Driver issues Blue screen - What could it be?

mckevstah

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May 27, 2013
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My friend recently bought a gaming desktop PC with an AMD 480.
His drivers were up to date but when he plays Overwatch, his screen would go black and it would crash. We looked around and many people said it was the most recent driver. You'll have to go back a few.

So we did and seemed to fix that issue. However now when we play Dead by Daylight and other games, he gets a blue screen error. Something about his driver. So we got it back to the current one but the issue still persists. We've done lots of back and forth and we just can;t figure out what is causing his constant crashes.

Any ideas?

(his is the error code) - "Stop code: DRIVER IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL
What failed: atikmdag.sys"
 
this error code just means that a driver tried to get data from memory and the data was not there. When this happens normally the windows memory manager would run and get the data from virtual memory (pagefile.sys)
in this case the driver has priority over the windows memory manager so the windows memory manager can not be run. This causes the system to deadlock and then bugcheck.

often the memory address the driver attempted to access is bogus anyway due to memory corruption, overheating, bad power to the graphics card or just bugs in the drivers or driver conflicts between your sound card on your motherboard and the sound support in your GPU.

Generally, you would update the BIOS, then go to your motherboard vendor and update your device drivers. Most motherboards had replacement windows 10 audio drivers that were released after windows 10 shipped.

since the named driver is a graphic driver you would want to update that also from the graphics vendor or the motherboard vendor if they have a update.

it is also very common to get this error with overclocking drivers installed. I would remove the GPU and CPU overclocking until you resolve this problem.
BIOS updated can also fix bugs and timing problems that can be related to this problem.
 

mckevstah

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May 27, 2013
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Thanks for your response. We have installed the latest GPU and Mobo drivers. He also does not ave any overclocks.
What else could I try?