windows xp pro SP3
i7-920
evga X58 SLI LE Intel Motherboard
EVGA GTX 275 vid card
6gig ram
750watt P/S
latest nvide drivers, motherboard bios etc.
I have my case fans set on high and cores never seem to et above 54C. My GPU temps seemed to get pretty high and I was having constant STO crashes.
After reading all the threads about GPU over heating I maxed my GPU fan speed and monitored GPU temps while playing STO. They never seemed to get over 55C yet the game constantly crashes and occasionally causes BSOD's.
To verify it wasnt my hardware I ran memtest for 14+ hours straight and it did not log a single memory error.
Last night I ran furmark with all options set and my card at max resolution. This worked the GPU HARD and drove gpu temps to 70C after a couple minutes and it held stead for the next 12+ hours with no crashes/lockups or BSOD's.
Yet STO still crashes regularly. Is anyone else having issues?
About one BSOD every second or third time I play. Seems to slowly be getting better but the game is a bit buggy.
Since blue screens are generally hardware related I did many of the same things you have. Updated drivers, double checked settings, even went into my bios and slowed things way down. No help... I can turn things up to max or down to very safe settings and still get the occasional crash.
I will say during the head start and the first week or so the game was out I was crashing maybe every hour. Things are getting better and the game is getting more stable for me at least.
I've run STO on Windows 7 64 bit and Windows XP 32 bit with the same results. I setup an EX partition just for testing sto so the only thing there is the OS, hardware drivers and STO. I did this to prove to myself it was not a Windows 7 issue.
So I'd say yes, it's buggy however it does seem to be getting better.
Don't use the latest nvidia drivers. I had to downgrade to 190.62 to get decent performance.
That probably doesn't explain your crashes though.
I know you've tried hard to eliminate any overheating issue, but have you set the frame rate limiter in the video options anyway?
Are your intel chipset drivers up to date? Maybe run a full test on the hard drive.
I don't see many people posting about this, so I don't think it's game bugs.
Software incompatibilities or hardware issues maybe.
Actual in game performance is fine with latest nvida drivers. I do have framerate set at 60fps.
System BIOS was just updated to EVGA's latest for my board. I will have to double check board drivers but I got the system a few days after the latest drivers where released (ie 10/07/2009) and I recall getting them when I built the box.
A couple months ago I had some random crashes with Assassins creed but was fidgeting with memory settings to get them up to full speed but that has since been rectified and thoroughly tested.
Ive put the hardware through some heavy paces and have not been able to get it to crash so I guess I would be leaning more toward a software issue somewhere......but where?
I added 2 more case fans today, dropped GPU temps down to 66C when I have GPU fan on max running furmark.
I also made sure my mobo network drivers, chipset drivers and audi drivers are at the latest available for my hardware. Ill give it another go tonight but if I cant play for a couple hours with constant crashing I give up. Would be a shame too cause I kinda liked this game, just cant deal with the crashing.
i GET CONSTANT CRASHES AS WELL. All my drivers are up to date in my comp. It doesn't matter what I am doing but on fed side I crash 1-2 times an hour, no matter what I am doing. On klingon side I crash every 5-10 minutes or so, no matter what I am doing.
It seems I crash more out in space though compared to inside buildings. I have the dynamic lighting turned off. This is the only game I have problems with. It always says server not responding and than 1 minute later it will crash to logging screen.
I am able to go right back in game and continue my mission most of the time on fed side but on klingon side it makes me depart system and redo mission. I have been stuck on the same mission for 15 tries now and I gave up and just stay on the home planet now and pvp que.
During pvp if I disconnect and relogin it makes everyone my enemy and I can't attack at all until a few deaths than it puts me on a team again.
I'm having much better luck with the 196.21 drivers vs 190.62
I do have /perFrameSleep 10 in my launcher advanced settings vertical sync is on and Ive monitored my video card settings while playing it never gets over 74C while playing. 3 120mm case fans with one blowing right across my video card... they are set to low and they keep things nice and cool.
I'm going to keep tinkering.
I might move my video card into my wifes machine and see if the game locks up on hers also. I just upgraded her system and except for the video its better than mine now.
I have lately getting instances where i cannot play for an hr without my pc completely powering off. No BSOD or errors, its like someone just pulled the plug. Normaly i would attribute this kind of an issue to a heat problem but im running under 94F and am not having any temp issues. PC is less than a year old with all the latest drivers etc. Have no issues playing other games such as WOW, Atlantica, Eve, etc.
Having my pc crash/poweroff due to a specific game is not an acceptable situation. STO is clearly buggy, missing features, and was released to early. Graphics are sub-par, interface is lousy, controls are sloppy, and game is basicly a grind fest. I had high hopes for STO and am sad to see what was released. I certainly wolnt pay $15/month for this. I will not be continuing my STO experiemce and will go back to playing my other games while waiting for SGW and JGE to meet my spacefaring needs.
Gl to all of you who remain and ill see ya out there somewhere else sometime.
I have lately getting instances where i cannot play for an hr without my pc completely powering off. No BSOD or errors, its like someone just pulled the plug. Normaly i would attribute this kind of an issue to a heat problem but im running under 94F and am not having any temp issues. PC is less than a year old with all the latest drivers etc. Have no issues playing other games such as WOW, Atlantica, Eve, etc.
Having my pc crash/poweroff due to a specific game is not an acceptable situation. STO is clearly buggy, missing features, and was released to early. Graphics are sub-par, interface is lousy, controls are sloppy, and game is basicly a grind fest. I had high hopes for STO and am sad to see what was released. I certainly wolnt pay $15/month for this. I will not be continuing my STO experiemce and will go back to playing my other games while waiting for SGW and JGE to meet my spacefaring needs.
Gl to all of you who remain and ill see ya out there somewhere else sometime.
Probably a 99% plus chance if your machine is just plain shutting down without giving you a blue screen you have a hardware issue. In this case probably heat related, might give the thermal and overheating threads a read. STO really does use the features of a system to it's fullest and that does make some systems run hot.
reworking the cooling and adding in a few
Content, grind fest, look, feel and features etc.... other threads for that.
I think this weekend I'm going to bang on my maciine alittle more and start digging though the dump files to see what the root cause of my issues are. Its easy to say STO is buggy and I've been guilty of this. It may just be the only program that makes my machine .... insert nasty behavior here.... well, it may be STO is the only program telling a driver or piece of hardware to do something it should be able to do but for whatever reason the driver or hardware is not doing what it should and bang... blue screen. Because it only happens with STO does not necessarily mean it is a STO "bug".
We have already seen "thermal issues". STO runs GPU's hot. It's using the GPU to it's potential so if it is a bad card or not properly cooled it will run hot and may lockup or even get damaged. Is that STO's fault? Ten people would probably have ten different responses to that.
Give it time... things will work out. It's still a young game.
My chip set drivers were current but I updated my network and audio drivers. The 2 new case fans dropped temps when running furmark with gpu fan on high down to 66C which is a 4-5deg improvement. During STO play GPU temps never got above 57C
I was able to play the game last night for about 90 minutes with no issues before logging out. Did I just get lucky or was it a change I made? Only time will tell I guess.
I don't know if this will help you guys, as I don't use nVidia parts, but all of my crashing problems went away when I forced my HD5750 to go from 0.950 voltage to 1.100 voltage when running 3D. Since I bumped the 3D voltage STO hasn't crashed once in hours and hours of gameplay. Maybe there is a way to make sure your nVidia cards are using correct 3D voltage and test it in STO to see if it works.
GL guys and I hope you fix your problems as crashing all of the time is no fun at all
Since I was getting a BSOD I decided to play programmer. Downloaded windbg and the symbol file for Win7 64 bit. Ran this against my crash dump... ok.. so It's mostly greek to me. I did notice a reference to a a version of something that was causing the kernel to crash.
I went into my device manager and started checking versions of drivers... found one that was the same version in the dump. It was my network card driver...
I thought that was odd as I thought I had updated that driver. Looking at my downloads yep.. it was current but checking it did not match up with the version I was using. So... thought I updated the driver but for some reason the actual driver file did not get updated.
I made sure I had the most current driver for windows 7 downloaded. rebooted, disabled the card in the system bios. started up, removed the driver. restarted, turned the card back on in bios. restarted, system detected the card, I pointed it at the updated driver when it went to install.
Two nights in a row now, no crashes. Root cause... old network adapter driver.
Probably could have gone though the device manager and manually checked the dates on my drivers and eventually figured out this one was pretty old. But... the method i used confirmed it was this bugger. What really messed me up was I thought that driver was current.
note to self... double check driver date/version after doing an update.
Back to what I said... i was only getting the crash when STO was running. STO was telling my computer to do something it should have been able to do with my NIC. The driver could not handle it so it was blue screening to protect itself. STO was the symptom not the problem in this case.
Comments
Since blue screens are generally hardware related I did many of the same things you have. Updated drivers, double checked settings, even went into my bios and slowed things way down. No help... I can turn things up to max or down to very safe settings and still get the occasional crash.
I will say during the head start and the first week or so the game was out I was crashing maybe every hour. Things are getting better and the game is getting more stable for me at least.
I've run STO on Windows 7 64 bit and Windows XP 32 bit with the same results. I setup an EX partition just for testing sto so the only thing there is the OS, hardware drivers and STO. I did this to prove to myself it was not a Windows 7 issue.
So I'd say yes, it's buggy however it does seem to be getting better.
That probably doesn't explain your crashes though.
I know you've tried hard to eliminate any overheating issue, but have you set the frame rate limiter in the video options anyway?
Are your intel chipset drivers up to date? Maybe run a full test on the hard drive.
I don't see many people posting about this, so I don't think it's game bugs.
Software incompatibilities or hardware issues maybe.
Actual in game performance is fine with latest nvida drivers. I do have framerate set at 60fps.
System BIOS was just updated to EVGA's latest for my board. I will have to double check board drivers but I got the system a few days after the latest drivers where released (ie 10/07/2009) and I recall getting them when I built the box.
A couple months ago I had some random crashes with Assassins creed but was fidgeting with memory settings to get them up to full speed but that has since been rectified and thoroughly tested.
Ive put the hardware through some heavy paces and have not been able to get it to crash so I guess I would be leaning more toward a software issue somewhere......but where?
I also made sure my mobo network drivers, chipset drivers and audi drivers are at the latest available for my hardware. Ill give it another go tonight but if I cant play for a couple hours with constant crashing I give up. Would be a shame too cause I kinda liked this game, just cant deal with the crashing.
It seems I crash more out in space though compared to inside buildings. I have the dynamic lighting turned off. This is the only game I have problems with. It always says server not responding and than 1 minute later it will crash to logging screen.
I am able to go right back in game and continue my mission most of the time on fed side but on klingon side it makes me depart system and redo mission. I have been stuck on the same mission for 15 tries now and I gave up and just stay on the home planet now and pvp que.
During pvp if I disconnect and relogin it makes everyone my enemy and I can't attack at all until a few deaths than it puts me on a team again.
I do have /perFrameSleep 10 in my launcher advanced settings vertical sync is on and Ive monitored my video card settings while playing it never gets over 74C while playing. 3 120mm case fans with one blowing right across my video card... they are set to low and they keep things nice and cool.
I'm going to keep tinkering.
I might move my video card into my wifes machine and see if the game locks up on hers also. I just upgraded her system and except for the video its better than mine now.
Having my pc crash/poweroff due to a specific game is not an acceptable situation. STO is clearly buggy, missing features, and was released to early. Graphics are sub-par, interface is lousy, controls are sloppy, and game is basicly a grind fest. I had high hopes for STO and am sad to see what was released. I certainly wolnt pay $15/month for this. I will not be continuing my STO experiemce and will go back to playing my other games while waiting for SGW and JGE to meet my spacefaring needs.
Gl to all of you who remain and ill see ya out there somewhere else sometime.
Probably a 99% plus chance if your machine is just plain shutting down without giving you a blue screen you have a hardware issue. In this case probably heat related, might give the thermal and overheating threads a read. STO really does use the features of a system to it's fullest and that does make some systems run hot.
reworking the cooling and adding in a few
Content, grind fest, look, feel and features etc.... other threads for that.
I think this weekend I'm going to bang on my maciine alittle more and start digging though the dump files to see what the root cause of my issues are. Its easy to say STO is buggy and I've been guilty of this. It may just be the only program that makes my machine .... insert nasty behavior here.... well, it may be STO is the only program telling a driver or piece of hardware to do something it should be able to do but for whatever reason the driver or hardware is not doing what it should and bang... blue screen. Because it only happens with STO does not necessarily mean it is a STO "bug".
We have already seen "thermal issues". STO runs GPU's hot. It's using the GPU to it's potential so if it is a bad card or not properly cooled it will run hot and may lockup or even get damaged. Is that STO's fault? Ten people would probably have ten different responses to that.
Give it time... things will work out. It's still a young game.
I was able to play the game last night for about 90 minutes with no issues before logging out. Did I just get lucky or was it a change I made? Only time will tell I guess.
GL guys and I hope you fix your problems as crashing all of the time is no fun at all
I went into my device manager and started checking versions of drivers... found one that was the same version in the dump. It was my network card driver...
I thought that was odd as I thought I had updated that driver. Looking at my downloads yep.. it was current but checking it did not match up with the version I was using. So... thought I updated the driver but for some reason the actual driver file did not get updated.
I made sure I had the most current driver for windows 7 downloaded. rebooted, disabled the card in the system bios. started up, removed the driver. restarted, turned the card back on in bios. restarted, system detected the card, I pointed it at the updated driver when it went to install.
Two nights in a row now, no crashes. Root cause... old network adapter driver.
Probably could have gone though the device manager and manually checked the dates on my drivers and eventually figured out this one was pretty old. But... the method i used confirmed it was this bugger. What really messed me up was I thought that driver was current.
note to self... double check driver date/version after doing an update.
Back to what I said... i was only getting the crash when STO was running. STO was telling my computer to do something it should have been able to do with my NIC. The driver could not handle it so it was blue screening to protect itself. STO was the symptom not the problem in this case.
.... i are smart