NVIDIA Geoforce GT 335M (11xR2) Causes Game Crashes

I know now for sure that the NVIDIA's graphics card is the root of the problem to many game crashes faced by m11x owners. I have experimented on many different occassions with many different games, switching back and forth between the Intel Graphics Card and the NVIDIA graphics card. My computer only freezes using NVIDIA. As to what the direct cause is, I don't know. It may be the Optimus technology, or I may just have to uninstall and reinstall NVIDIA drivers. I'm posting this to see if anyone can aid me in solving this on-going issue. I want to get to the bottom of this so that the m11x community has one less issue to worry about.

Thanks!

 

It's pretty rare for people to report game crashes of any kind here. What drivers are you using?

 

agreed...if i OC too far then it crashes but thats about it. I have found my M11x i7 very stable

 

258.96. My computer crashes with this version and the version it came with.

And I don't Overclock

 

You're going to need to provide more info. Which games are crashing? Event logs show any smoking guns? Is the OS locking up? Etc...

 

Okay. It happens most often in Guild wars. And no there are no event logs or error messages. The OS does not lock up. The game just freezes at any given point in time, but everything else on my OS is fully functional. So, Im forced to CTRL+ALT+DEL, and bring up task manager. It says Guild Wars is not responding, so then I click on processes and try to end GW.exe to no avail. I am able to close the game, but the process continues to run. So, I am not able to open up another window of the game since the process is still running. I've tried many process killers and none of them worked.

Now, here's the interesting part. I'm forced to restart my computer and when i do so instead of my computer restarting it brings me to a blank screen and nothing happens. I am unable to exit this blank screen and am forced to manually reboot. When I turn my computer back on no error messages show up, it is as if it never happened.

 

From what was listed, if there is no error log, and the video card crashed/or failed without messaging you the video card wasn't the cause, as it wouldn't cause you to freeze your game for a prolonged time.

This is NCSofts fault, this error actually occurred with my Macbook and etc, NCsofts solution to this is basically Don't play it. It's ridiculous but thats how it works. If this "freeze" symptom occurs with any other game list it, but if it was the graphics cards fault it would tell you, the game or computer wouldn't simply freeze, the OS is built to give you an error log.

Now on a side note, if your going to play another rpg give Vindictus a try, currently playing the beta and seems to be a great game. ,

 

Then why is it that my computer does not freeze on the Intel Graphics Card?
And if it were to log an error where would I find it? (Just to make sure I'm looking in the right place)

 

I get the same exact problem,but with a different game which is WOW.Its a random freeze then when I go to end process the wow.exe wont close.I have to hard shutdown to kill the process.I'm using dell video drivers with no OC.I thought it was my addons and got rid of them,but it still freezes at random times.Even changed my security programs and hard drive.Still no luck.

 

I'm sorry to hear that I've sent an email to alienware support, hopefull they'll respond back soon. If I find a solution I'll respond back and inform you of it.

 

3 Ways, first if your graphic card actually failed, or crashed at the time of crash at the bottom right corner near your taskbar a sign will appear saying that your video card has failed and or crashed if you click that it will show you what occured.
2nd if you have a hard crash and manually turn off and and turn on your computer via alien head(power button) the first thing you'll see is an error report stating why your computer crashed (rarely this will show unless it was a serious crash)
3rd, you can also find an error report within your game files usually game folders contain an crash report section listing what occured for you to close your game Check your ncsoft folder in your program files and or document files.
There was another way of finding it out but I just can't seem to remember it, if I remember I'll list it down but I have no free time currently so I can't go digging around.

Also Intel graphics? Assuming your using R1 and you manually are using Intel graphics can you even play guild wars with that? If you can I can only imagine you would have to lower your graphics setting down to bare minimum.
I also forgot to mention but when you play guild wars do you set your graphics settings to the top? If you put too much of a load or even Overclock your card it can also lead to your card failing. Download EVGA and check what the temperature on your graphics card is.

Worst case scenario you got a faulty card, and your going to have to get dell to replace it, I heard a couple of people talking on the forum about how a petition was going around saying nvidia sold faulty cards but I have no idea if it was a rumor or what.

 

I had a crash the other day while playing Singularity. The entire OS and game crashed, and the only thing that brought it back was resetting the machine. It didn't feel overly hot and it booted back into the OS fine, so I'm not sure what the cause was. This is the first crash I've experienced, though I haven't really gamed on it much for more than 30 minutes or so since I got it. I'm hoping this was only a one time thing.

 

Hi all

I am having same problems.
It freeze while Cabal Online and Maple Story gameplay.

*Cabal Online is protected by GameGuard.
*In GameGuard folders, there's erl files which created when application is launched.
*Have email GameGuard erl files to [email protected] and [email protected] for verification.
*Reply from GameGuard Security Center is 'Please terminate temporarily all processes (programs) in task manager that was not related with game playing.'.
I've tried this solution but its not working.

lRlS: As you written above to nickcorona, this is NCSofts fault and their solution is 'Don't play it.'.

nickcorona: May I ask, you face this freezing problem only on MMORPG's, am I right to say that? If yes, I think up until now, most MMORPG's third party programs doesn't support NVIDIA Optimus Technology.
And, yes I am able to play it with Intel HD without freezing my laptop.

Alienwareglow: WOW is World of Warcraft (MMORPG's). Please correct me if I am wrong.

I face this problems only on Cabal Online and Maple Story (my laptop freeze randomly) which it was actually 'BLOCK' me from logging in Cabal Online by GameGuard.
Until I feedback to Asiasoft and GameGuard, they released a new patch to support NVIDIA Optimus Technology, then I am able to log in.
*I do not know, why GameGuard treat Optimus as a hacking tools firstly.*

Until now, there's no solution yet to fix this.
So, if anyone know how to fix this, please teach us.

By the way, i tried few games with highest graphic settings with 'NO' freezing problems, Prototype and Ninja Blade (it is very cleared that, freezing issue only appears in MMORPG's - my opinion after few games tested).

Thank you.

Alienware M11x-R2
i7-640UM (No OC)
Windows 7 Home Premium (64bits)
6GB DDR3 SDRAM
NVIDIA GeForce GT335M (No OC)

 

I'm having the same problem as the OP with counterstrike source. Game freezes, can't kill process no matter what, etc. and so forth.

My specs:

M11x R2
Core i7 640um (OC'd 166) With ThrottleStop (thanks unclewebb )
Vertex 2 120gb SSD
4gb ram
NVIDIA GeForce GT335M (No OC)
Windows 7 Home (x64)
Using external 23" Samsung PX2370 monitor (HDMI)

Now, whether the two are related or not I don't know. But, I find the game freezes AS IF I were overclocking the GPU. I have gotten stable clocks of 920, 1240, 520 and 3dmark06 of over 8500. That being said, once I bring that OC into a game like Starcraft 2 it freezes quite quickly. I tried OC'ing and playing Counterstrike and the game freezes even quicker, the same way as if I weren't OC'ing. This makes me think the card can't handle CSS under default clock speeds which I know isn't true. But... this does make me think the Nvidia card is the culprit, and how long I can play is dependent on not OC'ing and how much stress it's under. Sometimes it lasts a while, other times not at all.

Temperatures have all been fine as well.

No crash files in the steam dump folder during the times I've experienced this freeze. Again this makes me think its the card failing, causing the game to freeze as opposed to their being something wrong with the game.

 

Thats, a crash failure, again if theres no dump file then its a hardware failure I suggest first though attempting to play those games with your cpu at factory default settings, once again unclewebb and BB, mentioned over and over any failure you might notice by ocing might cause hardware failure. But I still don't understand how you can't process kill.

At the time of failure, can you goto task manager, goto the 2nd bar Processes, right click whatever it is, (games usually take 1 GB RAM) then click Kill Process Tree. If that doesn't work, please screenshot everything as it appears, and post or send to me, I'll try to fix this problem for you guys if I can. Again worst case scenario replacement notebook from dell.

 

In between this post and last I tried underclocking the GPU, and that seems to give me more time in game, no crash yet. Though, I would like to put that to the test a little longer. If I find that I can play several hours without any issues then the problem is pretty clear...

If any freezes occurs again, I'll undo the CPU OC and turn off ThrottleStop, see if that helps at all.

Next time it crashes I'll try and get a screenshot.In the past I have tried end process, end process tree, killing the process through command prompt, third party programs... nothing seems to work.

I should also add that I have had no problems with Starcraft 2 at default settings for GPU (or at least very rarely). So I am not quite sure why Counterstrike would cause it to act up while SC2 works fine.

 

When I was attempting to play The Witcher on my R2 it would crash very frequently and I couldn't kill its process by any means. The only option was force a shutdown of the notebook. The OS itself wouldn't be able to shut down gracefully due to that process being stuck. I tried every single fix or workaround that was out there related to that game running on Vista/7. I tried every driver for the 335 that was available back then as well. No dice. That's the only game I've encountered that problem with. It played beautifully on my Win7 9800GTX desktop though.

 

From what I've read, these problems appear on the R2, mostly so.. hm. Can you guys try hibernating your notebooks instead of turning it off? If it fixes by hibernation theres a problem with the CPU and RAM, if it isn't it could be optimus doing an infinite loop, but again I have nothing solid to work with so :/

 

Hmmm. Interesting idea. I mostly hibernate, I will try to see if that could be causing the lockups.

 

Hi all

Game Guard Security Center replied me:
'We have already update the latest Game Guard module which could be able to solve the problem you encountered. In order to make sure the cause of the problem, could you send us the frest erl files after launch the game.'

I am busy working right now, so, I will try it when I reach home.
So, if this really solve the freezing issue, I believe it is because games compatibility problems.

I will keep you all posted after I try it out.

PS: NVIDIA GeForce GT335M is quite a new hardware (I am not sure) and it is not compatible to 'ALL' games as of now.

Thank you.

 

Hi all

Game Guard Security Center replied me:
'We have already update the latest Game Guard module which could be able to solve the problem you encountered. In order to make sure the cause of the problem, could you send us the frest erl files after launch the game.'

I am busy working right now, so, I will try it when I reach home.
So, if this really solve the freezing issue, I believe it is because games compatibility problems.

I will keep you all posted after I try it out.

PS: NVIDIA GeForce GT335M is quite a new hardware (I am not sure) and it is not compatible to 'ALL' games as of now.

Thank you.

 

Exactly what i am experiencing when i play Dragon Nest Online.
My blood pressure has been going up and i have depression due to this

 

This happened when i play Dragon Nest Online too. I checked on the forum looks like many of the players having this problem too.
I really hope Nvidia will come out with something to fix this.
( sigh )

 

Same goes for my cs:s. If anyone find any solution to this, please share it :/

 

I had the issue of starcraft 2 lock up and the process refuse to close, I ended up reinstalling windows. I didn't use the restore partition and used the cd, don't know if that will help for others on this issue but might try removing the video drivers completely by even deleting whats left in the registry and reinstalling them.

 

your freeze or crash is a different story. dont mix things up this will create confusion. your crash is due to gameguard. This is a known issue with Optimus. anything that has a 3rd party anti hack like nprotect or Punkbuster will forbid you from playing the game as it will detect that you have some kind of hack. this is due to the way optimus work on a system whereby there are 2 different D3D device running concurrently. I am not sure why can this be classify as a hack as those anti hack makers will have to explain this then. the only anti hack that is not being interfered by Optimus is Valve's VAC. I dont know how different they are in terms of hack detection but this is how it is.

you should consider yourself lucky enough as gameguard bother to look at your problem and do and update on their software to support the stuff you have. and i think this should be the right way. unlike punkbuster who dont seems to give about their customers. and continue to be ignorance about the issue that customer with Optimus system are facing when playing a game that require PB. and those customers can only wait patiently now hoping that Nvidia can sort this out in their next driver release which they "promised".

 

can you try this demo and see if same thing happen? MEGAUPLOAD - The leading online storage and file delivery service

 

E GADDS!
I thought I was the only one with this problem 0.0
I have exact same crashing issues when I play company of hereos.
Currently on the 258.96 modded drivers.
Will be upgrading to the newer 260 ones soon though.

 

Hi guys.

I just recieved my M11x 4 days ago (i7, 4GB, windows home premium 64). I immediately updated windows and my drivers to the most recent ones. Installed an anti virus program and WoW after that.

After 4 days of playing I can safely say I have the same issue as described here. WoW crashes very randomly (though usually after at least an hour or so of play). When it crashes I can Ctlr Alt Delete out of it, but can´t kill the process. T

he only option I have is to close Windows, which does shut down, but not entirely and then gets stuck in shutting down at either a blank screen or a sort of Windows 7 shutting down screen. So I´m forced to manually shut it down. I have no addons running, I just repaired WoW and it happened again (funny enough it only took 10 secs this time), I have no OC running whatsoever. Is there any diagnostic tool we can run to see if its the nVidia´s card fault? Or if its faulty in some way?

 

I have similar crashing problems with Dragon Age, using the 260.89 drivers. I am able to kill the process in Task Manager, but it takes a very long time. I turned off all overclocking and it doesn't seem to make any difference.

 

If you are overclocking in the BIOS have you tried it with the OC turned off?

 

OCing in BIOS has always been turned off in my case. Still get the crashes.

 

I am freezing with sc2 and wc3. When it occurs, the game just hangs and i seem to have no choice but to restart. Everything else still works fine in the background it seems except for the game being played which does not seem to close. I bought this to play games and carry around for schoolwork but how can I game when it freezes like this?

m11xr2 i5 4gigs ram

even with this values off, the freezing still occurs
cpu oc'd to 154
evga precision oc'd to 500/1200/811
throttlestop set to 50/50

Am I doing something wrong?

 

same with me and WOW....257.30 drivers...did not do this before cataclysm however......i have to play on i ntegrated, fortunately wow can run on fair just fine. any ideas?

 

This occurs on FFXI as well. Of the last 4 crashes, 3 have been from closing the lid, and the last was while in t-stop checking the temp. I'd be inclined to blame Optimus.

 

I've had this happen to me on a few occasions, but only when I OC the GPU. To fix the inability to close the process, you have to disable the GPU in device manager. Then task manager process closing works.

 

Hmm sounds interesting. So it IS the nvidia card having some sort of loop hiccup? Ill try it this evening, see if that works. Course that doesnt PREVENT the crashes...

 

Well, just tried it, and even shutting down the GPU didnt work. Device manager didnt respond to it. Any other suggestions? I´d rather know how I can prevent the crashes....

 

I do not OC the GPU, for what it's worth. I've tried moving to the nvidia card as default. I'll see how that goes.

 

Same problem happening to me! Anyone found a fix yet?

 

This is the same symptoms when playing Everquest 2. Though it is weird to see people playing WoW having problems. Wow isn't graphic intensive like Everquest 2. WoW is designed to play on low budget type computers and the M11x should be more than enough to handle WoW.

 

I think it's somehow related to any 3D applications (be it guild wars, wow, EQ) and the nvidia card. Sofar no decent solution has been brought up. I havent seen a post on the nvidia forums about it, i posted one myself at the alienware forum, no response sofar.

If no solution is available, I'm inclined to use my return policy. Perhaps it's a faulty card then after all.

 

Hmm same thing seems to be occuring to me when I've tried to play League of Legends.

Didn't occur when I first started playing after getting the laptop yesterday, however today it has occurred on both attempts at playing, so I'm unsure of what to do.

I do have the GPU OC'ed but turning it off made no difference, has anyone been able to solve this problem?

 

I don't know if this is a fix to it... I play perfect world with a friend. I have to keep everything low or it will hang up. I whitelisted and pretty much turned everything off and to performance. I turned up the quality in the game and hangs up. So my opinion is turn everything low... then work your way up cause I did fine some medium settings to use. Now league of legends use to crash so I tried to control the game with the whitelist. Having no luck I put the game on high end nvidia processor performance and single display. I play the game with max settings shadows off benchmark for fps and getting 120- drops down 70ish with 10 man people blowing off all abilities. I think its a driver issue. I use 265.xxx community built drivers. They work substantially well.

 

I've been trying to play Mass Effect 2 but everytime I run it, the game somehow minimizes onto the task bar everytime. I tried clicking on the task bar icon, and all that happens is the screen going dark for a split second, and the desktop shows up instead of the game. Strangely the audio is working just fine.

 

OK, I think I have something here... I was getting 2-3 crashes a day until I resolved a different issue on my M11xR2. I hope this helps someone else.

Symptom: Every time I open the control panel, windows explorer crashed.

Solution: I removed the Dell WLAN file from the System32 folder, filename: BCMWLCPL.CPL

I have it stored in a temp folder and my control panel runs perfectly now.

Reference to this error found here:
Control Panel Crashing While Loading WLAN Utility - Microsoft OS Forum - Software & Operating Systems - Dell Community

I have not had a crash in a game since (knock on wood) and my computer seems to not heat as much. I have made no other fixes to my computer other than numerous restarts and running windows update.

 

I'm having the same freezing problems as well while playing wow. My m11x R2, i7, 4GB RAM is only two weeks old but it's had this problem since I got it.

I called Alienware and they installed my drivers and uninstalled them a couple of times. In the end they scratched it off as the game's fault because I had told them that I don't experience the freezes anymore when I play Spider Man: Shattered Dimensions after updating the drivers. So I called Blizzards tech support and all they did was ask for some info about my laptop then told me to reinstall the game and the drivers. Nothing stopped the freezing.

[EDIT]

I've updated to the latest modded 265.xx driver and the game froze after about an hour.

 

have u tried the 260.99 drivers from nvidia? i was runnign 257.30 from Dell, and crashing, then changed drivers now no more crashes...

 

I've had this issue since August after receiving my m11xr2. I've suffered it on various different games (although some are certainly more problematic than others) and using various different drivers (both at stock and OC).

As far as I can tell something kills or breaks the discrete GPU at a driver level which then effectively means unless you can end/kill the process that invoked it (normally the game executable) the only way to fix is a reboot, and then generally that means holding down the power button for several seconds.

I'm inclined to suspect it's driver and game specific rather than hardware. I still suffer the issue (occasionally) using 265.90r2.

But who knows

 

Yeah my suspect is on a driver level right now. I also would suggest not holding the power button. ctrl alt delete shutdown the computer. It will either power off, the computer might seem to be running but the screen will be black, or may hang up on the page that says its shutting down. And then force shut it down. I would do this to keep your hard drive good.