Recurring crashes that occur while playing games such as: CSS, L4D, SC

[Aleks Borough]

Basically while playing games like CSS or SC2 my computer while crash and loop the last sound that was playing. Also the screen will generally go black with brown or green lines running vertically down the monitor.

I had this issue before when I had windows vista but I upgraded to windows 7 last year and thought the problem was gone unfortunately the upgraded did not fix the problem. I don't think the problem is one with my computer not being able to run these games since I can run games like Skyrim on high graphics settings fine for hours.

If possible I would very much appreciate it if someone explained how to find and extract kernel dumps or small dump files that I could post here for someone to help me out with.

Just to clarify I am not getting a BSOD, my computer just freezes or crashes if you will. Because of this I cannot find any dump files in %SystemRoot%\MEMORY.DMP even when I search for it with the run application.

 

[Vir Gnarus]

Can you turn on Driver Verifier? That may induce the BSODs we need to produce crashdumps for info, and will help us discern if it's a hardware issue or not. If turning on DV and restarting into Windows does not cause a BSOD, then try playing one of the offending games with DV active and see if it'll induce a BSOD. You may need to wait a minute during a system hang for it to turn into a BSOD, but if it doesn't after 3 minutes, then it won't trigger a BSOD and you can do a hard reset.

 

[Aleks Borough]

Alright so I have been running Driver Verifier and on the first boot up there were no crashes but upon booting up my computer a few hours later it froze my computer while I was browsing the internet. It was the same freeze/ crash that I mentioned in the title. The screen freezes and just loops the last sound until I do a hard rest. I noticed that the driver verifier did make games like css and videos lag a little bit. But I still cant get the BSOD, each time it froze I waited for a good 4 to 5 minutes just to be safe but my comp just stays frozen and loops the last sound like before. I am going to run the driver verifier a little more on some other games to see if I can get it to BSOD.

 

[Vir Gnarus]

Hmm, if it's still freezing, there's a good chance we're dealing with a hardware problem. I had that suspicion previously, but I was hoping a minidump or two can give us hints on what may be causing it. Still, it may be best to perform the following:

• Update Drivers (especially graphics card and mobo component drivers)
• Update BIOS
• Update SSD Firmware (if you have an SSD)
• Uninstall all bloatware (software that came with Dell)

Don't disregard the last part. As irrelevant it may sound, I've actually seen Dell software make an utter wreck of a PC's stability, regardless how insignificant it may appear.

If symptoms persist after all of this and do not change, then we'll need to go through testing hardware. I'd recommend doing a 7+ pass Memtest and then follow up with an overnight run of Prime95 on Torture Test on Large FFT settings. Regardless of the results of Prime95 - whether system crashes, test fails, or test continues successfully in the morning - you'll want to run another Prime95 overnight but on Blend settings. Each stresses different parts of the system. Make sure your system's cooling is sufficient for this run, as it will stress your CPU to max. Check temps for 30min-1hour runtime, and if it's still in stable condition, you can do a full run.

While this may be your graphics card bugging out, without moving the graphics card to another system to test, one cannot tell. There are no sufficient graphics card testing utilities available.

 

[Aleks Borough]

Alright I will test these setting and get back to you, I just got back into school though so it will probably take me a few extra days to test as I am just settling back in. On a side note I have ran in the past a 7+ pass Memtest and it came out fine. I'm assuming that the 7+ Memtest is just a 7 hour test of my RAMM in which case I have ran it. I will get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks again for all the help.

 

[Vir Gnarus]

If that's the case, you can disregard the Memtest (wouldn't hurt to try again tho) and go for the Prime95 stuff. Often times people just do one pass with Memtest and write it off as OK afterwards when it really needs plenty more. I was just making sure of that.