Half-Life 2 and Counter Strike : Source going blue screen?

Jarl

Jarl

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Well, I bought Half-Life 2 the day it was released in Denmark back in November, and boy did I enjoy both the Single Player game and later on CS:Source - even further down the road Deathmatch.

I didn't have any problems and the game run smothly, but now suddenly I have in the last two days experienced a total of three times that my screen turned blue and then nothing happens. I'm forced to reboot. ( this happened first in CS : S and then two times in Half-Life 2 )

I don't understand how come this suddenly began to happen, but it did. Anyone else who has experienced the same.

I've downloaded and installed the latest patch for my Saphire Radeon x800 pro, and still no change - this "problem" BTW doesn't ocure frequently mind you.

Help plz... :(
 
how frequently that happens? and i think it's not HL2 or CSS problem, it's YOUR WINDOWS's problem...
 
HALF-LIFE 2 IS THE SUXXORS POOW!



N00BS TEH KLOT OF YOU! HAHAHAHAHA!!!!1111!!!1!!


1337 5|>34|< |>\/\/|n5 J00
 
How come it's my windows problem - It's fully updated.

Oh BTW I've just flashed my BIOS with the newest for my K8NSNXP-939 Motherboard - so with now both my motherboards BIOS and my grafic card driver fully updated I'll give it a new go... though I'm afraid it wont help.

Oh on the www.steampowered.com forum I found another guy with the same problem it seems - though I ONLY experience the blue screen thing: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=221973&highlight=screen+going+blue
 
nothing to do with halflife 2...i think. Tried fiddling around with the settings of your ATI control panel???
 
Well, why has I then never had this problem before? - for two months I havn't seen anything like it... but now... *sigh*
 
The only reasons i had blue screens with games before were:

. Heavily overclocked system - lol my 2500 went all the away to the equivalent of 3400 with crappy CPU cooling (but my case is decent) but it didnt like it up there - so now it's sitting at 3200, which it has done happily for nearly a year.

. Unadequate PSU - When things get really demanding your PSU might not have enough muscles for it. PSU's are usually understated, and generally considered rather unimportant when building PCs. The Tagan PSU's are the highest rated i have seen, but i just got a 550W one with led lights etc and its never happened again


thats how i escaped em :D good luck
 
Okay it happened again after like 15 min of playing HL2 - decided to go through it again this with the dificulty set to hard

And my power supply unit is ample, and I havn't overclocked anything.
 
it could always point to a faulty piece of hardware, like your memory.
 
Jarl, go get the minidump file from c:/windows/minidump and uppload it to this site. It's hidden so you need to have view hidden files on.
 
it isn't text files but instead:
Mini010405-02.dmp

have tryed to open them with notepad - it's no text file.

edit:
Oh, and my power supply is 360 watt
 
Again, wattage means jack shit. This is especially true with generic power supplies.
 
If it's a cheep PSU then 360 Watts won't cut it. As heat builds up even in a quality PSU Wattage declines, hopefully your case is well ventilated.
 
Front case fans in, back case fans as exhausts. General rule of thumb, though you can play around to find which gives the absolute best temps.
 
I have front and back fans put in - the funny thing is that I didn't have any problem with HL2 BEFORE I put the fans in ( the same time I updated my BIOS ) which should help with cooling down.

My PSU is chieftec ATX-1136H.

oH, and I downloaded and ran memt32 - It didn't give me any error or anything.
 
I used to get that when my motherboard was over clocking my ram by default because it was pc 3200 and my cpu was only 333. see if the same is happening with your ram.
 
you only had a 333 MHz CPU???? - must be a typo.

Well, I guess I'll have to check my BIOS but I think it's 400 and since I have pc3200.
 
I have a 333 MHz CPU and 400 MHz Memory I run the Memory at 333 MHz with aggressive memory timings with no problems. If the Memory and the CPU are running at different MHz this could cause some stability problems (BSOD). Double check the BIOS settings since you've recently flashed your BIOS.
 
Jarl said:
I have front and back fans put in - the funny thing is that I didn't have any problem with HL2 BEFORE I put the fans in ( the same time I updated my BIOS ) which should help with cooling down.

My PSU is chieftec ATX-1136H.

oH, and I downloaded and ran memt32 - It didn't give me any error or anything.
Click to expand...
Why don't you back to the previous BIOS Version and wait for the next release. I updated my BIOS not to long ago and the release was faulty I went back to the previous Version.
 
Jarl said:
it isn't text files but instead:
Mini010405-02.dmp

have tryed to open them with notepad - it's no text file.

edit:
Oh, and my power supply is 360 watt
Click to expand...

Jarl, it is a text file. Now uppload it.
 
This forum didn't accept uploading dmp files so I've change the filetype from dmp to txt, but in reality the content is still dmp.
 
the PSU cnt be the problem, i have a 360w PSU and i have a 6800 ultra and a AMD64 3200 running on it
 
I'm beginning to think I should play a game like doom3 to check if it's maybe some update to the game that has caused the problem.
 
B-MAn said:
the PSU cnt be the problem, i have a 360w PSU and i have a 6800 ultra and a AMD64 3200 running on it
Click to expand...
That's a Power Hungry Card recommended 480 Watt PSU.
 
Baeh....
I just ran into the blue screen again while playing HL2.
It has no message or anything... I just don't think we are talking about the same kind of blue screen.

I dunno, maybe god hates me and wont allow me enjoying HL2 or CS:SOURCE
 
Try to explain exactly what the Blue Screen is. I'm guessing by ur post that it's not a Blue Screen of Death - which has *cough* Handy *cough* messages to tell you why the systems decided to go Kaput!

If it is then I always copy down what's said and paste into google and Microsoft help site.
 
The blue screen is nothing but BLUE - and not a good blue color instead... well... remember the blue color the installer had back in the day when you installed win98 from dos. That kind of blue!

And it's all over the screen hence a blue screen ;) :D
 
I have almost the exact same probelm as you described, identical to every detail except one, I can't even start a new game or load a save.

If I start a new game the title displays and then it flickers and goes to blue screen (no error and I have to reset). If I load a saved file, I only get a glimpse before it goes blue screen, same thing.

It happens every so often at random times in Counter-Strike Source too, but not very often.

I have almost the same video card as you too, but mine is the Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, not Pro. Maybe that's the source of the problem, the X800 series card? I also have an AMD Athlon64 Processor.

Were you ever able to fix this? Please tell me how if so. I've tried so many things already, same as you. I've posted my problem on the Steam Support forums a couple months ago but gave up after I tried everything. If you, or anyone for that matter, knows what this problem is caused by, please help!!!!
 
This is a fairly serious type of error. I'd play some other games to see if they repeat themselves.

Try running Prime 95 while doing something graphically intensive (3DMark) or something else and see if it repeats. Prime 95 is a really tiny program and all it does is force your processor(s?) to crunch numbers to find a prime number. Instant 100 percent load on the CPU. If you have your processor loaded and your video card laoded and it will run for 30 mins (You say these crashes occur about 15 mins in right?) you're probably fine.

But loading the graphics card and the processor at the same time is a great way to test your PSU. If it seems to be fine doing that, try the Large numbers test on Prime 95 (Where it uses the memory a lot) and do the same thing.

It's just a process of elimination. Figure out if your PSU is adequate then I would investigate to make sure the memory isn't going bad. That's waht the large numbers test in Prime is for (run small numbers the first time you run it. You'll have 3 options) but if you're familiar with it, you can run memtest86 instead and that will tell you if the memory you've got is okay. If it passes memtest86, run the large numbers test on Prime 95 for a while and see if an error crops up. If so you'll have to figure out whether or not it's the motherboard or the memory causing the issue. If no errors pop up yet again, and if this isn't a problem with Source engine in particular, if it's a hardware issue, that battery of tests WILL ferret it out. If your computer can survive a few hours of Prime95's various tests then the hardware is fine.

After that, I would start suspecting that your hard drive is failing. I used to get strange issues like that when trying to setup a known failing hard drive to have a bootable copy of Win98SE on it (as a backup in case my new drive ever suddenly failed, I figured if the drive never got used, I could use it in a pinch as long as I didnt put anything important on it) but just running it even for a few minutes would constantly land me BSODs even if I scanned it and it turned off the bad sectors.

So if it passes Prime, and memtest if you want to be thorough, scan your harddrive for bad sectors. If your hard drive is fine, then I would go to steam, go to the my games tab and right click HL2, go to properties, and select verify integrity of game data or something like taht, and see if it turns out okay.

You're going to turn up SOMETHING if you do all of that. If you can't bring your system to its knees and find the weak link through all that, then we'll start to think it's a Source specific issue.


That was a bit long... I'll summarize.

Download Prime 95 and run the small FFT test (default) for at least 30 minutes.

If it goes well, then, if you have 3DMark, run it AND Prime 95. Just something to laod the PSU/Graphics card and the CPU at the same time to make sure the PSU is good enough.

If that goes well, run the Large FFT's test on Prime 95, and let it run for at least an hour.

If that goes well, then try memtest86.

If that goes well, then scan your hard drive for bad sectors.

If that goes well, then verify the integrity of game files through steam.

You're going to find SOMETHING by diong that. I guarantee it. If you can't find ANY issue, it is probably a driver issue.

And this is assuming it's not heat-related.
 
I finally found a fix after almost a year. If anyone else is having this issue, try setting anisotropic filtering to Bilinear or Trilinear. Steam's recommended setting based on my hardware configuration was the Anisotropic 4x MSAA*, but I set it to Trilinear and I have not had a single blue screen again.

This must have something to do with the video drivers because the blue screen only started happening after I updated them. Rolling them back was not an option because of different complications that occurred. For more information on this issue, see the Help topic I created at Steam's support forums: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=710227&highlight=half-life+blue+screen

I hope this helps anyone with ATI drivers and video card having this problem. I know it's an old thread.
 
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