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As supplies age, and the hold-up capacitors become weak, certain critical supply rails may sag under load. GPUs have a considerable demand for surge current just as soon as they are called upon for any complex rendering.
As to BSODs specifically
(revised in Win8 to the FOD Frown Of Death see
below graphic), while hardware can certainly be at fault, better
than 85% of the time it turns out to be a driver issue.
Rather than go through much additional trial-and-error, I'd
personally prefer to test, not guess. To that end, a free diagnostic, called
WhoCrashed, may be able to answer the
question as to the precise culprit. Note that on first use
WhoCrashed will download either the 32 or 64 bit Debugging Tools
for Windows (WinDbg) Package from MS, which it uses to collect
and extract data for analysis.
I assume you already looked into
Win32K.sys, and got nowhere?
Sometimes the driver indicated on the BSOD is just where the
process hung and not the root cause. If nothing else, take a look at the
STOP
message troubleshooting list.
Two of the more common
drivers known to be problematic, often causing a blue screen, are
TCPIP.sys
and/or Intel's
netw5v32.sys, which is part of many WiFi driver packages.
There is also the possibility of
HAL
errors. The HAL sometimes needs
rebuilding after replacing certain critical hardware, like the
MoBo, CPU, GPU/graphics card, or upgrading certain drivers, like
those for the GPU, network card/on-board network chipset, or the MoBo
itself. Rebuilding the HAL requires, at minimum, a repair
reinstall, sometimes called a "refresh" reinstall, which should retain most of your settings.
Two questions:
1. Does
the machine behave in Safe Mode? Safe Mode loads
only the compatibility drivers, which doesn't run the video
in a stressful fashion. So that can significantly
narrow things down.
2.
Have you tried running with a "live" Linux CD. If it behaves
running a live Linux distro, that pretty much rules out
hardware. (You might give either
Knoppix, or the KDE-based
BackTrack
a try).
MS "feels your pain" with
new Win8 Frown Of Death. |
|
...And so should Nvidia
(feel our pain ;-)
|
One of the more typical
hardware-related problems that can cause a blue screen error is
overheating of the CPU, GPU, memory sticks, and sometimes even the
Northbridge. For this reason, do you have some type of temp' monitor installed? Something like the free
HWMonitor?
(It's from the same folks as CPU-Z). Click
on the "Version History" link for the available downloads.
If you had an Nvidia GPU, I'd point you to this
Inquirer
article, detailing the chip substrate
overheating problem they had, as things typically looked just like your
video, prior to crashing altogether. There are still a lot
of those bad GPUs floating around.
I think that about covers it for the moment. <grin>
EDITED: 30 Oct 2011 08:51 by COMTRONBOB