So my buddy bought a copy of GW2 for himself and my broke kitten only to find out that it doesn’t really work on his computer. Since he’s busier these days and not quite as tech savvy, I’ve been trying to figure out how to fix the issue myself so that he can play it.
I’ll describe the symptoms, his computer, what we’ve tried so far, and go from there. Updates from me might be a bit slow just because I don’t really have access to the computer from home, so troubleshooting will kind of have to go through him first before I can update.
Anyway, here we go. His computer is actually newer and better than mine, so it’s definitely not something to do with it being under-equipped for GW2. He bought it pre-built last year online (newegg I believe). I can’t remember all the exact specs (I’ll get them from him and post here) but I’ll post what I know.
GeForce GTX 460, at least 4GB of RAM (I think it might be all the way up to eight), I can’t remember his CPU but it had at least four cores, plenty of disk space (hundreds of GB free), Windows 7 – 64 bit, and a water cooling system came built into it. According to him, the CPU is NOT overclocked.
The problem he’s getting is that whenever he gets into the game (he gets past the character screen and everything just find) the computer usually gives him about two minutes or so of beautiful, smooth gameplay only to (without warning) restart itself. Sometimes he is given a BSOD when this occurs, other times it just inexplicably restarts.
I’ve had him check his .dmp files on the BSODs, and he’s gotten a few STOP 0.0124 and one 0.09c error. The 9c error actually didn’t occur until he had played for around 20 minutes (we thought it was fixed for a bit there, quite the disappointment) He’s attempted to play it one other time after we ran CCleaner and updated his chipset drivers, and just got the non-BSOD restart after two minutes again. I don’t know if the error changing is significant or not, but it was definitely the only 9C error in the list of 124’s he’s been getting from this game only.
All of my research so far has pointed to various hardware issues, but this seems odd to me since GW2 is the only game that causes this problem for him. He’s been playing CoD: BO2 on it quite a bit, as well as Planetside 2, which I would think would be more hardware taxing than GW2, but has never had this issue with either one of them, even after hours of play. I’ve also heard that it might be a power issue and that we should check to see if his vcore is too high. However, he’s played lower-end games on it without issue as well (Diablo III, League of Legends) so I would think a high vcore problem would trigger there as well.
Breakdown of what we’ve tried so far:
-updated Nvidia drivers to the newest 370.10 which came out a few days ago.
-cleaned up registry with CCleaner
-updated mobo chipset drivers
-checked his CPU temperature with Core Temp, no issues (and it’s water cooled)
-lowered all in-game graphics settings to their absolute lowest. It was ugly, and it still restarted his computer after a couple minutes play.
-tried different characters (thinking maybe there was something in his current starting zone that his rig didn’t like for some reason) and still had the problem.
-did the suggested ‘application-controlled’ fix in the forum sticky for Nvidia cards (even though this was supposed to fix a different problem, we thought it couldn’t hurt)
-turned off some power saver setting in his control panel that another user had said fixed the problem.
None of these fixed the problem (obviously) and failed to show any improvement.
Now, I know there are more hardware checks we can do, but thus-far I’ve held off on that because of what I said above. This is the ONLY game or application that causes this. Am I wrong in thinking that an actual hardware issue would occur in other games as well?
Anyway, if anybody out there reads this who knows more than I do about BSOD errors and such can offer some advice, let me know. I know it’s long, but I know it’s usually important to be as detailed as possible with these things. I’ve tried to put the most important parts in bold to help out. If/when I find the solution I’ll be sure to update this for anyone else out there with similar issues.
Thanks a TON guys, I’ll check back in a bit later on today.