Games freezing, me despairing.

[Shane]

I have had this problem for some time now and nothing has worked. Now I've got myself a new system except for my old 9800gt and the crashes still occur making it obvious that the gpu is the culprit.

The crashes occur usually after the intro video for a particular game ends and the menu screen comes up. Sometimes they occur after a few seconds of gameplay. They involve distortion of the game screen while the sound may keep coming out as normal. The screen freeze requires a system reboot but sometimes Ctrl-Alt-Deling and shutting down the process works too, if I'm lucky. This doesn't occur with all games and sometimes it occurs after minutes or even hours of gameplay.

Here's a list of games that I've experienced this crashing on:

Right on the menu screen:
Dishonored

After loading the game:
The Walking Dead Episode 3 (the first two episodes worked fine)
Skyrim (Skyrim worked fine a few months back)
Saints Row 2

A while after playing the game:
Dark Souls (crashes are rare but they occur sometimes while alt-tabing or during a cutscene)
Battlefield 3

I doubt it's because the game is demanding because many heavier games work fine. It can't be the temperature either because I tested Dishonored by running the game after keeping the pc switched off for a while.

My system specs: Corsair 650 TX V2 psu, 2500k, Windows 7 64bit(the crashes occur on the 32bit version too), Seagate 1TB HDD, 9800gt 512mb

[Sparkasaurusmex]

Does your computer make lots of noises?

Are you using updated drivers for that 9800gt? Are all those games meant to run on 512 video ram?

[Shane]

Does your computer make lots of noises?
Any noise only comes from the fans.

Are you using updated drivers for that 9800gt? Are all those games meant to run on 512 video ram?
Yes and yes, the gpu vram meets the minimum requirements for all of these games. Anyway, running out of vram causes stuttering not hard crashes, right?

[QuantaCat]

could be that its just fried. Basically, as soon as the GPU takes over.

[Shane]

A lot of games work fine though, Planetside 2, Hawken, Dota 2, Blood Money, Mark of the Ninja, Far Cry are some of the recent games I played that ran decently.

[Sakkura]

Try checking its temperature while running a game or a stress test/benchmark like furmark. Stop if it gets really hot (above 80-85C).

[Sparkasaurusmex]

shot in the dark- Have you been updating drivers without really cleaning up the registry?

[mashakos]

Does the crash look like this?



or this?




or this?

[Bobtree]

Do you have any software running that adds overlays to games? These can conflict and crash if you have more than one. Examples include Xfire, FRAPS, D3Doverrider, any post process injectors, GPU stats programs like EVGA Precision, or anything similar that draws over a fullscreen game. I don't know if the Steam in-game overlay has similar issues.

The Xfire option "Enable Xfire In-Game" does not stay disabled when Xfire restarts (though toggling it on and off works until a shutdown), so I routinely disable it manually for every game. It will causes crashes with D3Doverrider or the SweetFX injector.

[Shane]

Does the crash look like this?



or this?

Yes! IIRC, a while back similar crashes occured while browsing Firefox until I turned Hardware Acceleration off.

Do you have any software running that adds overlays to games? These can conflict and crash if you have more than one. Examples include Xfire, FRAPS, D3Doverrider, any post process injectors, GPU stats programs like EVGA Precision, or anything similar that draws over a fullscreen game. I don't know if the Steam in-game overlay has similar issues.

No, the only extra process running while I play games is Avast.

[mashakos]

Yes! IIRC, a while back similar crashes occured while browsing Firefox until I turned Hardware Acceleration off.

too bad, you need a new gfx card. You can always try this:
http://www.gpureview.com/how-to-fix-...ticle-798.html

[Sparkasaurusmex]

Haha interesting! The opposite has worked for hard drives for me. Twice I've successfully brought back apparently dead hard drives by putting them in the freezer. They worked long enough to back up.

[Finicky]

Haha interesting! The opposite has worked for hard drives for me. Twice I've successfully brought back apparently dead hard drives by putting them in the freezer. They worked long enough to back up.

Wouldn't the condensation from the freezer be enough to kill off the electronics in the drive...

[Shane]

too bad, you need a new gfx card. You can always try this:
http://www.gpureview.com/how-to-fix-...ticle-798.html

Oh man, that sucks. Still, I was planning to get a gpu in Jan/Feb anyway.