Solved BSOD playing TF2; other video-related crashing.

[Requimatic]

Since last week some time, I'd been experiencing various crashes while playing Team Fortress 2. It only randomly crashed twice last week, which I didn't think anything of, but the past few days has been an on-going battle.

Last night, video apparently stopped being rendered while I was playing. Rather than crashing, I still had audio from the game.. I could still move and hear my character moving.. but I had no video. All I could see was what was behind the game, ie: firefox, and another program. So I end-tasked the game to try and search for a possible cause and solution in firefox, only to discover that the three tabs I had open weren't being rendered either. They were just blank, white pages, and firefox had to be end-tasked. It continued to do this, and I was essentially unable to use firefox.

I tried running Minecraft, and had a blank, white window appear rather than the launcher login screen that normally appeared. I restarted, and everything was fine. Because I was using an older video driver, I updated to the latest version available.. and it didn't help. I rolled them back to a much older version, and that didn't help either. I'm currently using the original version I had installed, which I had no problems out of until this random crashing started.

Today, however, during a session of TF2, I actually had a BSOD. I didn't catch everything from the BSOD, but the event viewer reads:

The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck.  The bugcheck was: 0x00000109 (0xa3a039d89b9b8899, 0xb3b7465eee1857ef, 0xfffff80002f3db76, 0x0000000000000001). A dump was saved in: C:\Windows\MEMORY.DMP. Report Id: 041914-13244-01.

All google searching makes it sound like one of three things:

1. Driver causing the problem.
2. Hardware causing the problem. (either this video card, or possibly memory. maybe even something else.)

So I'm at a loss as what to do. Since I've frequented these forums in the past, I already had the SF Diagnostic Tool, and went ahead and created a file to upload with this post.

Anyway, thanks in advance. I'm not sure exactly what's going on, but it's looking like potentially the video card, since this seems to happen only when gaming. If that's the case, I can go ahead and start an RMA since this thing has a lifetime warranty (thanks, EVGA!). The bad part is, I ship for basic military training on the 13th of May, so unless I shipped it off for an RMA Monday, I may not be here when the new card arrives, haha. (Note that this would be the second RMA on this video card I've had to do. The first RMA was with the original card I'd purchased; I'm currently using one EVGA sent me from that RMA.)

Edit: I contemplated running Driver Verifier after a few google searches, and running in to a similar thread on these forums, but I figured I'd post my SF Tool zip file first and see what you guys think.

Edit2: Last night some time, before I was shutting this down for the night, I started having errors with GDI32.dll, some "no entry point found" for what looked like a "draw rect" function. I have no idea what caused it, it just happened randomly and I was unable to open any new programs because of it. Restarting fixed that, but.. still a bad sign.

Edit3: After talking with a friend of mine, he seems to think it's either this hard drive, or the RAM. Apparently anything visual uses GDI, so for the Rectangle function to not be working properly is either the hard drive reading the file incorrectly, or the DLL being corrupted in the RAM. I've had to RMA this hard drive before, and one of my three stick of RAM, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was either.

 

[Gandalf]

Thread marked as Solved.