m6400 Covet - Random World of Warcraft Crashes

Black screen crash is a serious problem with me still. I haven't contacted them yet because I do not feel it is a Dell specific Problem. It is possibly a nvidia driver problem and will not be worked out for quite some time by looking at the open issues on there driver release notes.


They could care less for notebook drivers if you read closely enough.

GL all, if you finally get this fixed plz, PM me.

Edit:
does anybody have this same issue with a windows 7 installation. If no one has this problem with windows 7 I will install and go with it immediately.

 

@Puddin Cheeks - Windows 7 is exactly the same unfortunately (at least under build 7100 - not tried the newer builds yet).

I agree with you, it is no doubt a driver issue, however I still think it is a Dell problem, commercially. I bought the machine from them and so I hold them responsible for it. They can't really pass the buck to NVidia.

I'll try and contact them tomorrow and post back here.

 

Okay, I have a little more information to throw into the pile.

This has now happened to me, while the game(Guild Wars) was minimized running in the background (my character was idle in an outpost).

I did manage to get an error code one time after a hard reboot. Usually my computer doesn't recognize the crash.


Also, i was reading the release notes for 185.85 since it was the last "official" notebook release driver. I found something that may or may not be related to our problems.



I don't know what all of this means but someone smarter than me might be able to use it.

 

Yeah..I reckon it's definitely a driver issue problem...only thing is I've tried about 4 different versions of drivers.
185.66 seems to be the most stable for me.

 

M6400 Covet - Q9300

Really don't think this is a driver problem. Any graphics intensive application I've tried will eventually (between 5-30 minutes) cause the screen to go black and require a hard reset. I've tried XP, Vista (32/64), Win7 (32/64) and even Linux...the fact that even stuff under Linux causes the exact same behavior makes me think this is a hardware problem.

 

Hi DirtyBinky,

Thanks for posting.

I agree, that does sound interesting about running it under Linux, although I'm not an expert Linux user; where does the graphics driver come from? If I assume Nvidia still provide it then wouldn't much of the core code be the same and the problem still potentially there?

Anyway, interesting addition to this frustrating issue. Still haven't found time to call Dell. I really will try hard to grab time today.

Thanks,
Lozman.

 

FYI, I have opened a technical support case with Dell UK just now, and have directed them to this thread.

I will post responses from them as they transpire.

Thanks,
Lozman.

 

Upon following a few of the suggestions in this thread, I've figured out the following:

1) Disabling PhysX has no effect for me.
2) Setting up the power options to 'conserve energy' has no effect.
3) Running just on the battery, however - the system is 100% solid. I tried both my 'brick' (230watt?) power supply and a 130watt I have here - both caused the system lock up within minutes.

It really seems like there is a component overheating when the AC power is applied that's causing this. Not the GPU, not GPU memory --- but a power support component that just overheats on heavy graphics use. That's about the only thing that would explain my particular situation (locking up in both Windows and Linux). Yes, I'm using the NVidia supplied binary driver for Linux, however, the code base for a driver to support X-Windows (Linux) is so drastically different than for a Windows based system, there's an extremely unlikely chance that this is a common driver bug.

 

And as a quick follow up - think about the number of people that have potentially purchased an M6400/FX3700...if this were indeed a driver bug, I have a feeling that there would be a lot more noise about this problem. Again, it seems that there is a design defect here that only happens to plague a certain percentage of users (us). And...it would also be trivial for them to reproduce the lock up.

I don't have access to schematics for this laptop, but my current theory would be that the voltage regulation section for the graphics card has a component that works fine with the voltage provided by just the battery, but (on some systems) overheats with the additional V+ provided by the power supply under heavy graphics usage. This fits the failure model of my system 100%.

 

Wanted to also add that I ran across a forum thread where a guy had this identical problem on his M6400. Dell replaced the motherboard, and it continued. They replaced the FX3700 - voila - issue resolved.

EDIT : Contacted Dell to schedule a tech to come out and replace my FX3700...will update with the results.