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@Ashantara.8731 said:Also, not sure what "geek squad" is (and, personally, find such nicknames for tech-savvy people offensive), but I doubt they had the time to test everything. The OP should take the laptop to professional MSI tech support if they are unable to figure out and fix the issue by themselves.

Geek Squad is Best Buy's tech support. The problem with this issue is that even professional techs can't reproduce the problem with any of their testing tools. If they can't reproduce it, it makes it very hard for them to debug it. When I had this problem with my PC I debugged it with the folks on the nVidia and eVGA forums and brought it in to tech support 3 times...and no one could figure it out and nothing anyone had me try could reproduce the crash outside of GW2. The conclusion on ALL fronts was that it was most likely a software issue and that it should be resolved at that level.

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@Morfedel.4165 said:

@DeWolfe.2174 said:

@Morfedel.4165 said:ok, so i dont even known if my graphics card CAME overclocked

This can help get us started. Download and run it.

so, the GPU Core Clock is running at 300.0 MHz, and the GPU Memory Clock is running at 150.0 MHz. anything else I need to check?

Tell us what the name of the card is and the default clock speed. I'm assuming you gave us the current speed which is the card throttled down at idle.Could be helpful to try Hardware Monitor. https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.htmlThen play the game for a couple minutes and it'll tells us what was the actual max clock speed the graphics card hit. Nvidia boost can go quiet high.Next will probably be to use something like Leamas's Nvidia Inspector or software from the cards manufacturer to turn it down a bit.Also, they might have been a firmware update to your card which most folks never research as the computer ages.

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@vpchelko.4261 said:Update the driver is evil - if the current driver version is OK.

For example my PC is not working with current nVidia Drivers (video card reboots after 2-3 minutes), I installed an old nVidia Driver pack to make my PC work correctly, and fully disable all system/driver update on my PC to avoid such problem in future.

But if you're having problems that could be related to the graphics card or some other part that has drivers, updating the drivers is a valid suggestion.

My nVidia keeps telling me there's a new driver. I haven't installed it. Because my games currently work just fine. The last time I updated drivers was when I got my new card and before that when I was troubleshooting a crashing problem that happened around high graphics cut scenes.

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Morfedel, also as a summary, can you let us know what you have tried in order to resolve it? It'll help us so we don't keep rehashing things you've already tried. Maybe take a screen shot of GPUz or nVidia Inspector and post it so we can see all the numbers. Both look the same, with the exception that the latter allows clock changes. As DeWolfe says, the clock speed sounds low.

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I have the same problem and it's getting real worse in last week or so. The only difference is my PC not a laptop, it's a desktop.Sorry for my english (not my native) but i'll try to discribe it in short story : i've been playing GW2 for several years (not every day and without long breaks ofc, but pretty much often overall) and all this time i'm using the same machine for it. And the only major and significant things i've changed in that PC was GPUs and OS.

Started to play GW2 on Windows 7 with MSI GTX770 Gaming (factory OC only) - > not a single system shutdown/restart for all time.Then change it to Windows 10 and MSI GTX980 Gaming (factory OC too and i haven't been OC anythin' there) -> same. Not a single shutdown for a year and a half.Then changed it to GIGABYTE GTX1060 (6GB) (with factory OC + i've OC'ed it slightly) -> experienced my first BSODs and restart in GW2 as soon as i try to play with it. Changed back my OC settings down a little (but not downclocked or disabled it), found some stable one, tested it and played GW2 without problems after (1 year) So, yeah, game is "sensitive" to even slight overclock.

And finnaly, around 2 weeks ago or so i've changed my GPU to MSI GTX1080 GAMING (factory OC, not OC'ed anythin' manually) and got the same problems as author discribed in this thread : at any place, at any time, absolutely random, without any BSOD my PC locks up and restarting. It may happen after couple of hours in GW2 or just after i'm logs in. In crowded area or in solo-instance. Or may never happen for may hours or days. After today's Haloween update my game crashed and restarted PC twice already. It happens ONLY in GW2. Temps is absolutely normal on all components. So it's not overheating for sure. Playing any other games old and new for hours and hours and never seen a single problem/crash/hardrestart (playing new Shadow of Mordor and Evil Within 2 atm), working and building/rendering heavy scenes in 3D's Max and other programs and it's completely fine too. Making stress-tests and both GPU and CPU works absolutely fine with it. So it happens only with GW2.

Checked it with GPU-Z and it shows that GPU Clock is 1620 MHz and Memory Clock is 1251 MHz. Should i downclock it and test? And i'm not sure how to downclock somethin'. I know how to OC slightly with Afterburner ofc but never needed to downclock anythin' lol. How to do it?

I see several recent threads here about similar issue and all people says it's getting real bad after some new game's update at the end of september or smthn. But my problem that i've changed my GPU around this time and cannot say for sure what caused it for me.

Current rig : i7-4790k (not OC)/ MSI GTX1080 Gaming/ 16GB RAM/ Win10/ PSU Corsair CX 750W

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There are no cure all's for this but, we can post things to try. For downclocking, since you have MSI Afterburner installed, see if you can slide the "core clock" slider to the left for negative mhz. Try just -50mhz to start. I'd be concerned if your PSU can handle the new card but, the power requirements from the 770 to 1080 are not that dissimilar.

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@DeWolfe.2174 said:There are no cure all's for this but, we can post things to try. For downclocking, since you have MSI Afterburner installed, see if you can slide the "core clock" slider to the left for negative mhz. Try just -50mhz to start. I'd be concerned if your PSU can handle the new card but, the power requirements from the 770 to 1080 are not that dissimilar.

Since GW2 doesn't require a super powerful GPU, personally I would go more heavy handed on the clock and reduce all possible clocks by a full 10%. If it works, then you know this is the problem and you can start increasing the clock incrementally.

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Leamas.5803 -

"...They have long acknowledged that their software can have crashing problems with overclocked hardware."

I'll tell you this again: Anet is wrong. Software does NOT work that way. You, of all people should know that. What happens with unstable overclocked hardware is that the data becomes corrupted - randomly. If the hardware is stable - the data does not change. Software does not change data because hardware is overclocked. Hardware corrupts data when it is unstable. That causes software that relies on that data to crash.

"The problem with this issue is that even professional techs can't reproduce the problem with any of their testing tools."

The graphics card manufacturer can. They have special test jigs and software that can test for a variety of failures. All electronics manufacturers have advanced testing methods for the equipment they manufacture that are not available to the public.

The problem with testing for hardware failures using software, is that the software is often not very accurate. Take Memtest for example. It simply loads data in memory addresses sequentially with some standard data patterns. That works great for finding RAM that is bad; but it usually won't find RAM that is intermittently failing. That's also not a very stressful way to test memory.

Hardware Monitor (even the latest version) is often wildly inaccurate in regards to power supply voltages. It can even vary with different versions of HM. However, using a meter to measure the voltages with the PC running will show the real values.

Sometimes, you have to approach the problem differently in order to solve it. One issue that is a fairly common problem on older electronics is bad solder connections (I'm not referring to computers here, but it does happen with them as well). Sony TV's had a serious issue with this back in the 1990's because of a flaw in how their [solder] reflow process worked.

Instead of spending hours with an oscilloscope and meter trying to pinpoint the exact connections that were failing (which is nearly impossible to do); it was better to simply resolder any connections that looked bad and even those that "might" be bad that were nearby. This solved the problems and the repairs went much faster.

Back to your issue: If this was a code problem - this board would be flooded with complaints because most people these days run overclocked GPU's. Instead, there are very few people with this problem. If you can work around the problem by lowering clock speeds - great - whatever works. The fact is, the overclock is unstable. That's really not unusual if the hardware is old. It could be any number of electronic failures from bad capacitors on the board to one of the millions of transistors inside the GPU itself. We'll never know.

Good day.

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Downclocked my GPU's Core Clock and Memory Clock by 10% and unfortunately it doesn't help. PC restarts after around 30 mins in Lion's Arch. Strange that it was absolutely random and rather rare before, but after Haloween's update i literally can't stay in Lion's Arch more than 10-30 mins - it will crash/restarts 100%. Not happening in other game zones. Ofc there's alot of people there atm cause of events but i've been testing it with "model limit" set at lowest and still get the same crash/hardreset.

Because there's no BSOD, Event Monitor only says it's Kernel Power 41 error and system was shut down.

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what about other games?sounds to me like either overheating or faulty hardwarewindows has hardware protection which will shut itself off if it is going to damage your computer

if youre up for it, pull it apart, take everything out completely and reassemble it to ensure everything is seated properly

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Since down clocking didn't work. As Player indicated, how are your temps looking? You can use HWMonitor to check this. If it were the video card/OC I would typically expect to see an error in the event log related to nvlddmkm. Where you have a kernel power error, it may ultimately be a faulty power supply. I would take it in and have the PSU tested.

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@Player.9621 said:what about other games?sounds to me like either overheating or faulty hardwareI've told about other games/programs/stress-tests and overheating in my 1st post and problem is definitely not there :

@Exstazik.5847 said:...It happens ONLY in GW2. Temps is absolutely normal on all components. So it's not overheating for sure. Playing any other games old and new for hours and hours and never seen a single problem/crash/hardrestart (playing new Shadow of Mordor and Evil Within 2 atm), working and building/rendering heavy scenes in 3D's Max and other programs and it's completely fine too. Making stress-tests and both GPU and CPU works absolutely fine with it. So it happens only with GW2.

If not GW2 i wouldn't even know that such problem exist somewhere at all :)

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@Leamas.5803 said:Since down clocking didn't work. As Player indicated, how are your temps looking? You can use HWMonitor to check this. If it were the video card/OC I would typically expect to see an error in the event log related to nvlddmkm. Where you have a kernel power error, it may ultimately be a faulty power supply. I would take it in and have the PSU tested.Temps are pretty normal : when GW2 is running CPU is 50-55 C, GPU is around the same and mobo is at 30-31 C.Full Kernel error log looks like this :

80Q1yQ7.jpg

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There is a trial version of HWMonitor Pro That will allow you to monitor statistics in real time (Well, update once a second) via network. I've never used it for this purpose, so don't know how to set it up off the top of my head, but it might tell you if you're getting sudden spikes or drops in your voltages right before the crash.

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For the Fall Creators update, Windows 10's Task Manager is going to start showing GPU load too. So with Windows "Game Mode" and them now mapping GPU's, I don't quite trust this issue not being software still. When Microsoft makes public announcements that they are aware of issues, I'm going to believe the issue is pretty wide spread.

Ok first, before we delve into system, how about we clean up GW2 first? You might try deleting the gw2cache and local.dat. You'll have to have windows explorer set to view "hidden" items. Also, to not be running the game, so log out.

The "Local.dat" resides in the folder:C:> Users > (Your windows acct name) > AppData > Roaming > Guild Wars 2Just delete the Local.dat and GW2 will recreate it on the next running. NOTE: make certain you have your account name and password as you'll have to type it into the launcher again!!! May also need to reset a few settings in the Games "Options".

The cache is located at:C:> Users > (Your windows acct name) > AppData > Local > Temp > gw2cache+random numbersDelete the cache folder entirely.

The game auto repairs the big .dat data file. You can use -repair to force it to repair the .dat. Not a bad idea to try it too.

The last GW2 thing I can think of is going to the Guild Wars 2 installation folder, wherever you installed to, and find the GW2-64.exe. Right click on it and go to properties, compatibility, then tick on the "disable fullscreen optimizations".

For your computer, physically clean it! Might also be a good idea to reset, take out and put back in, the video card, ram, and power supply cables. You can leave the CPU and heatsink along! If it's a laptop or you don't know what you're doing, just try to clean out the dust, etc.

As I posted previously, it's important to get an exacting timeline of when the issues began to occur. If you are full blown crashing windows, you'll get a Critical level event with an ID of 41 in the Event Viewer. If the Nvidia driver hangs and recovers, you'll get a yellow warning with an Event ID of 4101. Seeing when these occur in relation to updates and software changes can help you diagnose the issue. You may notice a correlation between an update/software installation and errors.

For hardware monitoring, you can try the portable HWiNFO64. It has a logging feature which you can use if you know approximately when a crash will occur. You may see voltage drops, load spikes, Temperature spikes. It also shows if you've hit the Thermal Throttling on the CPU.

Quick summary of things I've read people trying to fix this.Uninstalling the Video Driver in Windows safe mode with DDU. To do so make certain you have your USB mouse and keyboard plugged into USB 2 sockets. Download the latest driver from Nvidia's website before uninstalling. For the rest, you can google how to enter safe mode for you system and how to use DDU too. Oh and turn off Nvidia GeForce Experience options or better yet, just install the drivers and not the bloatware for now.

Turn off or uninstall any graphical overlays.Turn off Windows Game mode entirely.

Check if there was a firmware/bios update for the video card. Might be a known issue already resolved by the manufacturer.Check if there was a firmware/bios update for the motherboard. Might be a known issue already resolved by the manufacturer.

Right click on your desktop and go to the Nvidia Control Panel. Under Manage 3d Settings, you'll see power management mode, change it to Optimal Power. If that doesn't help try Maximum Performance.

Right click on the Windows Start menu >>> Power options >> additional power settings >>> change the power plan to "high performance".

Lastly, we have down clocking the video card and adding voltage. Messing with voltage is the last thing to try.

This is the throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks list. :)

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@Morfedel.4165 said:so, as a side note, I turned down my graphics settings for the game within the game's graphics options all the way; well, I selected "best performance" out of the drop down box. And for the few minutes before I had to shut down to get ready for work, the game ran just fine.

Oddly enough, since this problem started, it ran just fine for two days before the problem started back up again; so because of that I'm not sure if this is a temporary fix, if the game will shut my computer down after some play, or if this is a more permament fix. Since I have to get to work I wont be able to play it until tonight, so tonight sometime I'll give it a run and see how it does.

But at least it didn't shut down immediately, so that gives me a little hope here.

I did not see if you replied OP since this post yesterday my time. How did you fair with a tuning down of the graphics settings?Also,

I didn't see a basic list of your hardware specs in the thread here. I might have missed it and will review again. Could you post a line by line list of your part specs you currently have in your system. And maybe the age of your GPU/CPU? I know a lot is being said in this thread and I think it might be helpful to recap with a list of your specs and a basic standing point of where you are currently. You can of course not do that and it is fine to.

This is what I do all day at work. My team gets the issues that no one else will or can deal with in the various systems where I work and there are many. Sometimes recapping when we hit a wall with a wonky issue helps ferret out the solution. We sit down at a round table and basically lay out all the facts on cards or verbally each take one and own it. We then honestly sit there and argue and yell at each other and throw paper balls and pens at each other for a while. Somehow at the end there is always an answer, it makes no sense really but I think it is the recap that really helps. The rest is like tossing stuff into a strong wind. The good ideas are heavy and fall and everything else blows off the table with our "gust". This last paragraph was just to lighten the mood in this thread. The recap really does help.

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@Seera.5916 said:

But if you're having problems that could be related to the graphics card or some other part that has drivers, updating the drivers is a valid suggestion.

My nVidia keeps telling me there's a new driver. I haven't installed it. Because my games currently work just fine. The last time I updated drivers was when I got my new card and before that when I was troubleshooting a crashing problem that happened around high graphics cut scenes.

In my case downgrade was correct solution

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@Exstazik.5847 said:

@Leamas.5803 said:Since down clocking didn't work. As Player indicated, how are your temps looking? You can use HWMonitor to check this. If it were the video card/OC I would typically expect to see an error in the event log related to nvlddmkm. Where you have a kernel power error, it may ultimately be a faulty power supply. I would take it in and have the PSU tested.Temps are pretty normal : when GW2 is running CPU is 50-55 C, GPU is around the same and mobo is at 30-31 C.Full Kernel error log looks like this :

80Q1yQ7.jpg

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/faq/id-3128570/fix-windows-error-event-kernel-power.html

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Most of the times I've had PCs shut down, it was bad RAM. PoF uses significantly more RAM than GW2 did before. GW2 may be hitting a stick of RAM that has not otherwise been getting stressed before now.

While no software RAM test can be perfect, Memtest86+ has not been supported since 2013, has known problems and should not be used at all. The original Memtest86 is now being supported by Passmark but is not as good as the others. HCI Memtest is the best of the "Memtests", and should be run with as many instances as will fit in available memory (for example, if you have 16GB RAM, run 7 instances of 2047MB each).

Finally, the best choice is Google Stress App (GSAT); I have linked how ASUS prefers RAM to be tested with GSAT. I'll quote ASUS on HCI Memtest vs GSAT: "The Windows version of HCI Memtest is a good test for hammering the cache and memory simultaneously. Googlestressap is more memory focused and picks out memory related errors faster than HCI Memtest does." GSAT should be run for a minimum of an hour. An overnight test of 10 hours with either HCI Memtest or GSAT is best to declare RAM or motherboard problems to be extremely unlikely.

I have also seen unupdated motherboard BIOS and chipset drivers cause RAM to act bad until they were updated. If you look at changelogs for PC BIOSes, they often consist mostly of "improving RAM compatibility". If you have never updated your motherboard's BIOS or chipset drivers, you may want to try doing that, especially if the RAM tests only throw errors very rarely.

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@DeWolfe.2174 said:This is the throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks list. :)

EXACTLY!! On top of what you listed, I've also tried (Was getting desperate and grasping at straws): Disabling various features in the BIOS that I don't use, such as RAID controllers Tried many different versions of video drivers, mostly minimal installs, to see and one was more stable than another (Which was the case). Various windows security settings that I no longer remember Swapping to a different KB/mouse combination (Cheap test) Changed the monitor (Wanted a bigger one) Changing all the memory (Had some dead stuff, so was a free replacement) Had the PSU load tested (3 times) Brought it to the shop and left it with them and they stress tested various things for an entire week. Found nothing. Reinstalled Windows and tested GW2 on a "clean" install...twice Moved Windows and GW2 from a HDD to a SSD and moved the system drive to a different port on the MB. Removed all USB attached devices, other than the mouse and KB Ran GW2 with the repair option to validate the file cache

I'm sure I did other things that neither you or I mentioned as well, but it's been some time. My conclusion ultimately was two forked, 1. "Something" in the machine was just flaky AND 2. GW2 is doing "something" (Be it a bug, or rarely used functionality) most other applications do not and that is triggering a crash.

I did NOT try a new video card or replacing any other hardware other than what I've already listed. I could not justify the cost for the sake of a single game since the computer still to this day, now nearly 5 years old, has no issues in any other game or application other than GW2. That has been the case since I bought the computer new in 2012...so it is not hardware degradation.

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An> @Leamas.5803 said:

@DeWolfe.2174 said:This is the throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks list. :)

EXACTLY!! On top of what you listed, I've also tried (Was getting desperate and grasping at straws):
Disabling various features in the BIOS that I don't use, such as RAID controllers
Tried many different versions of video drivers, mostly minimal installs, to see and one was more stable than another (Which was the case).
Various windows security settings that I no longer remember
Swapping to a different KB/mouse combination (Cheap test)
Changed the monitor (Wanted a bigger one)
Changing all the memory (Had some dead stuff, so was a free replacement)
Had the PSU load tested (3 times)
Brought it to the shop and left it with them and they stress tested various things for an entire week. Found nothing.
Reinstalled Windows and tested GW2 on a "clean" install...twice
Moved Windows and GW2 from a HDD to a SSD and moved the system drive to a different port on the MB.
Removed all USB attached devices, other than the mouse and KB
Ran GW2 with the repair option to validate the file cache

I'm sure I did other things that neither you or I mentioned as well, but it's been some time. My conclusion ultimately was two forked,
1.
"Something" in the machine was just flaky
AND 2.
GW2 is doing "something" (Be it a bug, or rarely used functionality) most other applications do not and that is triggering a crash.

I did NOT try a new video card or replacing any other hardware other than what I've already listed. I could not justify the cost for the sake of a single game since the computer still to this day, now nearly 5 years old, has no issues in any other game or application other than GW2. That has been the case since I bought the computer new in 2012...so it is not hardware degradation.

Also most hardware stress test does not perform complex testing - i.e. simultaneously CPU+GPU+RAM+Disk and other, which would allow testing the stability of the system as a whole including power supply.

It seems, in your case, being in Lion Arch acts like power supply stress test.

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@vpchelko.4261 said:Also most hardware stress test does not perform complex testing - i.e. simultaneously CPU+GPU+RAM+Disk and other, which would allow testing the stability of the system as a whole including power supply.

It seems, in your case, being in Lion Arch acts like power supply stress test.

That's what system benchmarks are supposed to do. Either way, it still only happens in GW2. The most similar games I've played to it are ESO and FFXIV and neither had any issues at all. In fact, in order to keep playing GW2 while I was playing the other two, I had to find another solution because neither ESO or FFXIV would work on the ancient video driver I was using because GW2 was the most stable with it. For a while I would install/uninstall drivers, depending on what I was playing, but that wasn't a feasible solution. At the time the driver releases were in the 350s I was still using 306.97. While I still had crashing, anything newer than that made GW2 completely unplayable, while everything else was happier.

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Since the last time I posted in this thread the crashes had stopped in the meantime - that is until the last patch. Last night I got a random hard freeze, no error message, had to manual restart PC. There were people getting a lot of lag and disconnections at the time before this happened but that is a different matter. Couldn't be bothered to log back in to continue my guild raid.

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