BSOD crashes, need help finding cause

[Mildan]

He guys..

So my computer has been acting out for quite some time now (nearing 2 months) where it would suddenly turn off while I was gaming. After trying a ton of stuff it eventually went away after I reinstalled windows but game back again after 2 weeks. The error was that it just suddenly stopped, turned all screens off and rebooted. No crash logs were created during that. I ran a CPU and GPU stress test simultaneously during that time to check if it was overheating, but both were fine, which in turn means to me that the PSU is also fine. The error happens only when I am gaming, so I am thinking it's driver specific somehow.

In the last few days however, it has started actually BSOD'ing me, which I was actually stoked to see because that means log files! So I ran a WhoCrashed on it and got the results of this are found here. Copy of the .DMP files can be found here.

All of the errors seem to indicate a software driver bug, but I am at a loss.. I think that I have updated all of my drivers and I just don't know any more. I've updated the BIOS, the BIOS drivers, GPU, Sound, Headset, anything that I can think of... Anyone know where I go from here?

I would just like to point out that bugchecking this is a pain in the ass, because the computer can sometimes go hours upon hours at a time with no problem at all, and then suddenly just BSOD/Random restart.

Computer Specs:
OS - Windows 10 Education 64-bit
Motherboard - MSI Z97 Gaming 5
CPU - Intel i7 4790K 8mb
GPU - Evga GeForce GTX 780 Ti
PSU - Inter Tech Energon 750W
RAM - Kingston HyperX Predator 2x 4GB
SSD - Samsung 840 Evo 500gb

Everything about this computer has been working fine for 2½ years, except for the motherboard, which was replaced this summer because the last one stopped working. The issue did not appear until 3-4 months after so not sure if it is related.

 

[GameFreak01048]

Did you recently update your Nvidia drivers? Try rolling back an update or two and hopefully the problem will go away. Lots of people have been complaining, myself included, about the quality of the recent driver updates from Nvidia, they have been causing more problems than actually fixing.

 

[Mildan]

I updated them recently to keep them up to date, but I have tried running with a previous driver for a long time (373.06) but I was still getting the random restarts then. Do you think I should roll it back because it throws a BSOD now?

 

[GameFreak01048]

Hmm it's worth a shot, if not have you made sure that even your BIOS is up to date? It might also be worth checking everything to see if it is all up to date just to be sure that an out of date driver is not causing this issue.

 

[Mildan]

Did you recently update your Nvidia drivers? Try rolling back an update or two and hopefully the problem will go away. Lots of people have been complaining, myself included, about the quality of the recent driver updates from Nvidia, they have been causing more problems than actually fixing.

Hmm it's worth a shot, if not have you made sure that even your BIOS is up to date? It might also be worth checking everything to see if it is all up to date just to be sure that an out of date driver is not causing this issue.

Yes my BIOS and my motherboard drivers (from here) are up to date.

How would I go about checking if everything else is up to date? I've looked through everything I can think of but it's just by very selectively looking at one of my devices at a time (and Device Manager is helpless at finding new drivers...)

 

[GameFreak01048]

It must be related to another driver then, what if you take out your GPU completely and uninstall everything to do with Nvidia to see if you can keep the system on and running through multiple boots?

 

[Mildan]

It must be related to another driver then, what if you take out your GPU completely and uninstall everything to do with Nvidia to see if you can keep the system on and running through multiple boots?

I don't think it would cause any issues because as I stated in the original post the crash only happens when I play games (and usually the more intensive ones like Witcher 3, GTA 5, WoW, etc.), and it can even play those games for several hours at a time without fault until suddenly, random restart (now BSOD).

 

[GameFreak01048]

We'll wait and see what others think about this issue, I am not sure what steps to take from here unfortunately.

 

[Mildan]

We'll wait and see what others think about this issue, I am not sure what steps to take from here unfortunately.

Alright, thanks for your help anyways!

 

[GameFreak01048]

No problem, my only last suggestion would be to try and boot with only one RAM stick in each time, could be memory failure even, but worst case scenario it must be a software fault, can you boot into safe mode fine? If you can then it's software based not hardware, try leaving your PC on for a couple hours in safe mode a few times and see what happens

 

[Mildan]

No problem, my only last suggestion would be to try and boot with only one RAM stick in each time, could be memory failure even, but worst case scenario it must be a software fault, can you boot into safe mode fine? If you can then it's software based not hardware, try leaving your PC on for a couple hours in safe mode a few times and see what happens

I can boot into safe mode and normal mode just fine. I even ran a little bit of a memtest86 which didn't show any errors (but only made it to parse 2/4 before I found WhoCrashed)..

 

[GameFreak01048]

So in safe mode it's completely fine? This definitely suggests a software fault somewhere...
What third party programs do you have installed? Try to uninstall some things and see if it helps you out

 

[Mildan]

So in safe mode it's completely fine? This definitely suggests a software fault somewhere...
What third party programs do you have installed? Try to uninstall some things and see if it helps you out

Nothing that would suggest these kinds of errors I think.. I'm going to be running a complete memtest86 for the next couple of hours to see if my ram is actually fucking me without my consent...

 

[Mildan]

How many parses of memtest86 would be sure to say that the ram is fine? I'm currently on my 3rd parse after 2 hours and 0 errors have been found. Also does anyone else have some new things to try?

 

[Mildan]

So I actually found something strange when I read up about what can happen if memtest86 succeeds and then what to look for. It turns out that apparently you check for the DRAM frequency, so I had to look up what it said when I bought it. But what I bought says I had 16 GB of RAM so that looked very odd. Dxdiag was telling me I had 8 GB. So I went into the BIOS and found that it could not recognize one of the RAM slots, so I tried shuffling them about and I apparently have a dead RAM card, which probably caused a bunch of problems by still being in the motherboard. This, along with the fact that it says that it is a "kit of 2", so the DRAM frequency is much lower (1333 MHz (667 MHz) compared to the 2400 MHz that it should have been) and that has probably been the cause of my rather spontaneous shutdowns.

Thankfully it is Black Friday soon, so I will try and get some new RAM cards for my computer, which I hope will fix this annoying error.

PS: How do I set this to (partially-) solved?

 

[GameFreak01048]

Unfortunately It's either solved or not solved

In this case however....how odd. What I would do is only use one RAM stick and enable an XMP profile, this will allow your RAM to run at it's advertised speed.

At least it is Black Friday

 

[Mildan]

Unfortunately It's either solved or not solved

In this case however....how odd. What I would do is only use one RAM stick and enable an XMP profile, this will allow your RAM to run at it's advertised speed.

At least it is Black Friday

Heh yeah, it's kinda weird. I fished up some old RAM I had and it fixed the BSOD problem, but my random shutdowns is back.. Don't even know where to begin to tackle that one again