|
Edited by Pahanda on 2/21/12 8:28 PM (PST)
I've been struggling with this on and off for about two years now, and I'm at the end of my rope. I get semi-random hard freezes at multiple specific points in WoW, and no other game. Throughout my entire time of attempting to figure out what causes this, I've replaced cooling in my case, switched sound cards, changed various network settings (CRC, error checking), switched out RAM, run RAM tests, defragged hard drives, repaired WoW installations (repeatedly), done full UI resets (repeatedly), run surface scans on hard drives, monitored temperatures (and even fiddled with fan profiles)... basically, everything I can possibly think of.
Tonight was worse than normal. I was attempting to tank on my warrior alt, and doing End of Time. The first time I zoned into the Bronze Dragonshrine, it went boom. I hard-cycled the power, and tried again with a new group. The second I zoned into the Bronze Dragonshrine again.. splat. Later on this evening, I am running it with a Real ID friend healing me. This time, I'm able to get partway through the first pull in the Bronze Dragonshrine, only to have it crash while grouping up the mobs. After restarting this time (and not losing my spot in group because I'd warned my friend about this), I was able to complete the instance, loading straight into the Dragonshrine. It's not any one specific spot that does this, though. I've seen it happen while flying around in Northrend, in various instances, but strangely - never in Raid Finder. I'm completely baffled. This isn't a WoW client crash. It's not even a Windows crash - there's nothing in the Event Log to indicate anything going wrong. I'm open to ideas. I suspect it may be some quirk with my motherboard (it's a fairly old ASUS nForce 4), but replacing it isn't really an option at the moment. And as I said, this only happens in WoW. I play many, many other games, and not one of them has ever exhibited this sort of behavior. Here's a DxDiag: http://pastebin.com/UDSMuVE7 Any help would be appreciated. |
|
nForce 4 boards are notorious for misbehaving with WoW. I know that you know your stuff, Pah, but have you tried the "latest" nForce 4 driver for Windows 7 x64? http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_vista_win7_64bit_15.49.html You'll also need to reinstall your video drivers after that's in. The nForce 4 chipset is the only possible issue that I can see offhand. ________________________________________________ The wise speak only of what they know. - J.R.R. Tolkien CORE I7 3.8GHz | 12GB RAM | ATI 5970+5870 | F120 SSD Live WoW Tech Support: irc://chat.freenode.net/wowtech |
|
|
Edited by Pahanda on 2/21/12 8:42 PM (PST)
I'll give those drivers a try in a bit here. Thanks for the link.
|
|
|
Edited by Pahanda on 2/22/12 5:28 PM (PST)
Negative results. Hard crash halfway the first heroic I ran tonight.
Any other ideas? |
Support Forum Agent
|
Pahanda ,
I think I'd try yanking the Asus Xonar card out of the pc and running without it or just on-board sound for a bit. Other than that, you'll likely need to start swapping parts out to narrow it down. The PSU is a good place to start, followed by the motherboard. ____________________________________________________________________ Support Information Administrator I'm available in this forum Tue-Sat 11am-3pm, 4pm-8pm (Pacific) |
#8
2/22/2012
|
|
|
Edited by Pahanda on 2/22/12 5:55 PM (PST)
This problem happened before I bought the Xonar; I guarantee that isn't the problem. In fact, I'd actually purchased that in an attempt to see if it was the onboard sound (an old AC'97 chipset with lousy driver support) causing the problems.
Unfortunately, the same thing is the case for the power supply; I upgraded from a 550W to a 700W in the hopes that that would alleviate the situation. I will look into budgeting for a motherboard upgrade; swapping it out is not currently an option (I'm out of spares at the moment). Thanks for the advice. |
|
Support Forum Agent
|
Pahanda,
See if you can get it to fail under a more controlled environment. Run Prime 95 on it for several hours if you can. http://majorgeeks.com/Prime95_d4363.html It can heat up the cpu pretty well so it might be wise to have a temp monitoring app up initially to ensure it's not going to overheat. If the cpu/ram are stable, there should be no issues running Prime 95 indefinitely really. If it crashes though or gives a lot of errors, you'll have a troubleshooting path to focus in on. ____________________________________________________________________ Support Information Administrator I'm available in this forum Tue-Sat 11am-3pm, 4pm-8pm (Pacific) |
#10
2/22/2012
|
|
|
Edited by Pahanda on 2/22/12 7:02 PM (PST)
Ah, a good CPU stress test. I've got CPUID running to keep an eye on it. If it seems stable for the next half hour, I'll run it overnight to see if I can make it go down.
So far, it's maxing all four cores... we'll see how it goes. Thanks for further advice; I'll check in tomorrow with an update. Also, after filing taxes, I can probably get an upgrade, but I'd like to see if I can get this sorted out in the meantime. |
|
|
Edited by Pahanda on 2/23/12 9:38 AM (PST)
I ran the x64 version of Prime95 all night, with 4 worker threads (one per core), for about 9 hours (yay for sleeping in). No problems or errors at all.
That pretty much rules out problems with the CPU and RAM, which leaves some sort of quirky (mis)interaction between the motherboard and WoW. I'm speccing out an i7-3820 system as an upgrade, which should resolve this. Still open to any other suggestions, and thanks again for the help so far. |
30 Tauren Druid
180
|
Edited by Kittypurryy on 5/29/12 12:55 PM (PDT)
I've been having the same problem. I'm getting a major hardware lock up and it seems to be sound-related.
I have a Asus Sabertooth X58 with Core i7-950 and there's definitely a WoW issue here. I started playing again early this year after deleting my toons, etc. I didn't have any problems at first until probably in my 40s with my rogue. Suddenly, I started having lockups consistently. There's always one obvious thing and that's a repeating sound event. I uninstalled the latest Realtek audio drivers and went with the generic MS driver. That seemed to work okay for a while -- until the lockup happened again. Granted, it wasn't nearly as frequent. I recently bought the Asus Xonar DX card and at first, it was great. I had zero issues. Suddenly, as of late, it's been locking up -- again, with a repeating sound upon lockup. I'm familiar with Win32 kernel debugging and this is definitely a hardware-level problem as the kernel debugger fails to register any issue. My guess is that there was some recent update (March of 2012) that has caused instability in WoW. Please investigate this issue ASAP! PS. It should be noted that I have ZERO issues with any other games or with random computer usage. The only common element has been playing WoW. |
