[RESOLVED]Unexpected Shutdowns and Blue Screen of Death, is it a motherboard issue?
[RESOLVED]Unexpected Shutdowns and Blue Screen of Death, is it a motherboard issue?
Hello everyone. I have an old computer that I can't seem to repair. I'm experiencing random freezes in the system or during gaming occasionally. At that time, I had 12GB of RAM (4GB Crucial and 8GB Kingston). I suspected the motherboard (Asrock 960gm-vgs3 fx) was incompatible with the RAM, so I purchased 2x 4GB sticks of Corsair Vengeance LPX 1600MHz CL9, both dual channel of the same model. That appeared to resolve the issue temporarily. While monitoring CPU temperatures at idle, I consistently saw around 50-60°C+, with everything set to auto in BIOS. Strangely, the default auto settings overvolted the CPU and caused overheating. I adjusted the settings manually to stock 3.5GHz and achieved stability at 1.2V while temperatures dropped by about 30°C, both at idle and under load. I also disabled Turbo Core, Cool'n'Quiet, and some C-state settings. This resolved the heating issue. However, after some time, I continued to experience crashes, sometimes three in a day or none at all. Mainly during gaming after about five minutes, but also while performing random tasks like opening a monitoring program. Temperatures seem fine. I was gaming with Afterburner for monitoring and encountered a crash at 56°C CPU and 77°C GPU. So, I don't believe it's heat-related. In BlueScreenView, ntoskrnl.exe is the most frequently displayed, followed by amdkmdag.sys & dxgkrnl.sys. I'm running out of ideas. I ran MemTest for nearly two passes (2 hours) with zero errors.
Any assistance would be appreciated. Thank you!
PC specifications:
Motherboard: Asrock 960gm-vgs3 fx
Processor: AMD FX 6300 3.5GHz (stock, not overclocked)
Graphics Card: ASUS R7 260x OC 2GB GDDR5 128-bit
RAM: 2x Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR3 1600MHz CL9 running at (9-9-9-24-41)
Hard Drive: Seagate 1TB 7200RPM
Operating System: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
Conversion of crash reports
summary
- Click to run as a test to view the report
File: 101822-34750-01.dmp (Oct 19 2022 - 07:25:59)
BugCheck: [
SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION (3B)
]
Likely caused by: memory_corruption (Process:
XERA-Win64-Shi
)
Uptime: 0 Day(s), 2 Hour(s), 34 Min(s), and 14 Sec(s)
The mentioned process was affected
It appears to be GPU drivers again, based on the cryptic hints I received.
Are the 2021 drivers the most recent ones available?
Mar 11 2021
amdkmdag.sys
AMD Graphics driver
I've observed these cause issues in the past
Sep 25 2015
dtlitescsibus.sys
DAEMON Tools Lite Virtual SCSI Bus (Disc Soft Ltd)
Dec 29 2015
...
The first file pertains to AMD GPU drivers, the second relates to DirectX. If you had only shown DirectX, I would have guessed it was GPU drivers anyway Try running Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU), uninstall GPU drivers in safe mode, log back into normal mode, and reinstall GPU drivers How To - How to execute a CLEAN installation of your video card drivers. Updated 9-19-19 Steps to perform a CLEAN installation of your graphics card drivers using Wagnard tools Display Driver Uninstaller A common issue on many systems is the presence of multiple graphics card drivers or drivers that have been incompletely uninstalled followed by the installation of... forums. In case you encounter more BSOD Can you follow option one in the following link - here - and then proceed with the following step: Small memory dumps - Have Windows Create a Small Memory Dump (Minidump) on BSOD - this generates a file in c windows/minidump after the next BSOD Open Windows File Explorer Navigate to C:\Windows\Minidump Copy the mini-dump files to your Desktop Do not use WinZip; use the built-in functionality in Windows Select those files on your Desktop, right-click them, and choose 'Send to' - Compressed (zipped) folder Upload the zip file to the Cloud (OneDrive, DropBox, etc.) Then post a link here to the zip file so we can review it for you...
Thank you. I have consistently maintained up-to-date drivers for the GPU, even tried several versions of DDU previously. Then reverted to two versions last year due to some software bugs. Yesterday, I installed the legacy drivers for my card (22.6.1) that were released this year but without using DDU. They seem to be more stable, except for the random BSODs. I will attempt to reinstall them with DDU, and if crashes persist, I will perform the minidump procedure and share the results here.
Hello. I'm back. The computer crashed again; everything froze except the mouse, and after a while, the mouse also froze. Not during gameplay but shortly after exiting the game (around 3 minutes later). Dump files were already recorded in my Windows. I have one from my last BSOD that I didn't force restart a couple of days ago.
Here it is:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ohtve4c5ue600...1.zip?dl=0
Conversion of crash reports
summary
- Click to run as a test to view the report
File: 101822-34750-01.dmp (Oct 19 2022 - 07:25:59)
BugCheck: [
SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION (3B)
]
Likely caused by: memory_corruption (Process:
XERA-Win64-Shi
)
Uptime: 0 Day(s), 2 Hour(s), 34 Min(s), and 14 Sec(s)
The mentioned process was affected
It appears to be GPU drivers again, based on the cryptic hints I received.
Are the 2021 drivers the most recent ones available?
Mar 11 2021
amdkmdag.sys
AMD Graphics driver
I've observed these cause issues in the past
Sep 25 2015
dtlitescsibus.sys
DAEMON Tools Lite Virtual SCSI Bus (Disc Soft Ltd)
Dec 29 2015
dtliteusbbus.sys
DAEMON Tools Lite Virtual USB Bus (Disc Soft Ltd)
This is becoming tedious
Aug 18 2016
zam64.sys
Aug 18 2016
zamguard64.sys
ZAM Guard driver (Zemana)
The GPU drivers that I am currently using are the latest; they were released around June 2022, and they are the final driver for this card, according to what I've read.
I have DAEMON Tools installed and also Zemana from quite some time ago. I plan to locate and remove those applications. But can they cause GPU crashes?
Update:
I uninstalled DAEMON Tools and Zemana; the latter had some residual drivers in sys32, which I managed to remove with Autoruns.
I also executed
sfc
/
scannow
, the program detected an issue and fixed it. While searching online for additional tips, I discovered that the most frequent error events in the Event Viewer are Security-SPP (0x80070002) and ESENT (svchost) Database Corruption. I hope this information is helpful.
I've seen nearly everything trigger BSODs, so I try not to dismiss anything. It could be a conflict between drivers causing issues.
The Event Viewer is not an ideal place to investigate; often, things fail once, and it records that occurrence, but every other time they function correctly.
Esent: see if these links assist -
https://www.minitool.com/news/esent.html
(avoid purchasing anything)
This is a Windows Update error
This issue occurs when certain files in the update are missing or the Windows Update database on the computer is inconsistent with the database instructions in the update.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...80...c91c2b9beb
This may or may not help with BSOD.
Well, I will consider this resolved. Two days without a crash. It might crash again, so I will attempt the ESENT fix and the Windows Update error fix. I will post updates here if BSOD occurs. Thank you very much.
It might have actually been caused by DAEMON Tools or the
zamguard64.sys
&
zam64.sys
drivers.