M11x - Issues with gaming lockups and crashes - Discussion thread

Hi everybody, i have the same problem, user with M11X R2, random freezes in WOW. At first, sorry about my english.

Ive try all official drivers offered by Nvidia/dell, all clean install, and the M11X crash with all of them. Its a random freeze, and cant kill the process, the only way to reboot the system is by pressing power button.

Last week Ive try Nvidia 266.44 Modded drivers by Kopicha
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...odded-drivers-r2-possible-punkbuster-fix.html
The result in last 5 days:

Only one freeze after 3 hours at the first day, BUT i could kill the process and start wow again without reboot the system.
​

No more freezes in last 5 days, time playing per day 4-5 hours​

I suppose this could confirm that is a driver problem... but its frustrating that still there is no Dell or Alienware or Nvidia official answer or info explaining that.

Please try to install Kopicha's drivers and post your experience.

If i speak before the problem happens before XD
Today, after 4 hours playing wow, one freeze and a hard reboot by pressing power button :S
2nd Edit, another freeze, another hard reboot SOOO FRUSTRATING

 

My Alienware m11x R2 has had its motherboard changed twice

I will repeat this.

They have changed my motherboard twice

Therefore, the chances of being a hardware issue seem even more remote.

Problem I am having: The games will freeze randomly. Sound still plays, even the cursor for a while as I recall it, but the graphics stay frozen. I can alt+tab and use my computer normally, but I cannot kill the game process with task manager. The computer never shuts down, and I am then forced to do a hard restart.

I will repeat again, my mother board has been changed two times. That means I experienced this issue with 3 differernt Nvidia 335m cards.

1. Driver you are having issues with: had this issues with drivers provided by dell's site after fresh format. Tried all most updated drivers from Nvidias site as time passed. Been having this issue for months. Nothing fixed it.

2. Title you are having issues with: World of warcraft, Luna online.

3. Describe the issue in detail - Already described it at beginning of post

4. Include in-game graphic settings you are using for the problem title (please be specific, line by line please) Have tried with all lowest setting, problem persisted.

5. Are you overclocking or using throttlestop and if so, what are your current: not overclocking, don't even know how to handle that stuff really

6. Confirm you did whitelist your game's .exe - see here: confirmed

7. Is this behavior happening when outputting to an external display or on the 11x display? I have tested world of warcraft with lowest settings while playing only with the 11x display (that is, NO hdmi). The problem persists

8. Playing world of warcraft with i ntegraded video card for about 3 months now has NEVER caused the freezing issue


edit: VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: When they changed my 335m the first time, I didn't run into the issues for like 3 days. After that, the issues began happenning extermely frequent again (less than 1 hour ).
So, if you guys are gonna test this issue, have in mind it could take that long before you start running into it non stop

 

m11xr2, i7, 4gb ram

1. Driver you are having issues with - 260.99, 257.30, stock Dell

2. Title you are having issues with - wow

3. Describe the issue in detail - try to be as specific as possible (when does it lockup, certain scenes, certain behaviors, etc.). can play for X time, then freezes - i can alt tab out, use internet and any prog that does not use 335m. but have to hard restart. Cant log off, hibernate, sleep, or shut down. have to hold power button.

4. Include in-game graphic settings you are using for the problem title (please be specific, line by line please) tried on low, fair, high, ultra, good, shadows on/off, etc etc....

5. Are you overclocking or using throttlestop and if so, what are your current OC settings have tried stock, and no OC, no difference. TS Set at 100/100, and OC at 154

6. Confirm you did whitelist your game's .exe - see here: YouTube - Nvidia Optimus Feature on the Alienware M11x- R2 - yes

7. Is this behavior happening when outputting to an external display or on the 11x display? If external, is the 11x display disabled (meaning HDMI only - not dual view)? both


note - can run wow in integrated graphics for ever with no lock ups.

 

1. Still crashes, even at stock.
2. Yes, the behaviour persists, even if I restart the card through device manager.

 

Is it possible this is a heating issue?

I have had a handful of random game lockups, one on just about every driver I've used (for a total of maybe 5 or 6 times since ownership).
The game freezes up so bad that only a hard reset wil fix it.

It's happened on different games, the last one being Darksiders after about 4 hours of constant play. The time before that was so long ago, I don't even remember which game or driver.

Honestly, all of my systems, my desktop, my G73 and my M11x have all had random game lockups here and there. In fact, I don't recall ever having a PC system, self built or brand bought, that didn't have the random game lockup now and again. I always figured it kinda went along with PC gaming and was the tradeoff for having superior graphics on a game compared to it's console version.

And so therefore, I always assumed these lockups may be due to a heat/cooling issue around the GPU and CPU.

Point is, as crappy as random lockups are, they kind of go with the territory of PC gaming and rarely are ever a hardware issue, and almost always a software/driver issue.

Now, if you're someone like others here, whose game crashes every 5 minutes, then yeah, get an on site repair, exchange, etc. Like the poster who got his mobo replaced and now things are running better (congrats!)

But otherwise, until a real solution can be identified, I wouldn't trip too much when it happens thinking the hardware is faulty. I really believe, like others, that Nvidia engineers just don't really understand yet how to write drivers for a new technology like Optimus.

I could be wrong, though...

But the random game lockup? I've seen it on any and every PC I've ever gamed on. And while it can be a sign of a much bigger problem, in my experience, it almost always isn't, and just a result of bad drivers.

Cheers

 

Yeah, I'm not sure if it helps but, on my whitelist I changed Power Management from Adaptive to High Performance, it may help but I'm unsure. I did this along with changing the Boot options to where it uses all 4 cores, I'm not sure if it helps the issue, but it can't hurt to try.

 

It could actually be possible for me. On my previous motherboard, after half an hour+ of gaming, the laptop (around the left and right sides of the touchpad) were hot to touch, nearly as hot as my modem. I thought this was normal being a laptop and all, but maybe not. Anyway, after that 4.5 hour session last night, these areas were only lukewarm.

I don't know if part of my motherboard controlling the fans was broken, I don't know if I had a faulty part causing overheating (likely the GPU if at all), and I don't know whether I was feeling things.

Anyway, I'll keep you updated over the next few days, I somehow don't think it's going to be a permanent fix.

Could the Alienware FX lighting contribute to the heat at all? Because last night it was all off except the power button and wireless, caps lock etc panel as i mentioned in my last post.

 

I don't think this is a heating issue for me since i can play a game, freezes, force shut down, immediately turn back on and get back on the game usually doesnt freeze for awhile, so its not overheating or it would happen back to back or close at least

 

@wowplayer: out of curiosity, what virus protection are you using and have you run a full scan lately? Another possibility is that there might be a problem with the power supply getting hot and inefficient, did Dellienware replace it yet? I had some really funky problems like this about three years ago (ironically playing WOW at the time) and traced it down to a p/s gone bad.

 

Today's the first day I've been able to get around to testing The Witcher: Enhanced Edition (Steam). I played for 3 hours earlier this afternoon and for 2 hours just now and it has yet to crash on me. When I was trying to play this game last July the game would lock within 2-20 minutes without fail requiring a forced shutdown in order to kill the process and restore the 335 to functioning. Precisely what's being reported here. No amount of driver or game settings changes had any impact.

I'm using 266.58 at the moment. I can't recall what driver I was using back when I was struggling with getting it to run last year. I'll continue to test again tomorrow.

Games that I've played extensively without this type of lockup are as follows:

Dragon Age: Origins (completed it)
Mass Effect (completed it)
Mass Effect 2 (completed it twice)
L4D (completed the single player)
L4D2 (completed the single player and played online for about 30 hours total)
Torchlight (most of the way through it)
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl (completed it)
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat (played about 16 hours)
Metro2033 (completed it)
Bioshock (completed it)
Bioshock 2 (completed it)
Civilization (played through 5 long campaigns 250 hours total)
Fallout 3 (played about 18 hours)
Fallout 3: NV (completed it)
ARMA 2 (only about 10 hours)
Portal (completed it)

A lot of these were with older drivers. I've used just about every single driver there's ever been for the R2 at one point or another, whether they be from Dell, direct from nvidia or modded packages from kopicha or Nautis.

 

Just to confirm, the R1 doesn't have these insane lock-ups, right? I play WoW, SC2, C&C, Civ V, etc. and would hate for any of my played games to be affected by non stop lock ups.

 

I thought a fresh reformat + BIOS update may help the problem...but sadly it has not. I woke up today to find my m11x frozen at a game update screen. It was just a patcher running too...the game wasn't even open

Do you think Dell would take back a return on an m11x that is less than 1 month old because of these lockups?

 

I can add to this that both games based on Cryptics current engine, Star Trek Online and Champions Online both have run and NEVER hung up on me, on either the R1 or R2, and ditto for Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY edition, and the Cryptic games also stress the CPU quite a bit.

Thinking back, the ONLY bluescreen I ever got was on my R2 when I was trying to use VMWare Server on Windows 7 which is not supported; reloading with VMWorkstation it runs just fine. God I love my M11x's....

 

Bluescreen is not part of this issue.

 

No it's not, but the point is that under fairly diverse circumstances the machines hold up, and lockups are often a step away from a bluescreen event; a fairly high frequency of freezing, slowdowns etc point to a machine-specific problem, and the more data we have that can point to specific games NOT having a problem in general the quicker we can eliminate that possibility. It is the sharing of this kind of information that is the essence of this board.

 

Yea my freeze ups arent from anything overly strenuous. I played l4d2 and mass effect 2, all of which the laptop goes into optimal settings and you can hear it working hard. Instead in medieval 2 it freezes up from doing absolutely nothing, just from moving the mouse around or from a character just walking around. might be a driver issue, might be a version update issue, something about the game is just simply not compatible with the laptop or the video card or something.

 

I everyone! I just bought an alienware m11x r2 with an i5 core and 4Gb ram and I installed dead space one but my game wasnt running smooth at all. I even tried to lower the setting like the graphics quality to normal and lower the resolution with the v-sync turned off but doesnt changed much..
Im hopping that you guys could giveme some tips cuz I saw some videos of you playing dead space one and two really smooth without lag and the graphics were awesome..
I only tested this game cuz I just got the laptop.

Thank you very much

 

I played Dead Space 1 for about 15 minutes or so on my m11x R2 before work the other day and it seemed to work okay with no lockups.

I am currently using the 260.99 driver. Can't vouch for any other drivers, even the stock driver... as they may cause crashes.

and if you're running Starcraft II on your M11x R2, I highly reccomend using the 260.99 drivers. Every other driver I have tried has resulted in freezes... *especially* the 266.58 verde driver. I play 2+ hour long games with my brother on battle.net a lot and I've never had an issue. I only get the dreaded freeze when I use the 266.58 drivers.

and just an update, my support ticket on nvidia is pretty much going nowhere. The "tech" (I use the word "tech" lightly because this guy obviously has no understanding of this driver issue and is merely regurgitating solutions from a script) is basically telling me to reinstall my drivers again, and reinstall windows completely.

This is really disheartening... If this laptop weren't so gorgeous I'd be a lot more upset. I'm not ready to give up on this little guy though. Like I've said a million times, either run your affected game(s) in a window, or run them using the intel graphics accelerator... not an optimal solution, I know, but it works. I can run Guild Wars for hours with no issues on the intel graphics accelerator, and yeah it's not as pretty to look at, but it gets the job done.

Guild Wars will also run fine while in windowed mode, and will utilize the nvidia GPU correctly. It's the weirdest thing ever, because you'd think that while in windowed mode Optimus would have an even harder time "remembering" what GPU to use... but apparently not. This freeze only occurs to me on fullscreen games. To this date, I have never encountered a freeze in a windowed game.

and BatBoy, I apologize if I was rude to you. This is just a really frustrating situation and I know you're just trying to help. I'm gonna keep working at this as long as it takes, and keep hounding Dell & Nvidia until someone pays attention. First thing monday I'm going to get ahold of Carlos over at Dell and see if I can upgrade my support issue to the next level. I think the idea of a standardized test is perfect... The more I can give to Carlos at Alienware the better.

I think persistence and patience is going to be what's gonna get us through this guys. It's gonna suck, but I'm gonna suffer right along with you all.

 

**** MIGHT HAVE FOUND A FIX*****
EVGA precision tool needed or something like it

DOWNCLOCK YOUR CPU AND SHADER!!!!! OVERCLOCK YOUR MEMORY! I have had no lockups all day- 8hrs, i would usually get 3-4 in this period of time, might be a solution

CPU clock at 337
Shader clock (GPU) - 810
Memory clock - 842

^EVGA precision

try it out lets see if we can *BLEEPING* fix this

 

You mean GPU clock, right?

 

Im currently testing with overclocked CPU and havent had freezes since i changed it.

But as we all know this is the most random issue in the history of tarded computer errors.

If i get another freeze il try with ur settings. Would be awesome if different games will "require" different clocking settings. Feels really state of the art

EDIT: It crashed Testing the EVGA -settings now. It wont work but hey

 

Conclusion from my DELL rep is that my HDD is bad and needs to be replaced. Hopefully that is all.

 

I'm sorry, but that just doesn't make sense. A bad hard drive would have a broad-spanning effect on your system. It cause all games/applications to fail, not just *some* of them like we're seeing.

all the evidence we're seeing points to the GPU and the nvidia driver as the culprit. By all means, get your free replaced hard drive... but I highly doubt that it's going to result in a stop of your freezing.

 

my issue is more broad spanning though. I experience lockups even when running patchers, letting the pc sit over night, or even surfing the internet.

Unlike others, I also experience a COMPLETE system lockup...as in I can't do anything at all and audio is also effected. It always requires a hard reset.

I already told the rep that if the HDD replacement doesnt work that I want something else done besides a hardware replacement considering my m11x is just 1 month old. He told me he understands and hopefully the HDD replacement will work.


He determined the HDD was bad after running HD Tune and the HDD seemed slow to respond...i don't know how reliable this diagnostic software is, but 2 other reps ran separate HDD diagnostic tests that determined the HDD was fine.

 

I posted something about this a few days ago, but had not tried it myself. My new motherboard should be here in a few hours. So while I wait i will try this.

EDIT: Just tried it and its more stable than it has ever been. Just ran 3 routes in game that I have never been able to run 1 in. I wonder if they "overclocked" the 335M to give better performance during benchmarking and reviews. If so, its pretty lame. I wish I could get some info from someone else that has a 335m like an Asus, and see what they are set to. Pretty lame if it comes down to this.

 

I am having the freezing problem where games will freeze, forcing you to cntrl-alt-delete but I am unable to end process forcing me to press the alienware button to force shut down the computer, I can still browse the internet by control alt deleting but cannot play any games since it seems the nvidia driver is locked up. Everytime I change drivers I think the problem is fixed but it always comes back and always only with the same games. These are all the games affected for me.

Everquest 1-one freeze every half hour like clockwork-I can almost set this one on a timer-have to manually force the computer to shutdown through the alienware button

Wow-Usually freezes once an hour have to manually force shutdown.

Deep Space 2-completely unpredictable, sometimes 10 minutes sometimes 2 hours before a freeze, have to manually force shutdown.

Games that seem to play fine-Batman AA, Mass Effect 2, Call of duty-Black ops.

This issue would seem to be a driver issue not a hardware issue since it only happens with certain games. I am using drivers 266.58 but I have tried every driver available, doesnt seem to matter much. One thing I have tried is playing all my games with the intel GPU, discustingly slow but 0 lock ups. I am really starting to regret buying this computer-seems kind of rediculous to pay 1k for a gaming computer that doesnt play games, I should have bought an xbox 360, right now I would like to take this thing and shove it.

 

Try the evga Precision work around. I just did it, and it seems to be working fine. If it doesnt crash in a few more hours I am going to start running benchmarks to see what we lost in terms of performace. If its 10% or less, I'll count myself lucky.

 

Benchmark using Heaven Benchmark v2.1

Default settings 335m

FPS 13.1
Scores 331
Min FPS 8.4
Max FPS 24.9


CPU clock at 337
Shader clock (GPU) - 810
Memory clock - 842

FPS 10.4
Scores 263
Min FPS 6.2
Max 19.1

Quite a bit of a performance hit. I am not happy, but at least I can play my games.

 

Hmm you might be on to something, I set mine to core clock 393 - shader clock 943, you guys might be backing to far down on the gpu, I played EQ for an hour and ten minutes and no lock ups, thats a record for this computer, i will try abit more tomorrow

 

If dropping the clock is necessary to prevent the 335 from locking up then I'd consider that a defect and would call support with evidence that backs that up. Have them establish a TeamViewer session on your laptop. Start up whatever game you can reliably recreate the 335 lockup in a reasonably short amount of time. Then have them reconnect after the reboot and watch how it doesn't occur when you underclock the GPU. Have them go through that as many times as it takes for them to verify what's happening. At that point they can either decide it's a defective GPU or perhaps a driver issue. In any case it squarely puts the ball in their court.

Unfortunately the game I had this problem with (The Witcher) no longer locks, so I can't verify whether this helps. I've played a little over 13 hours since Saturday without an problems. There ought to be enough of you who are still having this problem to be able to stuff AW support with enough cases to make them take notice though. Run more tests. If underclocking seems to help then post about it on the Dell forum as well.

 

So I'm looking through my "Reliability History" in windows 7 and I'm seeing an odd pattern... there's an nvidia process that seems to be failing a LOT. We're talking failing on an almost daily basis. On the recorded incidents where Guild Wars has failed, this process is also listed as having failed...

The process is : nvxdsync.exe

May not be related, but I find it odd that this process is failing so much... Could this be related to the freezing issue?

 

@_@ i think i will wait a few more days to see if others running this "solution" pans out. while i really enjoy playing medieval 2, the cons far outweigh the pros in my situation. i am definitely not downgrading my gpu for a total war game made in 2006 or something along those lines when new games like mass effect 2 run without a hitch. no way......i'm gonna assume that shogun 2 won't have this issue. but i will be mighty peeved if that doesnt work either.

 

dark, might want to try this:

NvXDSync.exe ... ?! - NVIDIA Forums
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=191038

Normally, I would not suggest disabling the service. Disabling may kill access to the NV Control Panel. On SLI systems this killing the service can also cause issues - not that it matters with the 11x.

Obviously disabling isn't a fix (if disabling it makes any difference all) but given the entries in your log, I suggest giving it a shot. You can always re-enable. At the very least, you'll be able to rule it out as part of the issue.

 

I have been running Everquest2 for 12 hours straight. I would have crashed at least once by now. New mobo should be installed today (weather delays), I am going to check the settings in the new one. I guess the next step will be to find the clocksetting that provides the most stability. Which considering how much help Alienware has been on this issue, they should do for us. An official recommendation would help close out this issue.

 

How many people can confirm a new mobo will fix locking up issues?

 

The issues you've described with your system are outside the focus of this thread. BatBoy closed the other 335 crashing threads and created this one in order to better help us focus on the very specific type of lockup that some R2 owners are experiencing.

* Playing a game.
* The game locks, audio often still playing.
* The rest of the system is still accessible and functioning.
* The game executable is not able to be killed by any means.
* Any applications that utilize the 335 cannot be run.
* Nvidia control panel isn't accessible.
* 335 driver pukes.
* The only option at this point is a forced a shutdown of the system.

If you're experiencing anything different than all of the symptoms listed above then you need to create a new thread in order to keep this one uncluttered and to differentiate your specific issue. This will help you get better answers and keep the confusion level to a minimum.

EDIT: And yes, the title of this thread makes it sound as if this is a more generalized "games crashing/lockup" thread. Would be nice to change that for clarity's sake.

 

suggest a new one...

it wont. I and many others here do not believe this is a motherboard issue.

 

My motherboard is being replaced as week speak, but the issue was solved for me by changing the GPU to 400 with EVGA Precision. I'll continue to tweak the settings to optimize. Was great hanging out with you guys!

 

Hmmm... good point. How about

"Playing a game, game locks, rest of the system still accessible, forced to shutdown?" Post HERE!"

Something like that. Otherwise it dilutes what I thought the original thread was focusing on and becomes a thread where any sort of game crash is tossed around.

 

It's been proven not to help for the few people who have had their motherboards replaced in an attempt to fix the lockup issue as I've described above. In the old thread I believe there was one or two individuals who said that for a few days afterward it seemed to help, but ultimately the game/335 lockups returned.

Again, what you're reporting is altogether different.

 

I wonder if every m11x r2 has this issue, maybe alienware is driving the 335 too hard? Do other computers with the 335 use the same clock settings? It's difficult to nail down since it seems to only have issues with certain games, some m11x owners might never play those games. Most of my games run fine with no lockups at all. In any case I'm betting dell and alienware are and have been aware of the freezing issue for along time. I would imagine if they admitted to the problem and the solution it would have a rather advers affect on their sales numbers. I will post my issues and possible solution, EVGA precision, on dells forums.

 

Guild Wars was released in 2005... and is graphically "ancient" as far as games go. A game like this can't possibly push the laptop too hard, since it runs at over 100 FPS no matter what.

I believe that the shaders may be out of whack somehow, but I don't think it's an issue of them being pushed too hard. If that was the case, you'd have games like Battlefield Bad Company 2 failing (which it doesn't) and games like Guild Wars running perfectly... but the freezes seem to not care how intensive the game is.

 

Actually running an older game at 100 fps vs running a newer game at 30 fps is essentially putting the same stress on your GPU, almost every game you play will push the gpu utilization to 100 percent, monitor your GPU while you play. Game coding has as much to do with pushing a GPU much more so than the year the game was made. Crysis a game over 4 years old brutalizes all of todays midrange GPUs not because it is a graphically superior game but because of really poor coding.

Besides If it were just a case of the shader clock We wouldnt have to reduce the GPU core clock to fix the freezing issues.

 

Based on what we're seeing, that's not the case. Certain owners are experiencing this specific type of lockup with a given game, whereas others have no problem with that game. That's been pretty well established.

Yes, all notebooks using the 335M GT are running at the default clocks. notebookcheck.com cross-references them all and provides you with their specifications:

NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M - Notebookcheck.net Tech

Again, it's not as clear cut as that. For example, I used to have this problem way back in July with The Witcher. I spent a couple of weeks trying different drivers and every single tweak/fix/voodoo ritual that was out there specific to that game. I never could get it to run more than 20 minutes and more often than not it was 5 minutes at best. I finally threw in the towel. All of the rest of my games at that time ran beautifully. The Witcher played without a problem on my gaming desktop, so I chalked it up to a driver issue.

Now however, in the interest of troubleshooting this very specific set of symptoms I've reinstalled the game to see what I could contribute. Problem is, is that it's playing fine. About 18 hours without so much a hitch. A lot's changed on my system since July. Drivers for audio, the 335, IGP, fresh install of 7 Ultimate, different HDD, the system is now fully baked in whereas it was only a month old before, etc... I wish I could tell you why it now works.

Point is, is that this really doesn't appear to be a wide-spread, easily defined problem. The fact that it's morphed itself on my system makes it even more of an enigma.

 

At least now you can enjoy The Witcher

 

Well, not really. For me it's very much a beating playing through that sort of game once you've already done it all. Great game, but it's a one-and-done for sure.

 

Ok i ran some very different tests

EVGA PRECISION SETTINGS

401
962
870
*STABLE FOR WoW FOR 6 HOURS (Didnt play any longer so could be stable for longer)

510
1224
870
*Stable for WoW for 1-2 hours unless in a busy place then almost an instant crash


590
1416
870
*STABLE FOR 10-30MINS

DEFAULT-
450
1080
790
*STABLE FOR 1-4HOURS DEPENDING ON HOW ACTIVE I AM, IF IM IN A 40 MAN GROUP CRASHES ~20MIN
CHILLING IN THE WOODS ALMOST NEVER CRASHED (expected)

 

Well, I don't want to speak too soon here... but I've basically gotten Guild Wars to run on the nvidia card without freezing. I have been doing a Guild Wars test in pre-searing where I run around for a good 5-10 minutes to create a freeze... I have been able to create one every time, at almost exactly the same spot.

What I did was go into my Guild Wars shortcut and added "-noshaders"

the "-noshaders" switch as described by Guild Wars Wiki:

I need to do more testing and I will try playing Guild Wars for longer than 10 minutes with this current setup. I think that from what I'm seeing right now, these freezes are almost certainly linked with the shaders in the GT335M.

Like I said though, it's almost 2:30 AM right now and I don't have the energy to put Guild Wars through a serious stress test, so I don't want to say that I've "solved" this yet... but I am optimistic. I've gotten Guild Wars to run longer than I have ever seen it go on the nvidia card.

The downsides are that Guild Wars doesn't look very good with them disabled. It doesn't look *bad* but I suppose it's a compromise that has to be made if you want to run Guild Wars in fullscreen. The drivers I'm using (260.99) have a glitch that won't let me use anti-aliasing, so that kinda adds insult to injury in terms of the visuals of this 5+ year old game.

The game actually looks a tad better using the integrated graphics, but the framerate is not nearly as smooth. At least by disabling the shaders using this shortcut switch, I can play Guild Wars at 80-100 FPS with no slowdowns... whereas the integrated graphics tends to have issues in crowded cities.

anyway I'm ranting... I will do more tests tomorrow. If you're having freezes in your game, I'd bet money that it has something to do with the shaders. I think it's only a matter of time before nvidia releases a set of drivers that fixes this. Seems to me that optimizing/improving the shaders is something that nvidia likes to do in their drivers. Heck, maybe they'll unintentionally fix this problem and not even know it... just through the normal improvements of their drivers?

 

Are you running the 335 at stock clocks?

 

I can confirm that replacing the motherboard will NOT fix the issue. It crashed 20 minutes after replacement at the stock clocks. I lowered the clock to 425 down from 450. It runs very stable. I was able to stay in game all night with no crash. Performance was very good.