The Dreaded IDirect3DDevice9::Present failed: Device lost (D3DERR_DEVICELOST)!

Okay so this was the error message I was recieving when benchmarking with 3dmark06:

IDirect3DDevice9: resent failed: Device lost (D3DERR_DEVICELOST)

This didn't start appearing until I tweaked out my services and installed different drivers. Before I started tweaking it worked fine, every time. To make a long story short I've been racking my brain.
The reason it was driving me crazy was because sometimes 3dmark would work fine and other times it would crash with that error without changing anything! I installed numerous drivers, did a system restore etc, etc... nothing helped.

Finally today I decided to do a clean reinstall of vista. ran 3dmark and crashed at deep freeze. Same Error. I was going to smash something expensive. However I did a google search of the error and found many many different versions of the problem.

So I thought I would post my latest results here for anyone getting the same error.

After the reinstall I was using stock everything just like when I first got the laptop. After installing vista updates only. Remember when I first got the laptop, 3dmark would run just fine and I was getting around 9700-9900 3dmarks. After reinstall it crashed on me, first at deep freeze, then the first test, then while loading the cpu test.

I shut off every background app imaginable. Looked at my resource monitor and noticed that it was still crunching stuff. My little hdd activity light kept lighting up too, but I couldn't figure out what the computer was doing. In the "disk" section of the resource monitor, files kept scrolling through but I didn't understand it.

Well eventually it finally calmed down to virtually Zero activity. So then I ran 3dmark again and bam! 10006. Ran it again, no crashing, 10018. highest score to date.

So from what I have read about 3dmark, its pretty picky about what's running in the background? is it that sensitive that all activity on the disk must be stopped while running it? So far its the only thing that has really made a difference for me.

 

It is not sensitive about what is running in the background, but sometimes when screen resolution is changed (as usually happens with 3DMark because it switches to 1200x1024) Vista forces all windows to be repainted, which causes 3d mark to lose focus. Usually if you run it again immediately after it fails it usually works.

 

definitely sounds like 3dmark would be to blame there

how about switching to the testing resolution on your desktop before running it, then it doesnt have to alter the resolution...

 

Ahhh... as to be expected these are the best explanations to date. Its easy to see that resolutions change during the test so that makes sense. Well I did get it to work okay so I'm not gonna mess with it for now. but if it happens again I'll try out your solution. Thanks for the help.

 

I get that if I overclock the card too much.

 

Yep, I get that problem too if my card gets to hot due to overclocking.