Guild Wars 2

I’m experiencing an issue where recently, my gaming PC has begun to crash within 10 minutes of playing Guild Wars 2. By crash I mean instant “No signal” on the monitor, followed by automatic power-cycling of the computer, followed by a POST failure “long, short-short-short” (VGA Failure). It does not matter which character, within 10 minutes, (if not five) of pressing the play button this occurs without fail.

Sounds like a hardware issue right? I have tried everything from testing the memory, re-seating the DIMMs, re-seating the video card elsewhere in the PCI bridge, REPLACING the video card with a new card, reinstalling the driver, repairing the GW2 client, updating the motherboard BIOS, clearing the BIOS settings to default, ensuring the pins in the PCI bridge were clean… to no avail. Not even clean-installing Windows and Guild Wars 2 on a new partition has helped me with this. Press play… crash… power-cycle and POST failure.

Here is the godkitten kicker: This only happens when playing Guild Wars 2. Nothing else has any issue. I have no issues whatsoever, whether I’m playing Bastion or Minecraft or Crysis1,2,3 or Borderlands or Mass Effect or League of Legends or Homeworld or AudioSurf or TERA or Left 4 Dead or (anything!)

Under NO OTHER circumstance. Running NO OTHER program. Playing NO OTHER game does my computer crash like this. Only Guild Wars 2 causes this. ONLY. And it happens 100% of the time. And I am absolutely baffled/frustrated.

K-sku Sandy Bridge proc
Corsair XMS-3 DIMMs
ASUS P8P67EVO motherboard
CoolerMaster 800 watt power supply
GTX980

Any ideas?

I’ve had a similar issue quite recently as well.
Completely different problem from yours, I simply BSoD and reboot. No VGA/POST errors.

However, I think the problem I have is linked to yours as the BSoD I’ve been getting points towards a hardware issue (WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR – 0×124) and it only seems to occur while playing GW, usually within 10 – 20 minutes. Nothing else triggers it.
Like you, I’ve done everything I can to try and pinpoint the problem.
Other games run without issue. Stress testing comes back without errors. Nothing else other than GW2 causes it.

What OS are you running? I’m running Win 8.1.

Rebooting mostly is a problem with an aged PSU that simply shuts down if it is not
able to deliver enough power when the PC is under heavy stress.

Ofc make sure first if automatic reboot on system errors is disabled, else its maybe
a bluescreen that you simply don’t see.

This really sounds like a random error that not a lot of people if anyone will have encountered, you may actually be best contacting support directly with this problem and have them run threw all the tests they wish etc, to try and pin point it.

Id say that on the forums people would be hazarding a guess as to what the problem might be.

It does sound like a PSU issue to be honest, its almost like it cant produce the power needed, ( could be faulty ) and your signal loss is coming before the system is doing a memory dump before the cycle. ( which seems strange as I know that Crysis 3 is a beast for most computers, way more so than GW2 )

I am pretty sure this a hardware problem with the PSU but what you COULD try is this.

I am not going to speak to the NVIDIA card but will assume they have the same issues.

in and AMD card under the catylyst control panel is an option called “frame limiting”. While this CAN (but may not) lower overall frame limits it will put much less stress on your power supply and generate far less in the way of heat. This is tied of course to the type of monitor you have.

Generally the default is “unlimited”. Try it at a lower spec and see if you crash as often.

Thanks for the input people.

Transcendent.1567:

I’ve had a similar issue quite recently as well.
Completely different problem from yours, I simply BSoD and reboot. No VGA/POST errors.

However, I think the problem I have is linked to yours as the BSoD I’ve been getting points towards a hardware issue (WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR – 0×124) and it only seems to occur while playing GW, usually within 10 – 20 minutes. Nothing else triggers it.
Like you, I’ve done everything I can to try and pinpoint the problem.
Other games run without issue. Stress testing comes back without errors. Nothing else other than GW2 causes it.

What OS are you running? I’m running Win 8.1.

Windows 7 on this PC.

Beldin.5498:

Rebooting mostly is a problem with an aged PSU that simply shuts down if it is not
able to deliver enough power when the PC is under heavy stress.

Ofc make sure first if automatic reboot on system errors is disabled, else its maybe
a bluescreen that you simply don’t see.

Automatic reboot on errors is enabled so there most likely was a BSoD I couldn’t see.

Ok I Did It.2854:

This really sounds like a random error that not a lot of people if anyone will have encountered, you may actually be best contacting support directly with this problem and have them run threw all the tests they wish etc, to try and pin point it.

Id say that on the forums people would be hazarding a guess as to what the problem might be.

It does sound like a PSU issue to be honest, its almost like it cant produce the power needed, ( could be faulty ) and your signal loss is coming before the system is doing a memory dump before the cycle. ( which seems strange as I know that Crysis 3 is a beast for most computers, way more so than GW2 )

Yeah, this is a really obscure problem, not something I have seen in any of the threads here thus far (I’d have responded there). Just throwing it out here in the event someone had experience dealing with something like this.

babazhook.6805:

I am pretty sure this a hardware problem with the PSU but what you COULD try is this.

I am not going to speak to the NVIDIA card but will assume they have the same issues.

in and AMD card under the catylyst control panel is an option called “frame limiting”. While this CAN (but may not) lower overall frame limits it will put much less stress on your power supply and generate far less in the way of heat. This is tied of course to the type of monitor you have.

Generally the default is “unlimited”. Try it at a lower spec and see if you crash as often.

I actually tried something similar to that approach by manually undervolting the card to see if reduced load on the PSU had a positive effect. Which it did not this time. Even at 40% under the reference design power for the card, Guild Wars was still seizing up.

That said I actually started seeing progress with this bizarre crash. The P8P67 EVO has the three PCIExpress 2 ports. The first two share bandwidth, (x16 on one, zero on the other, or x8, x8 mode for crossfire/SLI). The third only runs up to 4×. When I checked, the board was running in x8 x8 mode despite there only being the one video card installed on the board.

After it switched back to x16 x0 mode I have seen a marked increase in the game’s stability. Honestly, I don’t see why x8 mode should have such an effect on Guild Wars (it doesn’t anywhere else) but it seems like that may have been the source of the problem on this PC. Still testing as I said, and if it crashes again I’ll try switching out the power supply. Thanks again for the input all!

EVGA 980?

I couldn’t find a solution to it, hoping maybe it’s a bad card, going to RMA tommorow.
Not getting my hopes up though….

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/EVGA-GTX-980-FTW-ACX-2-0-BSOD-Hard-Crash/

http://forums.evga.com/GTX-980-FTW-BSOD-help-please-m2300583.aspx

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/303ss3/gtx_980_black_screen/

Tabasco.1743:

Beldin.5498:

Rebooting mostly is a problem with an aged PSU that simply shuts down if it is not
able to deliver enough power when the PC is under heavy stress.

Ofc make sure first if automatic reboot on system errors is disabled, else its maybe
a bluescreen that you simply don’t see.

Automatic reboot on errors is enabled so there most likely was a BSoD I couldn’t see.

Disable it, so you can be sure if it is a bluescreen or not the next time.
You have to reboot once to make it really work i think.

Beldin.5498:

Disable it, so you can be sure if it is a bluescreen or not the next time.
You have to reboot once to make it really work i think.

Strangely enough it hasn’t crashed again for me to see it. In fact:

MassDelusion.9130:

EVGA 980?

I couldn’t find a solution to it, hoping maybe it’s a bad card, going to RMA tommorow.
Not getting my hopes up though….

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/EVGA-GTX-980-FTW-ACX-2-0-BSOD-Hard-Crash/

http://forums.evga.com/GTX-980-FTW-BSOD-help-please-m2300583.aspx

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/303ss3/gtx_980_black_screen/

Yes it is an EVGA 980, the FTW model in fact like yours. Actually, underclocking the card also helped for a short period of time, like it did for you.
However I seem to have found some luck: the change from x8 x8 mode to x16 x0 mode on the motherboard DID IN FACT solve the issue for me. Still have no idea why it solved the problem, but Guild Wars hasn’t crashed even once since then. So far i’ve spent hours in game without a hiccup.

You’re also using an ASUS board right? Try checking to make sure the link speed is x16. CPU-Z/GPU-Z can reveal that information, if you hadn’t done that already. The P8P67EVO is a couple years older than your Z97-A is,(obviously) and only has PCIExpress 2.0 slots, but who knows.

Thanks again all for your help people!

Tabasco.1743:

Yes it is an EVGA 980, the FTW model in fact like yours. Actually, underclocking the card also helped for a short period of time, like it did for you.
However I seem to have found some luck: the change from x8 x8 mode to x16 x0 mode on the motherboard DID IN FACT solve the issue for me. Still have no idea why it solved the problem, but Guild Wars hasn’t crashed even once since then. So far i’ve spent hours in game without a hiccup.

You’re also using an ASUS board right? Try checking to make sure the link speed is x16. CPU-Z/GPU-Z can reveal that information, if you hadn’t done that already. The P8P67EVO is a couple years older than your Z97-A is,(obviously) and only has PCIExpress 2.0 slots, but who knows.

Thanks again all for your help people!

I’ve already RMA’d the card, but right now I’m using my old 7950, and it’s running at 16x 3.0.
Could the 980 have been running at 8x on the same MB?
If so, how could I make it run at 16x?
I have an ASUS z97 Sabertooth Mark 1

MassDelusion.9130:

I’ve already RMA’d the card, but right now I’m using my old 7950, and it’s running at 16x 3.0.
Could the 980 have been running at 8x on the same MB?
If so, how could I make it run at 16x?
I have an ASUS z97 Sabertooth Mark 1

I’d be lying if I said I knew the answer to that one. Next time you have the card, just make sure to check. Does the BIOS in the Sabertooth provide for explicit choice for link speed? If not, just make sure the pins in the PCI bridge are clean, or re-seat the card, using the tan colored PCIExpress slot on that board. the board is supposed to default to x16 x0 if it doesn’t detect anything in the other slot.

Good luck!

Hola Tabasco.1743,

Let me just say that I FEEL YOUR PAIN!!

MassDelusion.9130 posted my previous post :

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/EVGA-GTX-980-FTW-ACX-2-0-BSOD-Hard-Crash/

I have my 4th EVGA GTX 980 (RMA) being delivered today and I do not have high hopes that it will fully correct the BSOD issue with GW2.

I can not tell you the endless hours I have spent trying to troubleshoot this with EVGA and A-Net.

No resolution to date.

To note…I am pretty sure I checked with EVGA the PCIExpress slot speed, but will confirm x16 x0 vs 8x 8×....

Sorry just saw this thread but I’ve also had this issue for a while:
I have a newer Power Supply so didn’t think about the methods posted above.
but found dropping to low graphics settings or Subsample (instead of native or Supersample) fixes my issue but give crappy graphics.
It also only happens in GW2 (not any other game, Eso, Bf4, Dragon age Inquisition, etc…)

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/GW2-Crashes-Computer/first#post5002850