Shut Downs, Restarts, Blue Screens When Gaming; Win 8.1

[NBKEEP]

When I play certain games, such as Assassin's Creed: BF and Splinter Cell: Black List (both on U-Play) my computer either does one of the following after about 10-60 minutes of playing:

1. Just shuts down and restarts, black screen
2. Blue screen with error messages of "K Mode Exception Not Handled" or "Memory Management"

I built this computer roughly 2 weeks ago and it works perfectly fine when I play different games such as League of Legends or Borderlands 2 (played on Steam) or when I'm just browsing the web. I wasn't sure if this is a Windows 8 issue or if this could be a hardware problem, I just know that the blue screens were triggered through Win. 8.1.

I can also get the specs if needed to diagnose what the problem may be.

Thank you for viewing!

 

[Nuno Silva]

Can be lots of things, tose are the most common:
- PSU not good enough for your rig
- CPU temperature too high
- faulty drivers
- bad setting in bios

It looks like it only happens on the most semanding games so first I would check the temperature on high load, run prime95 and monitor your cpu and gpu temperature with speedfan

By the way, it helps if you state the parts of your build 😀

 

[NBKEEP]

And the funny thing is..I literally JUST got done playing some AC for 2 straight hours with no problems. When I tabbed out I checked my GPU temp, just in case, and seems like it maxed out around 50C. This problem is so hit and miss that I don't quite know what to think. Here is my rig, though:

MSI Z-77 Motherboard
3.4GHz, i5 processor
EVGA GTX 770 GPU
8 GB RAM (Ripjaw)
120 GB Kingston SSD, this is where Win. 8.1 is booted from at start up and this is where U-Play games are saved.
120 GB HDD from an older desktop computer
750W Corsair Power Supply

None of the above are OC'd at all. I once OC'd my CPU to 4.0GHz, then the blue screens and issues started, so I reverted it back to default.

I downloaded "Heavy Load" and ran it, and my CPU temp maxed out around 47C after 3 minutes. Granted, that was only after 3 minutes under load.

 

[Nuno Silva]

Ok, so temperatures are not the problem, check your bios settings, specially memory and video card, whenever you see a turbo change to compatibility or normal or safe, words depend on bios

 

[NBKEEP]

When I went into bios I noticed the "Intel Turbo Boost" was enabled, so I just disabled that. While I was there I checked voltage settings for the PSU and they were almost all equal to their values, only varying by a few decimal places.

 

[Nuno Silva]

the problem is not the voltages, its when the graphics card needs power the psu is not giving enough

 

[NBKEEP]

Now, if the system didn't receive enough voltages under load, that's when the screen would turn black I presume, since if it blue screens power is still going to the computer? Yesterday I had little trouble with blue screens and now today I've had two

 

[Nuno Silva]

Btw, those blue screens you have, what is the code? something like 0x00000E
And, do a memtest, just in case its memory problem

 

[NBKEEP]

There were multiple errors, I think I've counted 5 different error codes when my BSOD pops up..unfortunately I can't remember them all, but I'll try
1. "Page Fault in Non-Page Area"
2. "K-Mode Exception Not Handled"
3. There was something about kernels, too..I just forget what it is
Then there are two others, I believe.

I just tried to run a memtest via a USB drive, but it doesn't seem to come up, even after I make it the top priority boot in my BIOS.
It came as a downloaded .zip file, should I extract all of that onto the flash drive, or should I just leave it zipped?

 

[Fred Anderson]

I would recommend you to run these games in compatibility mode, as Many games particularly the Assasin Creed are reported to have compatibility problems with Win 8.1 in many forums... So Check if it runs in compatibility mode or not...

Also, if you are running game on steam, you are advised to verify the integrity of game cache.. Check out the following link to perform how to do the both :
http://www.registryrecycler.com/blog/2013/12/preventing-game-crashesfreezes-after-updating-to-windows-8-1/

 

[NBKEEP]

Sorry for taking so long to respond back to this thread. Over the last few days I've been testing a lot of things.. and here's what I have concluded.
1. I ran a Memtest86, nothing was found to be wrong with my RAM.
2. I ran a Furmark test to test my GPU, it ran great and didnt shut down my computer at all.
3. While running Furmark, I tested how much power was being pulled into my computer, since my GPU was under heavy load. Only 330W was being generated, and I have a 750W PSU.
4. I ran a "chkdsk (enter drive here): /f /r /x" and checked all my hard drives. Nothing was reported and no bad sectors were found.
5. Out of frustration, I ended up reformatting all of my hard drives and re-installing Win. 8.1 fresh

I am still having problems with blue screens/random restarts. I just went into my Steam and U-Play settings and followed the instructions given by Fred to fix compatibility, since it won't let me set compatibility for these games, apparently.

So, the only options I'm left with are the my CPU may be in a funk.. but I don't know how or why it would be. And the only other option is the Windows 8.1 OS itself. Either way, it gets frustrating spending hours on end trying to troubleshoot and then playing a game to see that a half hour later it just..dies.

Any other suggestions for this problem? Thank you guys again for helping me thus far, it's greatly appreciated!

 

[Nuno Silva]

Try this:
Go to your bios and choose "Load Failsafe Settings", also check on your motherboard's manufacturer website if there is a new version of your bios.

 

[johnbl]

you can put up a memory dump somewhere on the cloud and I can take a quick look at it to see if I can see something wrong with your hardware settings