as a DMA transfer is initiated with some RAM locatad above the 4GB barrier, in fact the graphics card or the faulty north bridge will start overwriting regions in the 1st gigabyte of memory, including thoese regions used by other devices for their window of buffers (like Ethernet adapters, or the legacy VGA adapter, or the bus controlers): this causes an instant crash of the system and instant shutdown.

You can use memory tests like MEMTEST86+ and you'll find that memory is not at all the issue. The CPU is not also the cause, and the PC BIOS is not the cause... as long as you don't attempt to use DMA with that graphics card, whose Video BIOS incorrectly says that it should decode 37 bits, i.e. up to 128GB, where in fact the combination of the north bridge on the motherboard can only perform safe DMA transfers only inside the 4GB barrier.

And today this severe bug (in the motherboard design, in the PC BIOS that contains no valid fix in the DMI/WMI memory tables, and in the VGA BIOS of the nvidia GT220M graphics card, which also does not detect properly the bug/limit in the north bridge, which was NEVER designed correctly to work with more than 32 bits, even if it was designed for 64 bit processors!) is causing the same crash when botting any other OS (e.g. you cannot safely boot any Linux distrib with a "live CD", as soon as it starts displaying graphics video: there's no fix as well for this undocumented bug of the nvidia north bridge used in some of these motherboards.

Note that replacing the grahic car with another model may not necessaily work, unless their VGA BIOS includes a detection for the fault bridges, to check the memory limits for using them with DMA transfers: som of these alternate VGA BIOS may also simply stop using any DMA (the effect of acceleration is almost lost, notably for transfers of textures, or for working directly with accelerate block moves.

The only solution is then to remove some RAM: if you have such a faulty motherboard (notably from Asus, HP, Lenovo on their notebook), you cannot simply remove the graphics card (as you have no other controler to generate the video on the motherboard or in the CPU with an embedded GPU). In other word, do not install more than 3GB of RAM, even if the PC was designed or preinstalled with 4GB of RAM (and a user guide or promotion saying that you could upgrade to 4GB or sometimes higher! This was a lie from the PC manufacturer and was NEVER tested correctly, except with their own old tweaked version of Windows 7n, which was also incompatible with normal windows updates because this was made against all Microsoft specifications for Windwos!). These manufacturer lied and some of them were not able to find any valid replacement for the GPU board (notably on notebooks with the faulty nVidia chipset). And they did not provide any way to fix the graphics card in the VGA BIOS, simply beause that VGA BIOS was simply NOT flashable (you could not even read the VGABIOS normally, it was designed to be hidden behind the VRAM using an internal "bank switch" hidden in the tweaked display driver)

So if your PC has 4GB or more, remove some of them: use a 2GB SDRAM in one slot, and a 1GB SDRAM in the 2nd slot if you have one (operating in dual channel will not longer work). Or simply don't use any accelerated graphics mode or CUDA: you can only safely use that PC with 4GB only in MSDOS, or old Windows 95/98, or in Linux with a text console only, or with just the standard VGA modes (without any acceleration). This nVidia GPU board (and the nVidia north and south bridges in the chipset of the motherboard) is completely useless if you have more than 3G of SDRAM installed (this configuration becomes compeltely incompatible, causing instant crashes of system at any time, most often with instant emergency shutdown, and the cause is not at all overheating, and not a bug in Windows or Linux).

nVidia did not provide a way to fix the VGA BIOS and did not even provide any workaround in the Windows driver, and did not document the bug so that it could be fixed in a Linux driver (remember that nVidia dose not publish any specification for its bridges and GPU, it is completely closed and opensourced drivers are developed only by reverse engineering). nVidia not only kept its secrets, but it lied to customers, and to PC manufacturers as well and even lied to Microsoft for Windows, by not respecting the industry standards for many published specifications! In fact nVidia instructed PC manufacturers to hide the truth and perform silent returns of products, with some PC manufacturers. Others did not have the support contract from nVidia and chose to be silent because they wanted to keep their contracts for new ranges of nVidia products, in order to have GPUs at low prices, they had volume licences paid or to honour and did not want to su^pport the cost.

In summary: NVIDIA IS DEFECT BY DESIGN, and LIES to every one !