BSOD after gaming. What is the problem?

[Hashass1n]

Problem:

Having BSOD and reboots after I play a HighEnd game like Crysis or Gears of War. Also get some freezes (have to manually reboot) when I play CounterStrike or Day of Defeat and I quit directly from console to desktop.

My specs:

Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H, AMD690g Chipset
DualCore AMD Athlon 64 X2 +4400@2305
1GB DDR2 800 Patriot x2/512
ATI Radeon HD 2600xt 256mb
Thermaltake PurePower ATX 12v 2.0 460w

OS:

Windows XP Professional SP2 (up to date)

Drivers:
All up to date

Suggestions and possible problems:

From what I could read from the Minidumps it has something to do with frames and directdraw? Graphic card might be the issue, but, what specific issue could it be?

Please help me...i've been having this for a while now

BTW, i have made a memtest, it passed, and i ran it over 11 times, overnight while i slept.

 

[raybay]

Patriot memory is often second or third tier, with unreliable timings. You might want to try some borrowed top quality memory, that is not Value Ram. Something like Kingston, Crucial/Micron, Infineon, OCZ, Corsair... in matched sets.
Your video card also may be suspect. Can you borrow another to test?

 

[Hashass1n]

To be quite frank, i've sent this same PC to a hardware repair shop and they tested the hardware on different pc's without any conflict.
I really don't know what could be going wrong. The memtest passed wonderfully and i really don't have issues with gaming, it's just when i quit to desktop that it BSOD'd or freezes.

Is there a possibility to overwrite or exchange win32k.sys with another win32k.sys from another machine? Would that harm my whole installation?

Is there a possibility that the monitor refresh rates aren't that good and the switches between resolutions may cause these crashes?

I need theories so i can check this out. I'm quite positive that the hardware is working fine.

 

[Rage_3K_Moiz]

Since it causes a BSOD on exiting, I'd say it's an issue with the card switching from 3D mode to 2D mode. That'd most likely be a problem with the drivers. Are you running Catalyst 7.11? For Crysis, there's a driver hotfix available, so try installing that too.

 

[Hashass1n]

Yeah i think that might be the issue Rage.

Still, i'm using catalyst 7.10 (should be updating now to 7.11).

Thing is, this doesn't only happen with crysis, it happened to me with Gears of War and my PC freezes sometimes when i exit CS or DOD to desktop...

But, yeah, my guess it is something about the 3d to 2d resolution changes...but..how can i fix that? : /

Clean win reinstall?


I have a win32k.sys from my friend...is it safe to overwrite my own win32k.sys with his??
Will it fix my problem?

 

[be_patient]

Not sure about the win32k question...

but when i had trouble with my graphics card i downgraded some of my drivers to something i knew to be reliable and then tested it. (I had downgraded from 163.75 all the way down to 84.21, i was running an nvidia 7900GT)

Now obviously you wont be able to test it on crysis, but CS should still be right to play on older drivers. If it is fine with CS you now know that most likely it is a driver error, a problem with the new drivers. Otherwise... at least you have eliminated one possibility.

Good luck