Guild Wars 2

Hello,

I just had my CPU, graphics card, and motherboard replaced (A while back my liquid cooling system leaked and my computer caught on fire). I’m not an extremely technical person so I had a repair shop do this to ensure my other components were functioning properly. They reformatted my HD and I’ve updated all of my drivers.

Now whenever I play GW2, after about 5 to 15 minutes the screen freezes and my speakers make a loud static noise. I cannot CTRL-ALT-DEL or otherwise exit the program and I have to perform a hard restart. It happens every time I play. I suspect this is not specifically an issue with GW2 since I had a similar crash while watching an HD video but that has only happened once so far. So maybe it’s not appropriate to post this problem here, but I’m not sure what to try next.

Here are my system specs:
Windows 7 Professional, 64-bit
Intel Core i7-4790k CPU – 4GHz
4GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:
1) Installing all mandatory windows updates. Might be worth noting that I had multiple failures during the update installation and made multiple attempts. I used the Windows update troubleshooting tool and it was able to resolve the problems. Now it says all of the updates have been successfully installed.
2) Installed new drivers for the graphics card. NVIDIA GeForce tool says the driver is now up to date.
3) Memtest – passed
4) Chkdsk – no problems found
5) Ran the -repair tool for the GW2 game client
6) Ran DxDiag (results attached) – not sure if this is relevant
7) Ran GPU-Z graphics card diagnostic tool (results attached) – looks okay to me, but I’m not very technical

Any suggestions for what might be the culprit or other troubleshooting I could try?

Thanks in advance.

Your gpu pci-e says that is 1.1 and not 3.0 as it should be,remove the card and put it back in might that be the problem!!
I had same issues 1 year ago with my ati card and was bad drivers but remove the card first to see if that’s the problem

After testing again I’ve noticed it actually switches between 3.0 and 1.1. It goes down to 1.1 after I have GW2 minimized for a minute. But I’ll try removing the card, I guess it couldn’t hurt.

Edit: I did the Render Test in the GPU-Z app and it brings it back to 3.0. It says power conservation features might put it down to lower levels when not in use.

If that doesn’t fix the problem,install beta drivers or older that are tested and are ok!!
As i said i had same issues and was gpu drivers problem but i’ve bought new card and i don’t have this problem anymore!!

If you have warranty give it back and they will check it better,if there is a hardware problem they will replace it for free i guess

Was the power supply replaced?

No, the power supply was not replaced, but the repair shop performed a diagnostic and said it is fine. It’s a corsair 750W.

When screen freezes is turning black and got artifacts?

Nope, the screen just freezes and looks exactly like the graphics normally appear. No artifacts or other changes.

Hmm what’s the motherboard?
Never mind i find it at dxdiag!!

I didn’t find anything on internet but you can remove the gpu and enable the onboard gpu and see if it freeze again!!
I can’t think any other solution now
By the way install the latest drivers for Realtek audio,check gigabyte site if there are new

Thank you for your help alteriel.

I tried physically removing the graphics card and then put it back in, with no change. I then uninstalled the driver for NVIDIA the graphics card using the device manager. I noticed there were still some NVIDIA files in the Programs folder, so I deleted all of them manually. Then I re-downloaded the driver from the NVIDIA site and installed it again.

The driver was installed successfully, but the NVIDIA tool said there was another update available (same as last time) – GeForce Game Ready Driver. I had the same problem before installing this driver update last time, so I installed it again. My machine crashed during the first attempt during the “Preparing to install” phase; the screen became scrambled and I had to hard restart. The second attempt installed successfully.

I noticed that I still had the onboard graphics card in the device manager (I don’t remember seeing it there before uninstalling the NVIDIA driver). I disabled the onboard graphics card using the device manager.

Then started up GW2. This time after playing for about 5 minutes I got the same freeze as before, but a few seconds a blue screen of death. This is the first time the blue screen has happened.

The crash dump is attached. I also did !analyze -v and lmvm nt but I’m not really sure how to interpret the dump.

Haha np
First go in bios and see if onboard gpu is disabled,i always do it from there!
Your problem is this:* Symbols can not be loaded because symbol path is not initialized. *
I’ve never experienced something like this but i found these:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/311503
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463028.aspx#f

If you are not sure what to do,put dump file in usb stick and give it to repair shop to see it,prolly they will reinstall windows to avoid all this mess with symbols problem :P

Hey Slive. Just wondering if you’ve tried underclocking your 970 yet. Drop the core frequency by 400MHz or so, or reduce the power limit to around 65% (don’t try both at the same time) and see what that does for you.

Gotta say, your issue looks alot like what happened in another thread awhile back. Could help to read what other people have tried to solve this one.

Slive, I was looking at your GPU-Z Sensor log and I’m snowballing on this one just because the temps are a bit high even for nVidia to handle. Your card gets upwards to 161 Degree fahrenheit. Try running the game with the side panel removed and a small fan forcing more air into the case. I have a feeling the card is overheating.

I just installed MSi afterburner and I was actually about to ask about the temps. It’s running at 107F and I haven’t even played any games today. I have the side of my case removed already.

If I were to test with lower clock speeds, is it the “core clock” that I should reduce?

And alteriel, I did look that stuff up but honestly it’s over my head. If that even turns out to be the problem I’ll probably just reformat rather than mess with it.

I tested again with the current settings just to pay more attention to the temperature. The GPU fans do not run unless I’m playing the game. Seems like the idle temp is pretty high to not run the fans, but what do I know.

When the game started, the fans kicked on pretty quickly. The fan speed read at 30-40% in the afterburner program. The temp got up to 140F but went down to 130F after the fans had been running for a sec. The computer crashed at 131F (I had GW2 minimized at the time). It crashed after only 2 minutes, perhaps because I kept going in and out of GW2.

I just tried enabling the onboard graphics card again, and disabling the NVIDIA card in my device manager. I was plugged into the DVI port directly in the graphics card, so I had to switch to the VGA port on the motherboard.

Then I tested GW2 with the onboard graphics card and it crashed again after just 2 minutes or so. This time it did not blue screen, the screen just scrambled and was stuck there. According to GW2 system requirements my onboard card is sufficient (but man, the frame rate made my eyes hurt). The graphics auto-detect had set everything to low.

Then when I tried to restart I did not get any signal. I noticed this before but forgot to mention that when my monitor is plugged into the motherboard I do not get any signal until windows started up. This time there was never any signal. I tried restart multiple times, then I figured what the heck, I’ll try the DVI port on the NVIDIA card even though it’s disabled and magically it worked somehow. The device manager still says the NVIDIA card is disabled.

Do you have more than one monitors?

I find these in a forum,someone got high temps when gpu was idle:
1)Power management mode inside the nvidia control panel is set to prefer maximum performance. Fix: Set power management mode to adaptive then reboot your computer.
2)Shadowplay is enabled inside geforce experience. Fix: Disable shadowplay inside geforce experience OR completely uninstall geforce experience from your machine (highly recommended)
Disable shadowplay inside geforce experience if you have it on as it can cause high clocks too. If you don’t use shadowplay or geforce experience then uninstall geforce experience completely from your system to fix the issue. Geforce experience shouldn’t be installed at all!!

I don’t have nvidia so i don’t know more about these cards and the utilities they have!!

Omegavladd.3956:

Slive, I was looking at your GPU-Z Sensor log and I’m snowballing on this one just because the temps are a bit high even for nVidia to handle. Your card gets upwards to 161 Degree fahrenheit. Try running the game with the side panel removed and a small fan forcing more air into the case. I have a feeling the card is overheating.

Slive.9053:

I tested again with the current settings just to pay more attention to the temperature. The GPU fans do not run unless I’m playing the game. Seems like the idle temp is pretty high to not run the fans, but what do I know.

When the game started, the fans kicked on pretty quickly. The fan speed read at 30-40% in the afterburner program. The temp got up to 140F but went down to 130F after the fans had been running for a sec. The computer crashed at 131F (I had GW2 minimized at the time). It crashed after only 2 minutes, perhaps because I kept going in and out of GW2.

You guys, 161 degrees Fahrenheit is 71 degrees Celsius. The card is not overheating. The 970 thermal limit is 98 degrees Celsius, or 208 Fahrenheit.

Also yes, Core clock is the one I was talking about reducing. Or Power Limit. Good luck.

Right, I was implying it was probably not overheating when I mentioned it also crashed when the temp was only 131F. Temps still seems hot considering it only wants to run the fan at 30-40%, but what do I know.

I just tried reducing the core clock speed by 381 MHz (the slider control was not very precise and I did not want to go past 400). It crashed in less then 2 minutes after the game started up. It seems like the game is crashing faster and faster now.

Also, alteriel I do have shadowplay disabled. I don’t see any way to adjust the power management for the graphics card though. Nothing in geforce experience or the nvidia control panel.