Hi guys, I am a long time bit-tech lurker and respect the community here so decided I would try these forums for a solution first. I have just put together a new system. It works very well except for what I built it to do . . . play games! I have been testing with UT3 and company of heroes. The amount of time I play before a crash seems to be a about fifteen minutes to an hour and a half. The crash is always a crash to the desktop - "UT3.exe has stopped working/RelicCOH.exe has stopped working" sometimes (which is irritating) accompanied by a message saying my display driver has stopped working and has recovered. Once however I got a BSOD listing nvstor64 as the culprit of the crash. I wish I could get this sorted so I could move on to overclocking! My system specs are as followed: Intel Q6600 @ stock 2.4 cooled with Themalright IXF-14 (without secondary backplate) cooled by 120mm redwing fan 8gb Corsair DDR2 DHX rate 4-4-4-12 Asus P5N-D nforce 750i (using rev 0402 BIOS update from 0203) 1 x Samsung spinpoint F1 750gb ( I sorted the problem with this crashing by turning off NCQ) 2x ECS Elitegroup 8800GTs cooled by accerlo s1 heatsinks + my own frakenstien cooling setup Auzentech x-fi prelude Antec Quattro 850 psu Windows Vista 64 with SP1 Currently using nforce 15.08 + forceware 169.22 Steps I have taken to remedy the situation so far: 1) OK, so first thing I tried was drivers. I have tried nforce 18.02 and forceware 174.74 and 169.44 to no avail. I have used guru3d driver sweeper run as administrator in safe mode to try and clean bits of nvidia drivers. I tried running with only the display driver . . . this did not help leading me to believe that if it was driver related that it would more likley be display. I am thinking that perhaps after having installed and re-installed maybe there are some driver fragments that driver sweeper is missing. I downloaded the nvidia nasty file remover but that would not work because mscomctl.ocx was not registered, and despite following numerous instructions I could not get it to do so. 2) After drivers I started thinking heat. All the components are very close together in my case so maybe there's an overheating problem with one of them. However, as far as I can tell, the CPU is not going over 47 degrees, and my graphics cards are running at 39 degrees idle and 48 degrees load. I heard the maximum for an 8800 GT is around 90 degrees, so I'm thinking not heat. 3) So I started thinking it's the games themselves. UT is patched to version 1.1, Company of Heroes: Opposing Front is patched to 2.300 - had no effect. 4) So then I'm thinking it's some configuration of settings within the NVIDIA control panel. I've tried disabling SLi, running with AA, running without AA, running with AF, running without AF. Tried running forced alternate frame rendering 1 and 2. This has no effect either. 5) After this I started thinking that it is some inherent instability with one of the components, so I started stress testing. Did a combination of stress tests. I ran Prime95 for days on end, no problems. Run Superpi, no problems. So then I started doing combinations - ran Prime95 with hi-def trailer and i-Tunes at the background and UT3 in the foreground. The settings in UT3 were maxed out with 31 godlike bods in Shangri-La. Somewhat irritatingly the entire computer did not die, just UT. Prime95, trailer and i-Tunes ran happily at the background. Perhaps this points to a bad gfx card. However, i have dealt with hardware problems before and they tend to manifest themselves a little bit more pervasivley. So then I downloaded Ntune and tried the stress testing on that, with UT and Prime95 running at the same time. Again UT crashed, although this time in the process of trying to close the UT window the whole machine appeared to crash, so I could not see whether the stress testers were still running. I am currently re-running this test. I am pretty much at my wits end with this. I am starting to think it must be a faulty graphics card so after stress testing I am about to try one in the case at a time to see if it is hardware related. I just kind of doubt this given that I only get instability in games. Is there anything else I could do? Is there some wise guru out there who can save me?!
Try these: KB936710, KB938194, KB938979, KB940105 and KB945149. Also try testing you memory (use a dedicated tester such as memtest - http://www.memtest.org/). What prime were you using? - try using orthos - http://sp2004.fre3.com/download.htm - download the normal one (not beta). 8 copies in 8 different folders. run 2 per core (choose core 0 in 2, 1 in 2... etc) and run one "max cpu" and the other "max memory" (aka small fft's and large ffts). I'd also go ahead with the testing one card at a time.
Hi, I found this post while googling for something else, and thought I'd chime in to see if I could help. I had this exact same issue, and the only way I was able to fully resolve it was by limiting the amount of memory that Windows saw to less than 4GB. This seems to have fixed the problem for me, no more driver stopped responding errors. I had done memtest, prime95, everything to try to find out if it was my system that was unstable, but found nothing. Only by setting the amount of memory that Vista saw to less than 4GB was I able to fully stop any of my games from crashing. Sort of sucks, in that you now have all this memory that just goes to waste, but what can you do? It seems people w/ a combination of Vista, Nvidia, Creative X-Fi, and >= 4GB of RAM are facing this issue, but even some people w/ ATI cards get that their ATI drivers stopped responding. Now, I'm not sure if everyone with this combination gets this issue, it seems like some people have no problems. Can you try setting the amount of memory windows sees to less than 4GB and see if this works? I know it's not really a permanent solution, but until an actual fix comes out, this was the best I could do to get my games running stable.
Come to mention it, i remember seeing a driver update on creatives site with up update to resolve a 4GB ram issue. don't know about any 8GB issues.
