Bluescreen woes - possibly 8800gt related

[silenthit101]

Hi, I'm new to this forum so please feel free to redirect me if this post isn't in the right area.

The Problem:

Blue Screen crash that dumps before resetting - according to the minidump its a WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR, but it doesn't state which piece of hardware it is.

This crash only ever occurs when playing games, and is seemingly random, as it happens as often playing WoW as it does when playing Crysis or other graphically intensive games. Sometimes it will occur after 10 minutes, other times it might be a few hours.

What I've done so far:

I've run heatcheck programs such as speedfan to make sure I wasn't overheating, and I wasn't. I've run memtest+ to check for RAM errors, similarly i've run BurnIn test to stress test the CPU and Video card. I've also gone through the usual rigmarole of updating all of my drivers etcs, but nothing has made any difference. I've put this post in the Video card section because it seems logical to assume that its video card related due to it only happening when gaming.

My Setup:

Intel E8500 @ 3.16 ghz
2x2GB Ram
Foxconn Nforce 680i mobo
Gigabyte 8800gt 512mb
Vista Home Premium 64bit SP1

I built this PC myself not 2 months ago, and aside from having a problem with the 4GB of RAM at the very beginning, it has performed to my expectations bar this persistent and frankly frustrating problem. Any insights or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

 

[roadrunner197069]

What PSU do you have. It might be the culprit.

 

[silenthit101]

sorry, I forgot to mention that. I have a Enlight 650W ATX 2.2

 

[copasetic]

Well I googled the error a bit, it's pretty generic so it could be a lot of things. PCI/-E slots are a common cause of it, mostly when the motherboard couldn't communicate with a device there. So I would narrow it down to either the motherboard (unlikely), the video card or the power supply not doing its job properly. If the power supply hiccups or doesn't supply a good constant stream of power to the video card then the card might not be able to respond to the motherboard, which raises this error. Here's a snip from a page I found:

The root cause could be any one or more of the following: a device
driver is misprogramming hardware, thus hanging the bus; a device is not
in a state such that it can properly respond to accesses (frequently the
device is found to be in a low power state); or possibly this is case
where the HT timeout threshold is too sensitive.

http://www.osronline.com/showthread.cfm?link=104397

Check the dump file and post the arguments, like here:

Arguments:
Arg1: 00000000, MCA_ASSERT
Arg2: 85045028, Address of WHEA_ERROR_RECORD structure
Arg3: b2000000, High 32 bits of MCi_STATUS MSR for the MCA bank that had
the error

 

[silenthit101]

Ok, cheers for the suggestions. Here are the arguments:

Arguments:
Arg1: 0000000000000000, MCA_ASSERT
Arg2: fffffa8009785c6e, Address of WHEA_ERROR_RECORD structure
Arg3: 00000000b6200013, High 32 bits of MCi_STATUS MSR for the MCA bank that had
the error
Arg4: 0000000000080a01, Low 32 bits of MCi_STATUS MSR for the MCA bank that had
the error

 

[copasetic]

Well that didn't help as much as I thought it might

Before you replace any hardware make sure it's not a software issue,

- update every driver you can think of, including onboard audio drivers (Realtek for ex.) and anything else related to the motherboard

- update the BIOS if there's one available

- uninstall any Norton programs if you have any on there, you wouldn't believe how many errors get traced back to that garbage

- kill everything running in the background that doesn't need to be there and see if the error still occurs

Also make a post at the vistax64 forums with as much information as you can (like the dump file), there's people there who know a lot more about this stuff than I do.

Ironically MS came up with this WHEA system to make it easier to trace errors, but you still need a PhD to sift through it