Guild Wars 2

Before I seek help for my problem, here are the specs for my computer:

Intel® Core™ i7 3820 Processor (4x 3.60GHz/10MB L3 Cache)
Liquid CPU Cooling System [Intel] – Standard 120mm Fan
16 GB [4 GB X4] DDR3-1600
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 – 3GB
Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4 — 4x PCI-E 2.0 x16
500 Watt PSU
180 GB Corsair Force GS SSD
Windows 7 64bit

Windows is up to date and all my drivers are up to date.

As to my problem:

I recently bought GW2 3 days ago, and from initial gameplay, about an hour in, my computer screen goes black and then my PC reboots. If/when I try to play after that, it’ll reboot every 10-20minutes.

Yesterday I spent time adjusting in game graphic options. I dropped the settings to best performance, which put everything at low, and was able to play. Throughout the day (maybe 6-8 hours game play time?), I was able to bring most settings up to high and play for a few hours, with LOD distance, shaders, and postprocessing to medium (LOD/shaders) and low (postprocessing). However, after I switched to a new character and area, it started rebooting and now does so almost instantly.

Guild Wars 2 is the only game on my system that does this. I can play Skyrim, Civilization 5, and many other games just fine, with no issue.

I have tried the advice stickied in regards to Nvidia blackscreen issues (changing power-management to best performance) and adjusting anti-aliasing, to no avail.

Any advice out there?

I’ve read some posts about adjusting clock speeds/power settings, but am a little nervous about that and not sure how to do it without messing more stuff up.

Hey, was having the same issue as you for a while. You’ve got better specs on me in everything, but we share the same graphics card. My crashes started out as a black screen after about 3-4 hours of playing, sometimes just rebooting my system for me, sometimes just hanging on the Black screen for 3-5 secs then coming back to my desktop with GW still running minimized.

Gradually problem got worse over time – crashing after 30-60 min in world, 5-10 in every dungeon. Event viewer/bug checks always pointed towards nvidia driver when it pointed anywhere at all – most of the time it didn’t tell me much of anything.

From what I know this kind of black screen locking up without a BSOD (esp given that at times I could return to GW in the bar after a long pause and stutter) is your card performing a memory dump.

I began by rolling back my driver to 314 – didn’t help. I rolled my driver back to 306 – made the whole system much more unstable. I reinstalled windows and tried 314 again – same problem.

In the end what I had to do was install the 320.49 driver (last driver having any changes with the 660 in mind). After that world seemed more stable, but I always still crashed in dungeon after 5-10 min. Finally, i bit the bullet and under clocked with Evga Precision (MSI afterburner and several other utilities can also do it). The underclocking will not harm your system, it made GW run better in all aspects for me, and you can easily revert to default clocking in the program outside of GW while playing something else. It’s all managed in the utility.

Underclock yourself by 100 GPU and 10 Mem. Let the program run in the background while you play.

Also worth looking into is if your Intel Raid driver is up to date – for my gf, this seems to have been her problem with crashes. They released a new driver last month. intel link

Finally, google the program “Who crashed” – it is a much better program for investigating driver related crashing and is much more of a help than event viewer.

Thanks for the post, Milkduds. I will try that when I get home from work today and see what happens.

So I tried as recommended above, however, it seems I have to underclock at least by 150MHz and 20 mem. Though it rebooted once at those levels, so I underclocked to 175 and 25, and so far, so good.