G51Jx BSoD

Except ... no, they're not. I'm pretty sure I've turned on error reporting, and the event viewer is able to show me the error and details (that I have posted), but I don't have a %systemdir% (or whatever it is) \minidump

 

check in system -> advanced system settings -> advanced -> startup and recovery -> make sure "write an event to the log" is checked, and write debugging information = small memory dump to %SystemRoot%\Minidump.

i don't know how it works on win7, it'll either be a file or in a folder called Minidump. could also be hidden/system file.

 

I must be lucky then, mine were there and I haven't done anything to change windows error reporting.

 

%systemdir% is just a variable symbol. Usually %systemdir% = "C:\Windows"

 

Hello, guys again.
As I told You before, there was a problem with the BSOD on ASUS G51JX-A1.
As the users of that laptop know, there is a sound, when the BSOD starts (it is like "grrrrrrrrrrrrrr").
So, as one of the users of that forum recommended me, I opened many windows (My computer, Steam, Google Chrome with 8 tabs) before I started playing COD: MW2. Yes, it helped me, which I am saying thanks for. I didn't face BSOD (I played and left my laptop in the game, maybe for 8 hours).
Anyways, there is another problem. When you do that kind of thing, which is opening many windows, the BSOD like tries to start, but it fails. Kinda the beginning of it, which is that "grrrrr" sound. It starts for one seconds, and then it calms down. I don't know if the lags I faced during the game (Modern Warfare 2) were because of the BSOD or the connection, but it did lag a bit. The beginning of that sound (of BSOD) was during the FIFA 2010. And it was happening like every 3rd second, which is annoying.
Just to let You know guys, maybe it will help somehow. :]
[or You will help me to avoid that "grrrrr" sound]

 

Wasn't writing a small memory dump - was writing a kernal dump. Thanks.

Edit: Enabled minidump. Started transferring a large file over my network, burning a data DVD and playing borderlands - I had my MP3 player plugged in to charge, and a Microsoft mouse.

As soon as the CD started to finalize (the spinning sound changed, so I assume that's what it was doing), the entire computer froze. No BSOD like before, just frozen. It is repeatable consistently for me.

 

Yeah, I've had it freeze on me too with no BSoD with Firefox open and MS Word (good thing word auto saves). I can't tell if this is some program which is preinstalled by Asus causing the freezes or if it is also related to the BIOS.

 

Can't seem to reproduce the BSOD at the moment, but I can reproduce the system freeze!

 

So.. ASUS has issued me an RMA number so that they can test the system and if they reproduce the error intend to send a replacement system. Is this as big of a time waster as I think it is?

 

If you're not getting the BSoD consistently, then I wouldn't bother - just send them the minidump and they'll eventually get a bios update out. If it happens consistently, then yeah ... get a new one.

 

We talked on the temps and yours were a bit high but not too bad. Are you only getting the BSOD in WoW and is it always the 0x124 BSOD? If so then there would be no point, wait for the BIOS update, any new system will have the same issues imho. I think you can sit on it for awhile, I'd do that if I were you and see if they can't get this fixed quickly .

Peter

 

Just thought I'd throw my hat in the ring as another angry G51Jx owner. If they acknowledged issues with the BSODs and throttling on all the other systems in this product line and continue to produce and sell them, they're knowingly selling faulty products.

*rant*
I'm truly pissed that I plunked down $1500 for a machine that either BSODs or does a complete restart with no warning within 15 minutes. In fact, in the time it took me to write an email and attach two minidumps, my system BSOD's once and restarted twice. I'm sitting in safe mode now and it seems to be stable.
*/rant*

I emailed my dumps; hopefully it's another datapoint they can use.

 

Mine tops out regularly at 87, sometimes going as high as 91 under extreme load.

When I first got it, it would hit 91-92 almost immediately. I ran furmark on extreme burning mode for about 2 hours to see how hot it would get ... and ever since then, it hits 84-85 pretty quick, but generally tops out at 87.

 

Random question... has anyone using the latest drivers (the ones you need a modified INF to install) had a BSOD issue?

 

True - anyone with 196.86 seen the issue? I've been trying really hard for the past month+ to get one of these BSODs and still haven't with both the old driver and the new. So if someone who was seeing it can try the upgrade and confirm it still happens that'd be great. I'm 99% sure it still will, but it's worth a shot - as much as opening 20 Firefox Tabs and those sorts of things are and that does seem to help some people...

Peter

 

I have tried to use the anti-trottling app, but BSOD continues..
Initially I thought that without the AC I eliminated the BSOD, but then I noticed that to save power I have turned off the audio, so I tried to play without sound and with AC .. I have not had any BSOD. If I enable the audio, however, I have random BSODs, if I activate the 3D sound I have a BSOD every 5-10 minutes ..

Guys, can you try too?

 

Keep in mind:

• The BSOD and throttling issues are (as far as we know) unrelated
• The Creative drivers that come with the laptop are not made for the sound card that is actually included. Someone here may be able to point you to the right ones.

 

To get the BSoD, close firefox, use winrar to decompress a large file, and start burning a dvd. Load a graphics intensive game. Bam ... real world BSoD, in many cases, sometimes just a computer freeze.

Or, prime95+furmark with a tonne of peripherals while burning a dvd. Either a BSoD or a freeze.

 

Just got mine for the first time, when I was playing prototype.
Huhuhuhu
So the G51J do not have any BSOD problem, is that right ?
I hope ASUS can find the problem very soon.

 

i have one question
why does this happen to a select few? As much as i tried to recreate the issue with bsod i can not. asus put out a bios for the last one (much to my surprise), i am sure they will do the same here if it is an issue that can be solved in bios. Their qa is aware of the complaints so be patient and wait. If you want to make the difference call and ask repeatedly. if people stop calling they will loose interest

 

If we knew, then it would be easy to solve, eh?

 

They issued a BIOS fix that has solved it in all the tests people have run.

Exactly. I also spent 25 hours trying to reproduce this with games that showed the problem in the G51J and I have not seen them. Some think the games affected between the two systems (G51JX and G51J) is different, but even in the G51J it was a random thing and there are various temporary workarounds people have found. It is a very complicated problem and we still don't know the actual solution that ASUS used or if it would be identical for this model. Definitely need to send in the minidumps they are asking for, and report your problems and give them as much in the way of details as you can so they can try to identify exactly what is going on.

Peter

 

like i said in the last thread where i was repeatedly attacked. It is important to figure out why only a select few are affected by this. Something is different in the affected systems and it is not hardware. I got great result without any bios update though ultimately bios was the permanent and unified solution. Point being if i could produce a solution outside of bios then it is important to understand why.

 

It would be easier. Just because there is a bios fix does not mean that a poorly coded bios was the cause. this is where i was going with this.

 

find me another machine that consistently gets an 0x124/PCIE BSOD on some (but not all) games.

what do you think is more likely; that a BIOS predating the games (a g50v can run bf:bc2 without BSODs) magically includes the non-standard fix, and that the actual problem lies in the game engines (id Tech, UE3) which run fine on probably more than 99% of systems? or, this is a problem specific to this machine and BIOS? (both are using the same windows install, with the same programs installed)
when a game has even a slight issue, just about everyone notices it and not group X on machine Y.

providing a workaround to ONE of the 25+ games we have listed can provide insight as to where the problem lies, but it is by no means an end-all solution to the real problem.

 

I think what he's getting at is that just because there is a solution to the problem doesn't mean that it's the best solution to the problem. There might be other issues besides the BSOD's that will never be fixed unless we can figure out the root of the problem and fix that. Treating the symptoms can help, but not as much as fixing the problem.

 

i never said it was permanent or correct while i was confident that my work on the matter was solid and leading the way. i said figuring out a reason why i was able to provide a good fix for the people that did contact me is important. i did this a week prior to the bios fix. WHile i did not feel this was bios related i did press asus to find the solution and i got bashed for doing both. Pressing asus for a fix while ignoring everything i found is an easy way out.

Exactly!

I may get bashed for it again and again but i will say it none the less. I feel that a bios fix is a simple way around the cause. I do not feel that the cause is a flawed bios. It is the way i feel

 

If a BIOS update fixes the issue, why does it matter if there is an underlying cause? Are you really going to lose sleep that something elsewhere that produces no ill effects after a BIOS patch is still lurking there? BIOS is just a firmware written by someone somewhere and it is not perfect. Why look somewhere else when the fix is easily accomplished by BIOS? A simple fix is not good enough? Must it be a difficult task?

 

depends on the person. everyone is different. nothing wrong with the easy way out.

 

Do you work for Microsoft?

Just messing.

The fact that a BIOS fix has helped is great. It would still be good to know if there is an underlying issue/what it is. If it's fixed it could boost performance, increase stability, unlock overclocking potential, or even cure world hunger.

 

Well all I can say is that if it's not completely the BIOS's fault, then the only place it might still lie is either the graphics card driver or one of the many Asus installed programs. Win 7 has never given me a 0x124 BSOD as consistantly as it has on my laptop on my other computers, so I doubt it's the OS. Heck, I don't recall ever having a BSOD using Win 7 yet on those other computers. You said you had some workarounds that sorta were fixing the issue before the BIOS patch was released? Care to elaborate?

 

Read the thread and the J one as well as the wiki page - there's alot of reports. I don't think any are perfect, but it's true nothing is. I also had a discussion in the G51J thread with thalanix about this sort of thing and about how I as a programmer can solve problems with IE displaying my website incorrectly - but it's not my code that is at fault. In this case it could be a combination of the game, OS, Hardware and so on. We don't know the exact source or why it's caused.

I investigated these sorts of issues when I worked at ATi and I also am a Computer Science Software Engineering Specialist from Uni and I can't remember how many times the Profs would tell us to find the cause rather than just a fix. Sure maybe changing it from i < 33 to i <= 33 gets rid of this certain bug - but does it cause any more? So many times one fix makes more problems and we've seen that in countless situations. If you don't understand it, then it can just make things work. Sure the BIOS patch may have solved the issue with this game engine this time - but whose to say all they did wasn't just change variables until they couldn't reproduce the problem on this specific game or set of games? They might not even know exactly what they did that fixed it - it might have been from a combination of a bunch of small changes across the board. I doubt that for a problem this elusive in the first place that they re-ran tests with all the different games and programs and circumstances that they did originally and confirm they were all good. Changing variables till the problem goes away is fine - not the most intellectual way to take on the problem, but it works - but in the end you have to identify the cause - otherwise who knows if in a month or a year another game or app comes out that just happens to change the balance slightly the other way and causes this or some other BSOD, freeze, error, throttle or any number of problems because they didn't understand what they were doing.

I suspect (and yes, all we have is theories and our own observations to work with it's true) that if ASUS really understood why this was happening on the J and that they had identified the exact cause and solved it there then they would have issued the Jx fix and the ones for other systems already. All it would require is them applying the change that solves the cause, and test the heck out of it (or release a beta bios and let us test it as they have in the past). If they don't have that answer though - that's where they need to investigate on each new type of system individually as they are doing now.

Yes, no one is perfect, but if you don't figure out why a fix works then you're as bad as a programmer who writes a 10,000 line program without ever testing it along the way (yes I had one of them in my 4th yr Uni group - that was fun) - and if there isn't anything wrong with that statement to you then you might want to just hold tight and wait for the 'fix' - whatever it may be. Either way though, please do keep sending your mini-dumps and make the reports as detailed as you can so they can pinpoint the cause of the issue.

Peter

 

auto generated code needs no checking ... or that guy is a machine himself. or he works for asus (they did go from old to UEFI, which would be a rewrite from scratch of many thousands of lines).

if it was the software, it wouldn't happen on a clean install (even a cleaner install without any non-essential drivers or applications). still happens, leaving either hardware or the hardware interface (in the form of the BIOS).
if it was the hardware, then a lot more than just the 28 games we have would be affected (as well as windows XP BSODs and X.org crashes on linux). those don't happen; it's limited exclusively to the win7 ACPI profile. **

besides, a hardware error like that can only be flagged by a ring 0 kernel or -1 automated hardware routine and not a driver/application. because it's limited only to win7, we can narrow down the cause even further to a purposely specified change to win7's ACPI tables or registers by the BIOS. the registers will be a constant across OS's, so the only logical change is in the tables. these are also known as the DSDT, SSDT and XSDT tables.

if we g51j owners really wanted to figure out what asus changed to fix this issue (looks more like a hack than a fix, as the list of games changed [WoW now gets the BSOD]), we can clear the ACPI registry keys in windows, flash to an older BIOS, dump the keys, then do the same with 207.T10. comparing them will then show us (hopefully not too many) changes, each a likely culprit.


**: i just thought of an interesting way to potentially shed some light on the cause - build a custom linux kernel with "Windows 7" as the _OS(I) identifier. if it boots and we can find a way to force a crash, maybe it would be possible to see exactly what instruction routine caused it.

 

Ha - I hear you - in the case I'm referring to at Uni it wasn't auto generated - she wrote it off the top of her head combined with very rough paper notes and then added it into the repository and told me to just connect it up with my thoroughly tested code and that it would work. 20 hours later I did finally get most of it working - by completely reworking her code practically line by line because she wrote it thinking we were working from a different calling context than the XNA type continuous frame re-draw cycles it was set for. In the end that was all I had time for before the final presentation and game testing - man that was fun - very fun - and that was only one day out of a 4 month group based course and she was in my group for the entire thing...

But anyway - those are good suggestions on finding the cause, I know we tried to look at the overall BIOS code while investigating the Throttling issues and there were changes across the board - but if it is the ACPI tables then we can localize it enough to check and hope their 'fix' wasn't just changing variables across the board up or down at random. It's good to get at the cause, without it we just don't know. Yes we should be able to trust the OEM that they know what their doing (as we trust the maker of external keyboards that they didn't install a script to record your keytaps or the WiFi card builder that they aren't recording your traffic for their own nefarious ends) - but with the way this whole situation has been playing out... I'm not so sure...

Some concrete answers can't hurt.

Peter

P.S. Can you clarify - is it that user with a G51Jx reporting a BSOD with WoW or is there also a user with the G51J fixed BIOS reporting the same thing?

 

the one with the G51Jx (forgot your name, sorry ). no reports that i saw of WoW BSODing on the J.

if we can't find fan control in the tables, then i have a feeling we won't find the source of the BSOD either. an equality mistake or using the wrong variable would have much more severe consequences than just a BSOD in select games. there's a lot more to AML than the little i know (which is as much as you can gather without reading the documentation), and a greater majority of it is required to keep the system operational.

were those groups chosen by the prof/random, the students, or preassigned lab/tutorials?

 

There a new update BIOS v205 for G51Jx
I don't it can be trusted or not, but you can look at it at this link
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=6033380#post6033380

 

I installed the 205 BIOS and am running it right now. So far so good but won't be able to test with games until later.

 

I wait for your good new, I hope it can fix BSOD. If it can, the G51Jx will be perfect

 

I've flashed to 205 and so far no BSoD, but I only played the game for 2ish hours. Hope it continues to behave. If this is the "fix" then all that's left is the throttling!

 

You can disable throttling! Try: http://g51jbsod.wikia.com/wiki/CPU_throttling

 

Ah, thanks for the link!

Edit: Well I tried it. Turning off throttling + having prime 95 running 1600 MHz all cores plus Furmark and the temperatures climbed past 90* to about 92* and it probably would have gone higher had I let it. I think I'm just gonna leave throttling alone for now.

 

Tried the new Bios 205:

NO BSOD in 4 hour of COD 4, all settings max, 1920x1080....


Thanks Asus Customer Care

 

Ya, same for me, no BSOD's in the last 2 days, still cautious though but this could finally be the fix.

 

Congrats on getting the BSOD fixed, enjoy your machines fully now

And don't worry, no need to be cautious, go and have fun with your laptop haha. Whatever happens you can go back to bug Asus about it

 

Really works? Never knew since I only play GTA IV!

 

Will try the bios update another day, but just wanted to note that the above solution seemed to work as well. 5+ hours on dawn of war 2, where previously I was lucky with an hour.

 

? Uninstall Power4Gear Hybrid? Then you can't use Extreme Turbo anymore!

 

Got no BSOD anymore when I played Prototype for 3 hours.
This BIOS maybe 99% fix
I love it

 

Well got a BSOD after about 5 hours playing, so the above solution helped, didn't solve. Wanted to try the bios update but the file is said to be unavailable.

 

Why the hell do people play games for 5 hours straight? That's bad for your eyes and body!