First off, Computer Specs:
i5 4670k 3.4 GHz
EVGA GTX 760 OC
8 GB DDR3-1600 Corsair Vengence
Gigabyte GA-Z87X-D3H Motherboard
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
I honestly am at a loss for what the problem is, so I'm just going to give as many details as possible and hope someone can help me out. I built my first PC about a month ago, and am new to Windows 7 as well so I feel a little out of my depth for troubleshooting.
The first few weeks my PC performed fine, I had only installed minecraft so far but it was running at 300-500fps. Not long after, I started getting the "Driver has crashed and recovered" error that seems pretty common. After some googling I backdated my Nvidia driver from version 335 to 332 because supposedly the 335 was unstable. That seemed to fix things for a few days, but recently my game keeps dropping to 0fps and not responding, however the graphics error has not returned in Minecraft. Playing warthunder (more graphics intensive), however, did bring the "driver crashed and recovered" error.
Initially my suspicion was that the GPU was bad, because it was a graphics driver error I was getting. However, I've noticed via Resource Monitor, that my RAM never even comes close to using it's 8 GB, and appears to never use above 3 GB without triggering a crash. Note, these crashes are of a game, not of the whole system. Meanwhile, 2+ GB of something called SWAP memory is being used. I was unable to find much about the purpose of SWAP via googling so if anyone could enlighten me about what it does / is supposed to do that would be great.
Because of the low RAM usage even with Chrome, Skype, Spotify, and a game open, and the inversely high SWAP usage, I'm wondering if it's my RAM, not my GPU that is faulty. Additionally, Minecraft allows custom allocation of physical memory to use, however I get an error anytime I try to allocate more than 1 GB, saying "it could not reserve enough space for object heap."
So really, any help, even a better place to post this, would be extremely appreciated. Having a gaming PC I can't game on without errors after <5 minutes playing is really annoying.
I've read lots of threads for similar issues so I'll go ahead and say everything I've tried so far:
"Maximum Memory" setting in msconfig is not selected
I am running 64-bit windows, not 32
I discovered that my RAM was not running at the labelled frequency or voltage so I change those settings in BIOS with no difference in result
In Computer Properties it shows that 7.89 out of 8GB is usable, so it doesn't seem to be unrecognized or broken, just refusing to be used.
i5 4670k 3.4 GHz
EVGA GTX 760 OC
8 GB DDR3-1600 Corsair Vengence
Gigabyte GA-Z87X-D3H Motherboard
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
I honestly am at a loss for what the problem is, so I'm just going to give as many details as possible and hope someone can help me out. I built my first PC about a month ago, and am new to Windows 7 as well so I feel a little out of my depth for troubleshooting.
The first few weeks my PC performed fine, I had only installed minecraft so far but it was running at 300-500fps. Not long after, I started getting the "Driver has crashed and recovered" error that seems pretty common. After some googling I backdated my Nvidia driver from version 335 to 332 because supposedly the 335 was unstable. That seemed to fix things for a few days, but recently my game keeps dropping to 0fps and not responding, however the graphics error has not returned in Minecraft. Playing warthunder (more graphics intensive), however, did bring the "driver crashed and recovered" error.
Initially my suspicion was that the GPU was bad, because it was a graphics driver error I was getting. However, I've noticed via Resource Monitor, that my RAM never even comes close to using it's 8 GB, and appears to never use above 3 GB without triggering a crash. Note, these crashes are of a game, not of the whole system. Meanwhile, 2+ GB of something called SWAP memory is being used. I was unable to find much about the purpose of SWAP via googling so if anyone could enlighten me about what it does / is supposed to do that would be great.
Because of the low RAM usage even with Chrome, Skype, Spotify, and a game open, and the inversely high SWAP usage, I'm wondering if it's my RAM, not my GPU that is faulty. Additionally, Minecraft allows custom allocation of physical memory to use, however I get an error anytime I try to allocate more than 1 GB, saying "it could not reserve enough space for object heap."
So really, any help, even a better place to post this, would be extremely appreciated. Having a gaming PC I can't game on without errors after <5 minutes playing is really annoying.
I've read lots of threads for similar issues so I'll go ahead and say everything I've tried so far:
"Maximum Memory" setting in msconfig is not selected
I am running 64-bit windows, not 32
I discovered that my RAM was not running at the labelled frequency or voltage so I change those settings in BIOS with no difference in result
In Computer Properties it shows that 7.89 out of 8GB is usable, so it doesn't seem to be unrecognized or broken, just refusing to be used.