m6400 Covet - Random World of Warcraft Crashes

Well no, or rather I didn't try this particular program, however my laptop has failed with anything I throw at it that is remotely graphically intensive including world or warcraft (hardly intensive by todays standards), a couple of other games I've tried, and.... Google Earth!

By running this tool I only mean to stress the graphics card by running something intensive. This tool displays a large 3D ring of simulated fur fibres and moves it around the screen using OpenGL graphics. While running this at the native resolution of my screen with 4xAA turned on, I suspect it taxes the graphics card at least as much as World of Warcraft does.

It's true though, its not an perfect like for like test and its possible that this program just by chance doesn't use the specific instructions involved in the crashing, (if indeed that is a relevant point) but as I said I can't really play games during work hours.

For the record, I've been running this stress test for 4 hours straight and its been completely stable.

I'm off home now so I'll run up World of Warcraft tonight and let you know if I get any crashes.

IMO, so far so good

Cheers,
Lozman.

PS. Perhaps you could run FurMarks for a couple of hours and see if it crashes your machine?

 

Well I'm happy to report that so far no crashes It's not been unheard of that it lasts a whole night without a crash, but it is fairly rare. I'm feeling quite confident that the problem is fixed but obviously if it does crash again I'll post back here straight away.

I'll post another update regardless in a day or two just to confirm its still going good.

yay!

Regards,
Lozman.

 

Hopefully that fixes it..although my one had the video card replaced as well and exact same issue.

 

Then you need to have them replace the motherboard as well. Pretty sure the issue is those power mosfets on the motherboard making contact to the video card heat pipes.

 

any updates from the fixed computers?

 

Hi Puddin Cheeks,

So far, since the graphics card replacement, mine hasn't crashed once I guess I've been lucky.

@DirtyBinky, can you explain a bit more about the power mosfets? Are you saying that they should NOT touch the graphics card heat pipe as if they do they overheat, or, they SHOULD touch the graphics card heat pipe on the graphics card because this helps to keep them cool?

Best regards all,
Lozman.

 

I'm not sure if the following helps, hurts, or is beside the point. I had black screen crashes every time I played Far Cry 2. They sometimes happened within a minute or two of starting the game and I was never able to play more than twenty minutes without a crash.
I haven't had a single crash in over a week and the only difference is that I changed from direct x 9 to direct x 10 in the option menu of the game. It doesn't make any sense to me but I'm posting anyway in case it does make sense to someone else.

 

An update on my situation if anyone else still needs info.

After a 2 hour online chat with dell support yesterday they came and replaced my vid card about an hour ago.

I sent the dell chat guy directly to this thread so he can get the down low on the situation. Then he asked if my drivers bios were updated. Which they were and I also had already ran the diagnostic tool posted by lozman.

Then he had me email my crash files from my, C://Windows/Minidump folder. Which there where 6 altogether even though I had several more crashes than that. My guess is I was hard rebooting faster than my computer could minidump.

Once he looked through those he said, the files said video driver crash errors which meant video card. Scheduled and sent tech for today. I will post later tonight once i test it out.

 

Hey dudes, that friend of mine reported, that he got no more crashes since he reduced details and AA/AF to get lower memory needs...
Just as food for thought

 

Hi All,

Just thought I'd get back to you again and confirm that since my graphics card replacement last week, my laptop has been rock solid - not crashed once

How are you getting on with your replacement there Puddin Cheeks?

Cheers,
Lozman.