BSOD's galore! (Win7 SP1, 0x7e, 0xd)

[pbrad08]

So...I got an MSI GTX560Ti-HAWK about 3 weeks ago, and ever since using it in games, I get BSOD's about an hour into the game.

The card is clocked STOCK at 950Mhz core/1900Mhz memory and overvolted (also stock).

Are my minidump reports pointing to a memory issue within my gpu? Or is it pointing to something else?

I'm running nvidia drivers 167.60; only because I had WORSE results(constant BSOD's upon windows loading) with the latest 280.26 drivers.

Appreciate the help!

 

[Route44]

When I first read your post I was thinking graphics drivers and in fact even though nothing definitive was cited in your first two dumps as the cause the error codes in both was the same 0x3B which are usually caused by fauloty video drivers.

But on the ensuing reads (I only looked at your five most recent other definitive things were cited.

One cited the driver sptd.sys as the cause and this belongs to Daemon Tools. We have seen many, many people have issues with this driver over the years.

Another one cited arthrx.sys which is a wireless LAN driver as the cause of your issues.

But the most significant one is the 0xA error that specifically cited corrupted memory as the issue. This is the one we want to diagnose first because bad RAM will have a system throw out all kinds of error codes and all kinds of causes while bad memory is really the culprit.

Therefore you’ll need to run Memtest on your RAM.

1. Go to www.memtest.org and download the latest ISO version which is 4.20. It is free and perfectly safe.

2. Burn ISO to a CD.

3. Place CD in your drive and reboot with CD in drive. (You might have to place your drive as first bootable in your BIOS) The test will take over.


There is a Tutorial: How to use Memtest in our Guides and Tutorials forum; follow the instructions. There is a newer version than what is listed; use the newer. If you need to see what the Memtest screen looks like go to reply #21. The third screen is the Memtest screen.

Step1 - Let it run for a LONG time. The rule is a minimum of 7 Passes (not hours; this test is not measured by hours); the more Passes after 7 so much the better. The only exception is if you start getting errors before 7 Passes then you can skip to Step 2.

There are 8 individual tests per Pass. Many people will start this test before going to bed and check it the next day.

If you have errors you have corrupted memory and it needs to be replaced.

Step 2 – Because of errors you need to run this test per stick of RAM. Take out one and run the test. Then take that one out and put the other in and run the test. If you start getting errors before 7 Passes you know that stick is corrupted and you don’t need to run the test any further on that stick.


* Get back to us with the results.

 

[pbrad08]

Wow! Thank you for the thorough response!

So I went ahead and took the liberty of doing a memtest like you said; and to my surprise this is what I got:

That was on the FIRST test I ran. So I thought "ok, no biggie, maybe It just messed up on the first run" because when I checked the test, I noticed my ram had locked-up(I have crucial ballistix tracer, the LEDs on the ram indicate activity) and my PC had essentially "crashed" because memtest was completely un-responsive,

So, I did a second pass. Same thing, near the end of that 1st pass I had similar red blocks populating my screen. I didn't take a picture of this because at this point I figured it was definitive: my RAM has gone bad.

All the random BSOD's i have been getting now make sense. Since my RAM is corrupted, I figured (like the post above me did) that drivers were calling corrupted RAM pages, error'ing out because of the bad RAM, then BSOD'ing.

So I'll just go ahead and figure my problem has been solved; being corrupted RAM my windows will BSOD like no other until I replace the stick(s). Is this a valid assumption to make?