Guild Wars 2

Solved. It was the drivers HAH!

My laptop specs:
Asus G73JW Laptop
Win7 Premium 64bit (service pack 1)
Intel Core i7-740qm, 1.7GHz
Nvidia GeForce GTX 460M; VRAM 1.5GB
6GB RAM

Hello. I’ve owned GW2 since launch and after a bit of a break, started playing again. However I’ve been getting hard shutdowns at random times during play, whether 20 minutes in or 3 hours in. The times they occur aren’t very graphic intensive either.

I initially thought it was overheating so I removed the dust inside my laptop, forced my fans to 100%, and restricted my processor from going above 85%. However the hard shutdown still occured. So I wanted to make completely sure that it wasn’t a temperature issue by monitoring CPU temp and load as well as GPU temp and load using both GPU-Z and CoreTemp. CoreTemp only showed me 4 of my cores so there could be some inaccuracies if the other 4 cores are overheating.

After around 2-3 hours, the instant shutdown occured. I was using firey greatsword on the spider queen in AC p3 then a hard shutdown occurred. As far as I noticed: the voltage never seemed off, GPU temperatures didn’t exceed 58C and CPU temperatures didn’t exceed 54C. CPU Loads on each core would go up to around 60%. GPU load would occassionally hit 100% briefly but would otherwise be between 40-60%. Graphic intensity didn’t seem to be an issue as I was logging temperatures and load during zerg vs zerg fights in wvw as well as the laggy Svanir Shaman boss fight.

I occassionalty felt the air from my fans and in other places on my laptop. With the fans at 100% at all times, the laptop was fairly cool, even after the last hard shutdown. I’m convinced that this isn’t an overheating problem as these frequent hard shutdowns is a new thing to occur for me when gaming. I think the same issue occured within the first month of the game’s launch but I was able to play the game without much error afterwards iirc. Also that may have just been a game crash, not a hard shutdown. I can’t remember it was a long time ago. I did take a bit of a break within the past few months so I’m betting that a certain patch has broken the game for my laptop.

This is honestly all the information I know but it probably isn’t enough to solve the issue. If there are ways I can help to investigate this further then please tell me. I spent 200 gems on the new content and I don’t want to miss out on it before a patch removes content because of these hard shutdowns. I’m basically running a risk every time I play gw2 right now in fear of a corrupt hard drive.

Places (that I remember) the hard shutdown occurring:
-The vine event in Brisban Wildlands just before the lvl 80 zone to the south west.
-The trap spam event in AC p2 being the bait.
-The long boring burrow kill event during AC p3. Was using ice bow on thief.
-During Spider Queen in AC. Was using firey greatsword on thief.
-Watching a duel in a 1v1 server on the Legacy of the Foefire map.
-At some point during Honor of the Waves explorer.
-Other times I don’t remember.

I attached my complete documentation on the temperatures as well as the usual dxdiag.

All help will be much appreciated.

(I’m not sure if this thread belongs here or in the Bugs section.)

edit:

It seems I’m not the only one with this problem:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Computer-shuts-down-in-minutes/first#post4239073

In another similar thread, Oogabooga suggested to play in fullscreen mode. I tried that using the same high cooling conditions. I still got the hard shutdown. I then tried fullscreen without ever alt tabbing out of it. Still hard shutdown. Both times were in AC explorer mode. First time I don’t remember exactlty where but second time was near Spider Queen. I’m noticing that I’m getting the hard shutdown at Spider Queen a lot. But ya, fullscreen mode isn’t working for me. Temperatures and voltage looked fine when I monitored them. Laptop still felt cool.

I wonder is the game creating a crash log before the shut down, to see if that offers any insight,

C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Guild Wars 2

In there is a text document that records the crash logs, mine is called ArenaNet, see if the game is recording anything, if it does not record anything at the times of the crashes, it seriously looks like it could be hardware, be it HDD, RAM, CPU, I know you checked temps but average temps don’t mean it cant be failing,

If you haven’t, you could try turn down your settings and see if that resolves the issue, or at least slows it down, I know this game is heavy on the CPU, and some high end gaming desktops can struggle with parts of this game, let alone a laptop.

turn off the restart on BSOD to see if its a hardware or software issue. If you get bluescreens then read the code to find the error.

Otherwise i would first look to the voltage regulators or power brick. They do decay with age and grouped rail controller issues could lead to volt/amp drops across the different rails under heavy cross load and cause a shutdown.

Ok I Did It.2854:

I wonder is the game creating a crash log before the shut down, to see if that offers any insight,

C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Guild Wars 2

In there is a text document that records the crash logs, mine is called ArenaNet, see if the game is recording anything, if it does not record anything at the times of the crashes, it seriously looks like it could be hardware, be it HDD, RAM, CPU, I know you checked temps but average temps don’t mean it cant be failing,

If you haven’t, you could try turn down your settings and see if that resolves the issue, or at least slows it down, I know this game is heavy on the CPU, and some high end gaming desktops can struggle with parts of this game, let alone a laptop.

I checked out the logfile but the latest entry was last January over some game crash that occurred. I had my settings lowered to bare minimum at one point (back when I thought it was an overheating issue) and still got the crash. However I’ll try the same while in fullscreen at a lower resolution just to rule things out next time.

Know of any ways I can check the HDD and CPU for faulty hardware? I’m not the most computer savvy when it comes to inspecting the actual hardware. I’ll use memtest to check on the RAM though if that helps.

If it helps some, I’ve owned this laptop for 2-3 years and this is absolutely the first time the whole system has just hard shutdown on me. It only happens during gw2 since a week or two ago. Any time I played gw2 in the past never created this problem. I’m not doing anything differently in the content compared to what I did in the past.

However there are times where the OS will freeze and the only way out is to hold the shutdown button down or unhook the power supply (battery is still attached) for a hard shutdown that happens immediantly. This happens say once every 2-3 months on average and as far as I remember has always been wonky like that. Not saying it’s connected but perhaps it may trigger a thought from someone on another solution.

dodgycookies.4562:

turn off the restart on BSOD to see if its a hardware or software issue. If you get bluescreens then read the code to find the error.

Otherwise i would first look to the voltage regulators or power brick. They do decay with age and grouped rail controller issues could lead to volt/amp drops across the different rails under heavy cross load and cause a shutdown.

I will try that out along with the suggestion to play on lowest settings next time. Is there a way I can measure the voltage coming in? Right now I only know how to check the voltage coming to the GPU using GPU-Z. I don’t want to buy those expensive voltage readers that electricians have :P

So I was able to play for around 5 hours with the lowest settings and lowest fullscreen resolution. I also disabled the ‘restart on BSOD’ feature suggested above. It didn’t prevent the hard shutdown from happening sadly. It occurred in Lion’s Arch.

I’m not certain if the low graphics settings had anything to do with the time of the shutdown so I will keep trying it. Maybe I’ll just keep doing AC since Spider Queen triggers it.

I was able to do a bunch of HotW and CoE runs as well as SPvP before it shutdown in Lion’s Arch.

The weird thing I find with Asus laptops is that you need to get the drivers from their website, like they hack them to work with the laptop. If I grab the drivers from nvidia’s site, my laptop gets all screwy. The asus video driver hasn’t been updated on their site for the G73JW model sadly

Of course if any fellow Asus users have found a way around this, I’m all ears

I waited to see if I would run into issues before replying again. I updated my nvidia drivers and this time just used the universal install instead of using custom. My OS wasn’t crapping itself this time and gw2 wasn’t causing hard shut downs anymore. So ya I’m glad the solution wasn’t expensive and I’ll gladly look like a fool for it I’m really surprised that an outdated driver could cause that issue though.

Thanks guys.

edit:

(or maybe it was the recent game patch. I also did a game repair)

and of course a few hours after I post, the messiness of the OS starts to occur. Oh well I’ll deal >_>