BSOD (initially playing BF3) error 0x0000001E and 0x000000D1

[DingDingDao]

Hi all,

I got a BSOD this morning playing BF3. Restarted and got it again--now it's happened another 2-3 times from the desktop. I've attached the data to this post. Suggestions/comments? Thanks in advance.

This is on Win7 Home Premium x64.

 

[Maguscreed]

No doubt the ati driver has gone bonkers on you.
I've actually been seeing this a bit from bf3 players lately, it may be due to a problem in the game or the driver I don't really know. Anyhow typically just removing and reinstalling stabilizes it again

...the driver... not the game.

 

[DingDingDao]

Thanks for the quick reply. Is it enough to update the driver or do you think I should do a complete uninstall/reinstall of Catalyst?

 

[Maguscreed]

If you are familiar with driver sweeper it's actually the most thorough way. (display drivers only)
If not I only suggest using it after the simpler method fails.

 

[DingDingDao]

Thanks for the help. I updated the drivers through the typical method. Seems fairly stable so far--I'll keep driver sweeper in mind.

 

[Maguscreed]

Alright, also keep in mind they are STILL ironing out bf3 they tried to pull off so much with the new engine I'm not terribly surprised. Things are getting better though and they are still planning patches so it should get even better still as time goes on.

 

[DingDingDao]

So it was pretty stable for a while, but it started BSODing again. At this point it's so unstable that I can't boot to the desktop for more than about 3 minutes at a time. I've tried F8-last known config, F8-safe mode and nothing is working. I'm also getting new error codes: C000021a, 0x00000000, and 0x0000007E. Halp

 

[Maguscreed]

If you can't even boot safe mode it's possible you are looking at actual hardware damage here.
Given the debug results I would look at the graphics card first.

 

[DingDingDao]

Okay, I guess I'll start by swapping the graphics card to the OEM card to see if that solves any issues. Thanks--

 

[DingDingDao]

Maguscreed, any chance it's the RAM? I'm wondering if I should try a memtest...

 

[DingDingDao]

Update: I swapped out the video card to my old 6450 and I also swapped out my ram to the OEM sticks (it's a Dell 7100), on the recommendation of a friend who suggested that voltage issues with performance RAM might be the culprit. It booted stably to Win7, I uninstalled everything ATI-related (Catalyst, drivers, etc etc) and shutdown normally.

I then swapped the 6450 back to the newer 6950 and booted the system up and installed Catalyst 12.3 clean, and everything appears to be stable at this point.

My question at this point is: can voltage issues (undervolting or overvolting) with RAM lead to corruption of graphics drivers? Dell's BIOS is pretty much locked, so I can't manually control RAM voltages, so I'm sticking with the 8GB of OEM RAM at this point until I solve this issue.

Thanks all--

 

[Maguscreed]

Yes, voltage can affect performance, usually I go to the manufacturer's website and set the voltage manually in the bios based on their spec sheet. I don't think the dell bios allows for that though.

 

[DingDingDao]

Yeah, it doesn't, unfortunately. I have the OEM sticks in the computer, along with the new vid card and things seem to be reasonably stable (16 hours uptime at this point). Thanks for the input.