Random Blue Screens

Specs:

Windows 7
i7-950 @ 3.2Ghz
GTX 680
24 GB's DDR3 RAM @ 1600mhz

Now, I just want to state that I've never gotten a blue screen with this machine before. BeamNG.Drive is also the only game/program to cause my computer to blue screen. I play many other games daily, much more than BeamNG.Drive. So far this has happened twice. The first time was when I tried to load the Cliff map. The second time was when as soon as I tried to crash into something with the stock Gavril truck, right after loading a map.

I've already checked and nothing is overheating or anything like that. My drivers are up to date, latest WHQL drivers from Nvidia. Has anyone else been having similiar problems or issues? This only started happening for me after the Pre-Race update.

 

Never even heard of it except a guy who had outdated drivers (which fixed it).

 

I just experienced another blue screen while attempting to play again. This time just driving around doing nothing in particular. Seems to be increasing in frequency now.

 

How long have you had your hardware? They could be running out of life

 

Are you using a playstation 3 controller with motioninjoy? Motioninjoy causes bluescreens for some people at random

 

What is your power supply and motherboard?

 

It might be an unstable overclock, because BeamNG is very heavy on the CPU. Can you try running Prime95 for a while and see if it crashes again?

 

Mind sharing the error code? It can make diagnosis mucho easier.

 

Most of my hardware is new except for the motherboard and CPU, and I doubt it's "they're running out of life" as BeamNG.Drive is the only program that this blue screen happens.

Motherboard: GA-X58A-UD3R Rev 2.0 - http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3449#ov
My Power Supply is a Corsair 750w

No I am not using a PS3 controller with Motioninjoy. I have an xBox 360 controller.

The overclock is very slight. Normal i7-950 is at 3.0 ghz, with the multiplier set to 23x. I simply set it to 24x to get 3.2ghz. It's also not effecting any other programs, but I can try reverting to defaults and see if it happens again, just to be sure.

I'll post the error code when it crashes again.

 

Well, since Drive is much more CPU intensive than most games I'm thinking it may be overheating. Open up HWMonitor or another temperature monitor and watch the temps for your components while you play and see if any of them are overheating.

 

I already stated in my first post that it is not an overheating issue. I've checked and monitored my temps while running BeamNG.Drive. I barely reach 60 Celcius on the CPU, and less on the GPU. I play much more CPU intensive games than BeamNG.Drive and those do not cause overheating either.

I actually think I know what the problem might be. I found a way to actually replicate the blue screen and cause it to crash. This is what I get:

http://i.imgur.com/oF56r8i.jpg

That makes me think that BeamNG doesn't like how I've set up my virtual memory, as my pagefile settings are a bit different from default. I have a custom size set for page filing, Initial Size 800mb, Max Size 1024mb. It also probably doesn't help that I only have 5 GB's of free harddrive space on my C Drive.

In order to replicate the crash every time though, this is what I do:

1. Open BeamNG.Drive and load this map: http://www.beamng.com/threads/7137-Black-Hills-A-desert-world-1-2-3

When loading, it gives out a few errors about not finding some rock meshes, so I Alt+Tab, click ok on the 3 error messages, then click back into the game to fullscreen.

2. Start driving immediately without resetting or changing vehicle, take doorway on your left, and then follow the dirt path left. Then when you come to an intersection, turn right on the dirt path. Follow that dirt path until you come to the road, at which case you'll drive straight into the barrier on the opposite side of the road. As soon as I do this, Blue Screen crash, every time without fault. Already tested a couple times and it happens every time. Very strange.

Like I said before though, I think BeamNG just doesn't like my page file setup, so I'll try changing that, and also will clear up some space on my harddrive.

 

Interested in knowing what those are, there are just a mere handful of games as intensive as BeamNG CPU wise. But 60c, not toasty, should be fine. I think pagefile is probably a good place to start investigating. For the most part it isn't usually worth playing with pagefile settings, fairly common for it to cause issues with certain softwares, pretty sure someone else had problems with BeamNG crashing with altered pagefile settings.

 

BeamNG crashing is one thing, but my whole computer blue screening is a big problem =P Well I've tried turning off page filing all together, which is what I was using before, but the crash still occurs. I think I may record it to show exactly what I am doing. Will try default page filing settings next.

 

so, what games do you play that are more cpu intensive then beamng? (honestly curious, not trying to be all like "because i highly doubt whatever it is is ACTUALLY more intensive")


maybe try doing a complete re-install of drivers?

 

I had this problem before, I was testing for all sorts of things like bad memory, corrupt installs, malware (just in case), etc. I discovered that it's most commonly caused by a bad/faulty driver intruding on memory it shouldn't be allowed to use. I can't remember the name of the .dll file that was causing it for me, but I've heard that Daemon Tools' sptd.sys driver can cause it a lot. Do you happen to have Daemon Tools installed?

 

Other games I play that are heavily CPU dependent, well Minecraft for one, which I'm not sure even uses the GPU at all lol. Minecraft can get nuts especially with a bunch of heavy mods. Mechwarrior Online isn't well optimized for GPU yet either, using the Crytek engine and all. Also Watch Dogs with the graphics mod installed. Probably some others but can't think off the top of my head. These games usually will run at a worse performance than BeamNG does, and I know my CPU is old, so it's not my graphics card that would be bottlenecking. Plus I do a lot of video rendering, which uses usually all of your CPU power on every core. Even then I'll only hit 70 C =P

Yes I do have Daemon Tools installed, I'll try disabling it and doing another test. It's weird how it blue screens EVERY time I do this EXACT one thing though. Here, I made a private video to show exactly what I'm doing because I find this really awkward that it's a flawless blue screen result every single time, and only with BeamNG.Drive Perhaps this method of replication could be used to debug the true problem at the core?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze07FQoUdMw&feature=youtu.be

I also free'd up 90 GB's on my C drive and switched my page filing back to default, and the crash still happens, so that rules that out.

 

Don't just disable Daemon, remove it completely and use SPTD's installer to remove sptd.sys, then see how it goes.

 

Actually of the games you just mentioned, none of them are very heavily CPU dependent compared to BeamNG.
Minecraft in particular I have seen running on a 1.33ghz single core netbook, it was very laggy but it did run. It runs absolutely perfectly on my 1.8ghz dual core i3 laptop. Minecraft does indeed use the GPU for rendering, its just such a simplistic set of graphics that it doesnt tax the GPU all that much.
CryEngine, not heavy CPU loading. Very heavy on the GPU side. Optimisation for CPU vs GPU is actually part of CryEngine and not down to the Mechwarrior devs.
Watch Dogs, probably the most CPU heavy of the 3, also the buggiest mess of the 3

I will definitely give you the video editing though. There are twin xeon systems out there which are still overtaxed by video editing.

But thats all kinda off topic by this point as I am pretty certain the CPU itself is not at fault.






On my laptop, I cannot duplicate the bluescreen so the problem is likely inherent to your current setup.


Regarding the stutter when you first crash. That is the game caching the damaged textures from disk to RAM (for shattered lights and windscreen mainly), once they are cached they will remain there which is why it only happens on the first crash.

2 other smaller tests I can think of. What happens if you crash the vehicle in the shack, then reset it and repeat the test? What happens if you restart the game (to uncache textures presuming the previous test didn't BSOD) and repeat the test at a lower speed?

 

Minecraft looks simple, and people usually mistake it as being easy to run, when in fact it is not. It requires a LOT of ram, especially if running a server, and I've reached points where Minecraft will be using pretty much all my CPU power, due to a lot of complicated mods and far distance rendering. It's a java based game, and my GPU doesn't even really flinch when running Minecraft haha. Also we ran some tests a while ago when playing MWO, and that was also using mostly the CPU over GPU. Whether or not that's Cryengine's or PGI's fault for optimization, who knows. We know it definitely wasn't optimized for SLI at the time (back then I was running 2 GTX 460's)

But anyway, I'll give the daemon tools thing a try, though I'm not really happy about having to uninstall a program that I use almost on a daily basis. Especially since this program doesn't effect anything else, why should it be effecting BeamNG? Seems rather illogical. I'll see what happens if I crash into the shed first as well.

 

you must be using some really horribly coded mods then, because i play minecraft with 200+ mods, still doesn't come close to the amount of cpu beamng uses when i play it

OT:
you might try re-installing driver's, as something could have caused a slight corruption of a running driver.

if it still blue-screen's, try what the TheAdmiester said and completley remove deamon tools (and that sptd.dll as well)