Year old Optimus IV having BSOD VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE, crashers, etc

[biomachine]

Year old Optimus IV having BSOD VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE, crashes, etc

I have this pc for about 1.5 years, and a few months after I bought it I began having overheating issues that were solved when PC Specialist replaced the motherboard and GPU. Well, I have been having the same issues for like 6 months now. Temperatures were getting higher and I could not play anything demanding wihtout having an external fan nearby.

Recently the PC began to turn off without being super hot, and I have been getting crashes and the BSOD mentioned. I usually begin to play something and after 5-30 seconds the game would freeze along with the sound, and I would have to do a hard reboot. I got the VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE (nvlddmkm.sys) twice already in the last 2 days, also while playing. There are no artifacts or performance drops before the crashes os BSODs. It comes without warning.

So far I have:

1. Cleaned the fan. I took great amounts of dust out of it, and it certainly helped with the fan noise and with temperatures, but the only real difference is that now the game takes 5-10 minutes to crash, as opposed to 5 seconds.

2. I have run the FurMark stress test and I got a maximum temp of 81C (while the external fan was close), and then it dropped to 76-78C, staying like this for 20 minutes before the system said "my GPU driver crashed and successfully recovered", followed by the BSOD. The test run for about 30 minutes total.

3. I updated the GPU driver, did all windows 8.1 updates I could, performed a disk check (CHKDSK.exe) and nothing helped. No errors found, no difference in the bugs.
I also have BlueScreen View, but I don't really understand the crash dumps, so it's of little use to me right now.

(EDIT) 4. The PC works perfectly well if I am not using the Nvidia GPU to its limit. Netflix works fine, browsing the internet or PowerPoint files work normally. Startup is also problem-free.

So far, as you see, I have not been able to detect the exact issue that is causing the crashes, as I have been using the PC the same way for a while. Any help would be greatly appreciated.


My specs are:

15.6'' Optimus IV Notebook
Processor: Intel i7-3630QM 2.40GHz
RAM: 12GB Samsung 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M 2.0GB DDR5
Thermal Paste: Artic MX-4 Extreme

 

[ubuysa]

It rather sounds like a problem with the NVDIA driver, I know you have updated the driver but it's not unusual to get conflicts with previous versions. Boozad of these fora posted an excellent guide to performing a completely clean reinstall of the NVIDIA driver some time ago, to save you searching for it it's here:

Download whatever driver you want to use to your desktop. Next, go to Windows update and set it to 'check for updates but let me decide what to install' that will keep windows from automatically installing it's video driver. Next go to C:/Nvidia, open the folder and you should see a folder named Display driver. Inside that folder you should see a folder for every driver you have ever installed. They will be names 320.49 and such. Delete every one of those folders, but do not delete the display driver folder, just the ones inside. Next go to control panel > uninstall programs. Uninstall all of the Nvidia display programs, but this is important, uninstall the display driver last. Uninstall the Nvidia update, Phys X, 3D drivers (few people use them), Nvidia HDMI, and the Nvidia update (it does not work anyway). Last uninstall the display driver. You will be told to reboot, do so. When you log back on, windows will install a display adaptor, that is OK. Open your driver that you have downloaded from Nvidia, agree to terms, do not select express install, select custom install. Make sure the 'clean install' check box is selected and uncheck everything except the display driver and PhysX, then install. You will have to reboot after that. That will be the cleanest install you can get, and you will not have the HDMI driver to conflict with the Realtek drivers, but should have all the drivers you need. You can then set windows update back to whatever you like.

Give that a try and see whether that helps?

 

[biomachine]

Thanks for the tip, I will do that right now and report the results.

On a side note, I have ran Prime95 for detecting processor bugs and found everything was fine there. Also did a HD Tune Pro check and found no problems with the hard drive.