Frequent Crashes When Playing Games

I've had an issue for the last 2 months where every once in a while when I'm playing games (I've tested multiple games and it happens in all of them) the picture will freeze, screen will go blank, return me to the desktop and back into the game; this whole cycle takes about 30 seconds. It hasn't bothered me too much because I use this laptop when I'm travelling to certain areas but it's too much of an issue to ignore now.

When it started the problem would come once every couple of days but recently it is happening much more frequently, in the game I was playing before I got completely fed-up it happened 6 times in less than 30 minutes.

I have checked my temperatures and they are all very reasonable, the games that I play aren't even demanding. I also uninstalled the graphics drivers, ran drive-sweeper and installed the latest driver version but the problem persists.

I have a bad feeling that my gpu is failing but I would really appreciate any advice on things that could be done before I start looking for a new notebook.

I forgot to mention that the laptop is an MSI GT725 with an ATI 4850 512mb card.

 

That sounds like your GPU is failing. Espcially the increasing frequency of these crashes. Don't get worried based on my word though. Others might have better news.

 

could it be a heat issue?

 

Heat would make it throttle, wouldn't it? Or worst case shut the system down?

 

It's definitely not a heat issue, I always have HWMonitor running and the highest temps that I've recorded with all the crashes is 73C (163F).

Another thing that I didn't mention is that I'm also having an issue with flash sites freezing up when they load on chrome, ie. if I click on a youtube video (or go to the dailymotion home page) the page will load but the video will be black and it will freeze immediately; the only way to remedy it is to close that particular tab. I have now resorted to using firefox just for watching flash videos but the weird thing here is that there is a small chance of the same thing happening.

20% of the time flash videos work on chrome but 10% of the time flash won't work on firefox.

 

Sounds very much like GPU problem. GPUs do degrade with time and usage, I think the degradation might've reached a point where the stock voltage on the GPU is no longer able to sustain the operating frequency hence the instability, not enough for complete loss of GUI but enough to crash when stressed. Flash is GPU accelerated and the degree which the implementation relies on the GPU renderings will affect the likelihood of crashing.
Heat would cause throttling so your performance would tank instead of a hard crash. CPU issues will tend to manifest as BSODs more often then not, RAM problems is also tricky to diagnose and can cause the same symptoms but you can try running Memtest to rule it out. HDD issues will result in usually very obvious noise and long load/access times so I doubt that is the case. Could also be GPU video RAM degradation but you'd usually see random splotches or lines on the screen prior to a crash.

 

Ran 5 passes on Memtest; didn't come up with any errors, I wanted to run it for longer but I needed the computer.

I did get the idea of down-clocking the frequencies in Catalyst Control Center from 500/850MHz to 470/800MHz and after playing for over an hour I haven't had a single crash with the new numbers. Performance doesn't seem to have taken a huge hit so for now at least everything seems to be working.

 

It sounds right, sadly all ASIC's degrade, even to a point where they can't sustain stock speeds at stock voltages. You can try running AtiTOOL, if there is an instability with your GPU at a given speed, the program will beep, its very very sensitive and doesn't destroy your hardware like FurMark. You can also try Evga OC scanner but I find that to be not quite as sensitive.

 

Take a look in Event Viewer. Are you getting GPU driver errors?

 

The following shows up as a warning in the event viewer at the times of the crashes:

Display driver amdkmdap stopped responding and has successfully recovered.

 

Well, that's a confirmation that it's indeed GPU related.

As has been mentioned, your card might have slightly degraded over time, which could explain why lowering your clocks stablized it.

 

Crazyegg, in most cases drivers and other erroneous errors within the system can cause a sudden crash of the GPU, which cause it to stop responding and recover. I recommend that you research out your particular card within the search tab with keywords to find out if there are other drivers or possible known fixes that could help reduce this issue in regards to your setup/card.