BSOD playing youtube or any online video streams error hal.dll+12a3b

[bhua21]

Hi I just built my computer about a month and a half ago and made sure my hardware was secured tightly and properly onto the mother board. I updated all of the drivers for the PC to the best of my knowledge due to receiving BSOD in the beginning partly because the drivers were not up to date. After the driver updates everything is working great from playing games and the usual day to day use of the PC. But when I started streaming two windows of online videos from either youtube or any other video site, thats when it started to give me the BSOD. But it was sporadic and not crashing with every single video playback. It would crash on some videos and not on others. I did some research and found a software called bluescreenview which captures the BSOD codes and this was what I found: hal.dll+12a3b. I don't understand what this code means because based on my research it could be multiple factors. Please help me. Thank you.

- OS: Windows 7 64bit
- OS was full retail
- Age of the system is about two months old now.
- Age of the OS installation is about two months old.

Other hardware specs:
CPU: Intel i5-2500K @ 3.30GHz
8 Gigs of RAM

 

[Vir Gnarus]

All of them are the HAL for Windows reporting that your CPU has detected an internal failure. Given the strong consistency for these errors (they're all identical with the same cpu cache bank referenced), I'm afraid your CPU has most likely kicked the bucket.

Before you proceed on anything, if you have your system overclocked in any way, shape or fashion, reset to factory defaults. It's good sense that despite previous success with overclocking, if a system starts getting unstable, the first thing one should blame is the overclocking and reset as a result. Even if it isn't, it can easily be returned to its previous settings.

Anyways, I have sometimes seen software bugs arise that would cause this, and even once I seen a video card cause this problem (how, I have absolutely no clue). First of all, if you have any software that came with your motherboard besides the drivers, uninstall them. I've found they are very buggy as well as gimmicky, and strangely they have usually caused WHEA errors like this, making it appear the hardware is at fault. Second, update your BIOS if you haven't already, as that can potentially cause this. Lastly, run MemtestCL on your video card. Note that since you have an ATI card, you'll need to download and install the ATI APP SDK first, as it requires OpenCL.

Those should cover any potential edge cases that could create these WHEA errors. However, my opinion would be that this is certain hardware (CPU). The causes mentioned previously have the potential to create WHEA errors, but honestly, the specific WHEA error reported here is micro-architectural failure, which is most certainly the CPU's prob.