Games Crashing Frequently - Occasional BSOD - I'm out of ideas

[Jetien]

My computer has been having issues for months. The gist of it comes down to Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered. With the occasional VIDEO_SCHEDULER_INTERNAL_ERROR blue screen.
 
I've tried two different GPUs, both give the same problem and neither have problems on my friend's PC. I've even shipped my GPU back to GIGABYTE under an RMA and they stated nothing is wrong with it.
 
I have tried different motherboards (same model). I have tried different CPUs (same model). I have tried swapping between each of my sticks of RAM, using only one at a time (in addition to running memtest86 for several hours). I have re-installed Windows multiple times (using both Rufus to create a boot drive and trying Reset This PC). I have used DDU to clean my drivers and re-install. I have tried various versions of my BIOS and various GPU drivers. I have swapped out the stock cables on my PSU for aftermarket ones. I have not tried a different PSU at this time. I have also tried lowering the core clock and memory clock of my GPU a significant amount in increments to no avail. Setting the Power Management in Nvidia Control Panel to "Prefer maximum performance" did not resolve the issue.
 
I have absolutely no idea what to do at this point with the exception of trying a new PSU but I wanted to check here and see what your thoughts were before as I don't currently have the available funds to give that a shot. Please give me any advice you can and I'll happily provide any information you need.
 
 
Speccy: https://pastebin.com/4KeYu6Gp
 
Minidump: https://ufile.io/mokds5id
 
Sysnative: https://ufile.io/dsrgoq6h

[DaveLembke]

Hard Drive or SSD can be cause with virtual memory issue if the data passed to virtual memory and back to RAM gets corrupt through the process. Have you checked the drive health or tried a different drive yet?

[Jetien]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the response!

I had checked the drive health of all my drives, and the SSDs were in good health. I don't specifically recall seeing any issues with the HDD but I don't want to confirm it was good or bad.

I have actually somewhat resolved the problem. I took out all my drives and reinstalled windows on both SSDs and used them both individually for a while to verify no crashes. So far I've had no issues, though I still only have one of my SSDs in. So I've thought it was either a Windows update, an issue with the combination of drives. Or the HDD itself.


Could you elaborate a bit on this for me? I'm not super familiar with virtual memory and the process involved. If I'm playing games or doing something graphically intensive on games/programs that aren't on the HDD, could it still cause the problem (does the virtual memory still pass through that drive)?

[BC_Programmer]

Dave's theory is that the HDD could be corrupting pagefile contents, which go into memory and cause these issues.

I'm not convinced that is plausible, though.

1. all the failures are in dxgmms2.sys, and it seems very unlikely for arbitrary HDD corruption to cause that.

2. Disk Drives have error correction. If the data they read is corrupted, they won't actually send it as the result of I/O and will retry the operation. if they can't read the data without the ECC triggering they will eventually fail the read operation- At which point, I expect, there would be a BSOD surrounding the virtual memory manager.

Given your new information I think your assessment regarding the power supply could be correct. Removing drives would reduce the load on the power supply, and Graphics cards are the greatest consumer of Power in many modern systems. It could be the PSU just can't handle the system when under load and the Graphics card is the component that has trouble as a result.

(You don't mention what the current power supply is, by the way )

[Jetien]

Dave's theory is that the HDD could be corrupting pagefile contents, which go into memory and cause these issues.

I'm not convinced that is plausible, though.

1. all the failures are in dxgmms2.sys, and it seems very unlikely for arbitrary HDD corruption to cause that.

2. Disk Drives have error correction. If the data they read is corrupted, they won't actually send it as the result of I/O and will retry the operation. if they can't read the data without the ECC triggering they will eventually fail the read operation- At which point, I expect, there would be a BSOD surrounding the virtual memory manager.

Given your new information I think your assessment regarding the power supply could be correct. Removing drives would reduce the load on the power supply, and Graphics cards are the greatest consumer of Power in many modern systems. It could be the PSU just can't handle the system when under load and the Graphics card is the component that has trouble as a result.

(You don't mention what the current power supply is, by the way )

True, apologies for that! It's an EVGA 1000W GQ, so I never really thought load might be the problem. Unless it's possible the power supply is just defective, but I assumed (seemingly incorrectly) I'd be seeing more severe issues if the power supply were the problem.

[BC_Programmer]

A Failed/Failing or overloaded Power Supply can present a myriad of unusual issues. I have had Secondary/tertiary hard drives arbitrarily disappear from the system and even had the boot drive "disappear" which quickly caused the system to hang up completely. I found out it was the power supply long after I'd "taken it out of service" and was just applying random upgrades to it, upgraded the PSU and all those issues went away.

That supply looks to be from 2015. It's age probably isn't important but  it's possible that the voltages used in a PC changed in that time. Perhaps more stuff uses 3.3V or 5V, now? which look to be limited to 24A on that supply, versus the 80+ Amps that it can deliver on 12V.  I know back then 12V was converted to 3.3V by the VRM on the motherboard but I honestly don't know if that changed- did they switch to 3.3V as voltages for CPUs went down further? I can't find anything.